Relentless attention to customer service has been a mantra of Amazon since its early days. In 1999, Bezos said at a program in Washington, D.C., that Amazon’s vision “is to be the world’s most customer-centric store,” a place where “people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online.”157 But the obsession on being customer-centric has exacted a toll on Amazon employees. A few months before Bezos’s talk in Washington, a former employee described in an article in an alternative newspaper in Seattle the sweatshop-like conditions of Amazon’s customer-service department. Richard Howard said he had been a $10-an-hour customer service representative at Amazon.com for a few weeks before being dismissed for failing to fit in and meet the company’s performance expectations. Howard’s account, titled “How I ‘Escaped’ from Amazon.cult,” described a humorless and inflexible operation that emphasized speedy response while discouraging imaginative interaction or engagement with customers.158 He wrote:
As a Customer Service rep, the half of your daily shift not spent on the telephone is consumed by grinding out responses to customer e-mail inquiries. These can range from requests for help in finding a particular out-of-print title to suggestions that the company shove a particular policy up its corporate ass. One of the first surprises you encounter on the job is that you almost never respond to these queries from scratch. Instead you learn to troll the Blurb Index—a roster of pat responses, or “blurbs”—designed to address practically every conceivable scenario a customer might present. If a genuinely new situation arises more than once, there will probably be a blurb written for it. As my trainer explained, the use of blurbs saves Customer Service reps time and helps impose a consistent voice (in terms of both tone and policy matters) on official interactions with customers. Naturally, we were encouraged to tailor the blurb to fit the specific situation in question, as well as to disguise the more obvious signs of blurbosity. But to respond to the questioner as a person rather than simply a customer, to insert a genuinely personal—much less quirky, off-beat, or engagingly eccentric—tone into the transaction was deemed to be crossing the line and was emphatically discouraged.159
Howard also observed that “for all the well-intentioned idealism around Amazon, a sense of humor was in strikingly short supply there; people were too busy taking themselves and their corporate mission oh-so-seriously. Adding to this tone of quasi-religiosity was the unspoken taboo against any speech or expression (including gallows humor) that betrayed your lack of commitment to the long-term success of the enterprise; if you weren’t prepared to stoically endure the present purgatory of low wages, long hours, and sweatshop working conditions for a shot at a blissful future of profitability and soaring stock prices, then you were best advised to head back out into the world of cynics and naysayers where you belonged.”160
Amazon was the occasional subject of other barbed reporting in the late 1990s. Slate.com called the company “Amazon.con” in 1997, disputing its claim to be “Earth’s biggest bookstore” and asserting Amazon’s deliveries were no speedier than its rivals’.161 Barron’s described the company as “Amazon.bomb” in 1999, as the dot.com boom was fading. “Increasingly,” the Barron’s report said, “Amazon’s strategy is looking like the dim-bulb businessman who loses money on every sale but tries to make it up by making more sales.”162 But such reports have tended to be anomalous over the years. More often, the company and its founder have been the subjects of glowing media coverage, a tendency that can be traced to 1996 and an admiring front-page article published in the Wall Street Journal just ten months after the company opened for business.163
The article gave Bezos and the company unprecedented attention, helped boost sales, and represented the ironic effect of old media spurring the rise of a new media entity.164 The Journal’s article described Amazon as “a singular case in which the frequently hyped Web is actually changing consumers’ lives.”165 Extravagant praise has been not uncommon for Bezos, even though it has long been known he can be a harsh and intimidating boss, given to what Stone called “melodramatic temper tantrums that some Amazon employees called, privately, nutters. A colleague failing to meet Bezos’s exacting standards would predictably set off a nutter.”166
