Amazon's fleet of Twitter drones are here to assure you that their company is great, everything is fine
By all accounts, working at an Amazon warehouse is a hellish job. Over the years, countless reports have detailed brutal conditions that involve constant observation, inhumane physical demands (including a quota structure that discourages using the bathroom), and, to ensure no pesky sense of hope creeps into this picture, the company’s constant efforts to ensure its workers can’t unionize.
In order to combat all of this, Amazon, like a totalitarian regime offering guided tours to international observers, now provides tours of its fulfillment centers in order to show “what our warehouses are really like.”
Given the hilariously passive aggressive tone of the tweet and the very real possibility that the enormously wealthy company is just setting up Potemkin village-style model warehouses for visitors to tour, it’s not surprising that Twitter users, like Diana Wilde, have responded with angry disbelief at the damage control move.
Antennae wiggling as they sense any criticism being aimed at The Hive, Amazon FC Ambassadors—who are either predictive text robots or corporate flesh robots, it’s hard to tell—swarm to the defense.
“Dylan,” whose Twitter account follows 0 people, includes a bio that lists interests including “Sports, Music, Food and anything Louisiana,” is quick to correct Wilde’s mistaken, heavily-documented impressions of his beloved company. “Everything is fine,” he assures us.
In case you were worried he’s not a real human boy, the supposed warehouse worker has a history of tweets that are sure to clear up any confusion.
Despite his youthful appearance, “Dylan” is also “55 yrs old.” Presumably being “an avid sports lover” has kept him looking so good.
“Dylan” is just one of the many average Amazon workers who came to Wilde’s tweets. She was also greeted by a baton-passing relay of other drones, including “Rafael,” who frequently, accidentally changes their name and, like “Dylan,” is an exceptionally young-looking man in his 50s. (The name-changing happens elsewhere, too.)
Cyborg or human, the end result is the same: Amazon’s drones are a shape-shifting, seemingly self-replicating army with the goal to make their company look good, no matter how fucking weird they sound in the process.
The most compelling of these characters is “Jordan,” a friendly fellow who loves going to the bathroom when he pleases, tweeting about disconcerting physical ailments, and, you guessed it, Amazon. “He” is also a parody account whose tweets, frighteningly enough, blend in naturally with those put out by the actual Twitter ambassadors.
Reality and parody now blended together into a disconcerting whole, we can end our free tour of the Amazon drone factory with “Hannah,” who provides a tweet so mind-rendingly dystopian that it makes the human brain want to begin eating itself immediately upon reading it.
God help us all.
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