Amazon is Ruining the Planet (Again)
Graphic by Emma Novy
Well, they’ve done it again. The tech billionaire who shut down an entire city for his wedding has decided that a measly two hundred and thirty-nine billion dollars just isn’t enough to satisfy his big greedy appetite. But what could he do to make that extra pocket change? He can’t cut people’s wages or lay people off anymore, he’s already done that. What about raising prices? No, no, he’s thought of that already. How in the world could he make people buy more than they’re already buying? The answer’s so simple I can’t believe you haven’t thought of it before! He can just make all of his old technology completely defunct so that users are forced to buy new products. What a good idea Jeffy!
That’s right! Amazon has recently announced that they’re no longer supporting any Kindles produced before 2013 starting on May 20th. Well, that kind of makes sense. Maybe they’re too old to be supported by current technology, or maybe those older Kindles are so old that they no longer work? I understand where you’re coming from with those questions, but the answer is a resounding no. You silly goose thinking that a multi-trillion dollar company would take the little guy into consideration! No, the older Kindles actually work completely fine. They were made at a time when companies actually cared about something other than their bottom line. A time when they cared about their image as a company that could create quality goods at a relatively low price. Imagine seeing that out of Amazon these days!
Unfortunately for us plebians, there doesn’t seem to be any way to effectively prevent companies from screwing us over like this. The second that the numbers aren’t where they want them to be, companies will find a way to make us pay more and more to them until we can’t afford to pay them any more. At that point, you’re left with shitty products that break after a few years of use that you can’t afford to replace.
But don’t worry! If you thought that Amazon would be the only company doing this… seriously? Have you been living under a rock for the past couple of decades? Luckily for us, corporate greed is alive and well! In fact, you’ve probably been a victim of this phenomenon yourself. Imagine this: you’re in class and you’re playing games on your phone since the professor began to sound like the parents in Charlie Brown a couple of weeks ago and you don’t feel like paying attention anymore. Suddenly, you get a notification that your phone’s at 20%. Twenty percent? That can’t be right. You charged your phone last night and this is a 12:30 lecture! Then you remember that you have the iPhone 13 and the 17 Pro-Ultra-To-The-Max+ just came out last week. I don’t even have to spell the rest out for you.
Everybody knows that iPhones are only good until they’re about three or four generations old. After that, Apple slowly stops supporting them. Your battery that used to last you two days now barely gets you to lunchtime. The camera that you had to get the new iPhone for suddenly seems to be taking worse and worse pictures. And that’s exactly what Apple wants you to notice. They want you to see a decline in your phone quality so that they can sell you a new and improved phone that’s promised to do the exact same thing that your now old and useless phone was promised to do (now in blush pink).
So what’s the solution to all of this? We’re all unfortunately active participants in late-stage capitalism and are victims of tech billionaires. For a lot of people, there’s nothing that they can do. They barely have enough money to feed their family, let alone upgrade their 10th grader to the newest iPhone so that they can text their friends in class. I think for now, all we have to do is get others to recognize that we’re all in this together (hello High School Musical reference) and we have to stand together as one working class against the tech billionaires. We have to realize that they don’t care about us and that we can only rely on each other as prices continue to get higher and higher and times get tougher and tougher.