Bezos seldom grants interviews, and when he does, it is usually to tout new products, such as additions to Amazon’s line of Kindle readers, or to reveal that Amazon has been developing plans to deploy unmanned drones in delivering small packages to some parts of the United States.167 Otherwise, Bezos makes himself remote from the news media—although he surprised nearly everyone in the media business by buying the Washington Post in 2013 for $250 million.168 “Extending the big buzz-off to the press and the public is a tradition that Jeff Bezos has restored to the commonweal,” Jack Shafer, a leading U.S. media critic, wrote shortly after the sale was announced. “The company’s disdain for the press seems to know no limits.” The no-comment brushoff, Shafer wrote, has become “the default response by Bezos and the company.”169
Bezos’s standoffishness has made the glowing media coverage all the more remarkable. And there has been plenty of fawning over Jeff Bezos. In declaring him its “person of the year” in 1999, Time magazine declared: “Every time a seismic shift takes place in our economy, there are people who feel the vibrations long before the rest of us do, vibrations so strong they demand action—action that can seem rash, even stupid. . . . Thomas Watson Jr., overwhelmed by his sense that computers would be everywhere even when they were nowhere, bet his father’s office-machine company on it: IBM. Jeffrey Preston Bezos had that same experience when he first peered into the maze of connected computers called the World Wide Web and realized that the future of retailing was glowing back at him.”170 Bezos, said Time, “has done more than construct an online mall. He’s helped build the foundation of our future.”171
Wired magazine has said “Bezos may well be the premier technologist in America, a figure who casts as big a shadow as legends like Bill Gates and the late Steve Jobs.”172 In 2012, Fortune magazine named Bezos its “businessperson of the year,” saying he was “the cerebral founder and chief executive of a $100 billion empire built on books.”173 Built on books, certainly. But, more accurately, Amazon was built on a reality that began to come into focus in 1995—that the Internet, however chaotic it seemed, could be harnessed, could be made reasonably reliable and efficient for consumer transactions. Amazon was the first online pioneer to exploit the Web’s merchandizing potential, to demonstrate that the commercial Web could be welcoming, dependable, and secure. Such virtues were attractive and reassuring to the mainstream populations who in 1995 were just beginning to find their way to the Web.174
Bezos and his company responded deftly to the newness of the Web and its versatility and power. In upending the book industry so unequivocally, Amazon demonstrated the Internet’s remarkable capacity to innovate and disrupt. Amazon has been a seminal disrupter of the digital age, establishing and developing an expansive presence online that no rival has come close to matching.
Before Amazon.com opened its online store, before Netscape’s eye-opening IPO, the first wiki went live and in doing so affirmed that the Internet could be a space for creative collaboration and collective knowledge-sharing. The development of the “wiki”—that is, server-based software allowing users to create, revise, update, expand, and delete Web content using only a browser and a text-entry form175—was an early signal that the Web could be more than an environment where, in the words of Berners-Lee, “a few published and most browsed.”176
The wiki’s best-known and most elaborate application is Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia read, written, and edited by thousands of people. The wiki’s first use was more mundane: it was to enable computer programmers to write about and refine their techniques. The wiki’s inventor was Ward Cunningham, a genial technologist and software programmer in Oregon who has called the wiki “a new way to write.”177 On March 25, 1995, Cunningham placed his technology on the Web. At first, though,
it lacked a name.
“I started using it and I could tell that it was important,” Cunningham recalled. “I had enough of a feel that I knew it was going to work. . . . I knew it needed a name, it needed a good name.”178 He said he thought of calling it “Quick Web,” because the software allowed for rapid revisions. Cunningham chose “WikiWikiWeb” instead. He knew from his honeymoon in Hawaii that “wiki” meant “quick” in Hawaiian and that sometimes Hawaiian words were doubled for emphasis. The shuttles running between terminals at the Honolulu International Airport were called “Wiki Wiki” buses. Cunningham figured that “WikiWikiWeb,” though a bit odd, was more fun to say than “Quick Web.” The alliteration of “WikiWikiWeb” was appealing, too, Cunningham said, and it evoked “World Wide Web,” as well.179 In time, “WikiWikiWeb” was shortened to “wiki.”
