Out now: The World After Amazon: Stories from Amazon Workers
in print, online, and as a podcast, plus launch events in London, Berlin, NY, Toronto...
At long last, we’re ready to share a very, very special project with the world:
The World After Amazon is a collection of 9 short speculative stories, written by rank-and-file workers at the corporation that has transformed the way we read and so much more.
Amazon's sci-fi propaganda tells the story of a company using cutting-edge technology to deliver a utopia of cheap consumer convenience. But its workers pay the price, toiling in dystopian conditions to create a future that will exclude them.
What happens when those workers reclaim the radical imagination and their power to tell their own stories?
The World After Amazon can be ordered in print or read or downloaded online for free as a PDF or EPUB. It’s also available as a free podcast and audiobook.
For more information, visit http://afteramazon.world
We are preparing to host a series of launch events in the coming weeks, including:
London on September 15 at Pelican House
Berlin on September 26 at LISBETH
New York City (week of October 14)
Toronto (weekend of October 26)
The World After Amazon is the culmination of the Worker as Futurist project in which I was very fortunate to work with Xenia Benivolski, Sarah Olutola, Graeme Webb and Stella Lawson to host speculative creative writing workshops for Amazon workers. We also have phenomenal art from Amanda Priebe. The audio version is narrated by famed Canadian broadcaster and film-maker Sook-Yin Lee and recorded, edited and produced by Robert Steenkamer.
You can read more about the project in a recent article for the academic journal Triple-C, or an essay we published last year in Jacobin. Or you can listen to a 20min presentation I gave at last year’s Historical Materialism conference.
In addition to producing The World After Amazon: Stories from Amazon Workers, we also produced a podcast, The Workers’ Specualtive Society, which features interviews with activists, theorists, researchers and writers focusing on the world Amazon is building and the workers and artists fighting for different futures. It featured interviews with people including Robin D. G. Kelley, Charmaine Chua, Marc McGurl, Cory Doctorow, Jamie Woodcock, Mark Nowak and the Worker Writers School, and Steven Shaviro.
Since we are publishing The World After Amazon ourselves, I’d be very grateful if you could share this announcement with anyone who might be interested - we have no marketing or promotion team!
Other news
Sense & Solidarity
Following on our very successful May Day Movement (anti-)Academy in BErlin in May Sarah Stein Lubrano and I are leading our second in-person workshop for Sense & Solidarity November 14-17. Join us for the full 3.5 days, or come for a public talk or a live recording of our podcast What Do We Want? Registration is open!
Capitalism’s sacrifice of humanity podcast series
I was pleased to work with the wonderful Stefan Christoff of Free City Radio on a new podcast mini series on “capitalism’s sacrifice of humanity” based on some themes from my recent book Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire.
You can listen to interviews with Nick Partyka, Keren Wang and me here.
