Amazon is in our Brains. Is that...bad?

Beyond Politics

Today we tackle Amazon, Amazon prime, and the many ways both obvious and unseen that Amazon has wormed its way into everything we do. For many of us, Amazon is just a part of our daily lives. What we buy, what we watch, and what we say… Much of it runs through Amazon‘s computers and marketplaces. And from there of course, it is incorporated into Amazons algorithms, its data, it’s artificial intelligence. In a very real way, Amazon is inside our brains.

So what does that mean? How much control does Amazon really have over the American economy and over the choices we make as individuals? And is it time to take some more aggressive action place some limits on an entity that has really no precedent in human history?

Our guess is Dr. Emily West, an associate professor of communication at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She’s the coeditor of The Routledge Companion to Advertising and Promotional Culture, and the author of the forthcoming book "Buy Now: How Amazon Branded Convenience and Normalized Monopoly."