Cunningham said he never tried to patent the wiki; he certainly made no fortune from his invention. He showed the then-new technology to a handful of friends and colleagues, one of whom told Cunningham: “I hope you patented this thing. It is amazing.” While he saw the importance of the invention, Cunningham said he “also knew that I wasn’t going to get any money from a patent unless I went out and sold it. I thought, ‘Well, what’s the chance of [my] selling this?’ About zero.” He also said: “I mean, if I wanted to sell rights to use my patent, if I got a patent, I’d have to go to an executive and tell him that I had invented a technology that would allow anybody in the world to write all over [his company’s] Web site. And I thought, ‘Nobody’s going to pay to have somebody abuse their Web site.’ So the only thing I could do is develop a community and accomplish something. So I devoted myself to putting it to work for my community” of computer-programmers, he said. Cunningham did concede to a fleeting sense of regret not long after developing the wiki. “I said, ‘Gosh, could I have thought about it longer to figure out a way [to monetize it]? And I thought, ‘Well, I am using it as a calling card. I’m presenting myself as the person who organized this, as the person who wrote this software, the person who made this happen.’ . . . I realized that I didn’t have any other option. There was no way somebody was going to pay me for it.”180
Wiki technology spoke to the Internet’s altruistic and selfless side, to virtues of cooperation, community, and collegiality. It helped ensure that the Internet would be something more than a place for retail. The wiki, Cunningham once said, can be thought of as “shopping mall—not.”181 The Internet “actually makes a pretty good shopping mall,” he said. “But I wanted to . . . make it a creative space, not just a shopping space: a place where you could do work as well as spend money.”182
In a real sense, then, the wiki was an affirmation of the Internet’s fundamental ethos of promoting collaboration among users across distances and in a decentralized way.183 In a way, it was an elaboration of a defining objective of Berners-Lee, the Web’s inventor. “My vision,” Berners-Lee has written, “was a system in which sharing what you knew or thought should be as easy as learning what someone else knew.”184 The writing and editing components of early Web browsers tended to be ignored or minimized by developers.185 Without a hypertext editor in the browser, “people would not have the tools to really use the Web as an intimate collaborative medium,” Berners-Lee observed.186 With the wiki, Cunningham effectively confronted that shortcoming. The “editable part” of the Web “got left behind,” Cunningham has said. “I figured out a way around that omission” in developing the wiki.187
Of course, flaws in wiki use can be striking. Collaboration online can turn ugly. Spamming, abuse, digital vandalism, and pitched battles over obscure arguments and interpretations all can be drawbacks to open-source wikis.188 Few public experiments in wiki use proved more embarrassing, and short-lived, than the test-run of the wiki-editorial—or “wikitorial”—in 2005 at the Los Angeles Times. Seeking to enliven its opinion pages, the newspaper encouraged readers to go online to revise and alter an editorial about the Iraq War. It described its experiment as part of a “constantly evolving collaboration among readers in a communal search for truth.”189 What the Times got was chaos. Soon after the wikitorial went live, profanity and pornographic images defaced the site. Within two days, editors were forced to end the experiment.190 Two months after that, Michael Kinsley, editorial and opinion editor for the Times and the wikitorial’s principal advocate, was dismissed. He told his staff the publisher “actively wants me gone.”191
But even open-source wikis are not entirely at the mercy of vicious online trolls. As Robert Niles, then editor of Online Journalism Review, pointed out, the Los Angeles Times’s wiki software could have been configured to reject images users tried to submit; a “dirty-word filter would have blocked most of the obscene language.” And, Niles wrote, “a reasonably competent computer programmer could have found a way to force wikitorial contributors through the Times’ website registration process, which would have given the paper a better way to identify, and thus deter, would-be vandals.”192
A wiki’s community of users can be effective in identifying and expunging offensive or superfluous content. Wikipedia relies in part on such collaborative oversight. In fact, Wikipedia’s founder, Jimmy Wales, was caught in 2005 making repeated edits to his Wikipedia biography. Among other things, the changes downplayed the contributions of Wikipedia’s cofounder, Larry Sanger, who in 2002 cut ties with the site. Wired magazine reported that edit logs showed that Wales had changed his Wikipedia biography eighteen times, “deleting phrases describing . . . Sanger as a co-founder of the site.” After the deletions were exposed, Wales said contritely: “I wish I hadn’t done it. It’s in poor taste. . . . People have a lot of information about themselves but staying objective is difficult.”193
Wikipedia, which was launched in 2001, has only conceptual ties to Ward Cunningham. He recalled receiving a query one day from Wales, who said the wiki seemed “pretty interesting for you guys. Do you think it would work to write an encyclopedia?” Cunningham replied, saying, “Yes, it would work. But when you were done, you would have to call it a wiki.”194
If the rise of the wiki demonstrated the Web’s potential as a collaborative and intellectual environment, the hours after the bombing of the federal office building in Oklahoma City in April 1995 provided a glimpse of the Web’s potential for the rapid dissemination of news about major events. The attack in Oklahoma City signaled that the Internet was destined to be a medium of mass communication. By contemporary standards, the online coverage of the Oklahoma City bombing was halting and pedestrian. Emergent online news sites scrambled to report about the attack, which killed 168 people, devastated Oklahoma City, and stunned the country. The online operation at USA Today was just in its third day when the bombing occurred on April 19, 1995. The USA Today site was updated within ten minutes of the first wire service report about the attack. Within an hour, screen-grabs of television images were posted online. Not long after that, the site had uploaded a package of articles, photos, and graphic illustrations.195
Soon after the bombing, the site Internet Oklahoma had put up a Web page offering news reports, lists of survivors, and telephone numbers for hospitals in Oklahoma City. Jon Katz, then a columnist for Wired, noted the Internet Oklahoma response and wrote, presciently: “Inevitably, as the number of online users grow, online news will converge with a massive story, and digital news will become part of the media mainstream.”196
Going online, though, was a maybe-someday prospect for many news organizations in 1995. Soon after the bombing, the Daily Oklahoman newspaper in Oklahoma City found its way to an online presence in a most unintended and unlikely manner. Late on the night of the bombing, Sue Hale, the newspaper’s assistant managing editor, took a call from a young man from Internet Oklahoma named Matt Williams.197 “I would like to put your photos and your stories up on the Internet,” Williams told her. As Hale recalled, the Daily Oklahoman had been looking into establishing an Internet presence, but covering the bombing was such a demanding priority that
going online was a remote concern.
“Have you any idea what I’m going through right now?” Hale asked her caller.198 “I won’t have time to send you stories. I don’t have time to get photos for you.”
“You don’t have to do that,” he said. “All you have to do is . . . after the last edition tonight . . . just put the stories on a disk and leave them downstairs at the guard’s desk. And any photos you just happen to have laying [sic] around, put ’em down there and I’ll build you a Web site” featuring the newspaper’s stories and photos.
Hale consulted her boss, Ed Kelly, the newspaper’s managing editor. “Do you even want to mess with this?” she asked.
She said Kelly replied: “Well, it would certainly get the story out to the world. A lot more people could see if it we did that.”
“OK,” Hale said. “We’ll do it.”
That night, Williams stopped at the newspaper’s front desk and retrieved the material Hale had left for him. From a floppy disk, he uploaded Daily Oklahoman news reports. From prepress proofs known as “color keys,” which editors used to adjust the color quality of newspaper pages, Williams scanned and uploaded photographs. The process and the product may have been crude, but, as Hale said, the newspaper “had an Internet site without having an Internet site.” When the Daily Oklahoman established a full-fledged Internet presence in 1996, Hale was named the site’s general manager. Her first hire was Matt Williams.
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