I mentioned back in January how Amazon completely axed my decades-long customer account with them. I lost my history of everything I'd ever ordered from them, all the comics I had accumulated on Comixology, my Prime account (which was set to expire only a month later anyway), all of my Alexa functionality, my affiliate links (which, because they kept changing the rules on payouts, earned me exactly zero dollars over two decades)... Also, I still haven't checked to be sure, but I don't think I can add any new content to my old Kindle. (I did do some work at one point to try to jailbreak it, but it's a gen2 version, and it's only gen3 versions and later where you can seemingly do that. Or at least that anyone's bothered to figure out how.)
I originally set up my Amazon account decades ago when they literally only sold books. The slow creep of their services meant that I'd add one service here or there as they became available until I eventually realized how embedded I was with their system. With the realization, I began trying to ween myself off starting about a year and a half ago. It was good timing, in retrospect, because once they did cancel my account entirely, I found it annoying only in their complete lack of any reasonable explanation. I responded to the actual loss of services mostly with a shrug.
But that's me as a consumer. Whether or not I'm connected with any of Amazon services doesn't impact my income stream at all. (OK, technically, I expect some of my books get sold via Amazon and I would lose out on some profits from that, but annual sales of all of my books under all platforms combined is a couple dozen at most. That's barely enough for a nice dinner out once a year.) What happens if your income IS dependent on Amazon specifically?
Tom Ray recently noted that Amazon completely shut down his account as well. More notably, though, he had been selling copies of his HomeMade Cartoons and "Bobert"comics through them exclusively since 2018.
Every book that he had made was specifically formatted for Amazon's platform so he could get paid on 'per page' basis instead of 'per title.' But now that income stream is just gone.
He has a very similar story to mine. He was just going along, doing his thing, and then BAM! Email out of nowhere that his account had been terminated with some unconvincing and generic explanation about "violating terms." Although his comic features nothing you could label as pornographic or excessively violent or obscene in any way -- I can't even find any mild cursing in it.
The suddenness with which his and my accounts were canceled, coupled with the complete lack of any sort of appeals process, leads me to believe this is the result of Amazon turning over their account review process to AI. Amazon created an AI agent to look at every account and, instead of flagging them for any potential violations, had them canceled outright. I'm not sure what the thinking was on their part. In theory, with something like this, you would have tested the process by simply running a report before doing anything to actually impact any accounts. But if they did that, they would've gotten tons of obviously false positives like Ray and could've seen their agent was too aggressive with flagging. Which suggests one of three possibilities to me:
Ray is obviously frustrated and annoyed with this. He kind of had all his webcomic eggs in the Amazon basket, so to speak. From what I can gather, though, it does sound like he's at least got some other income streams that are unrelated to Amazon. In addition to cartoons, he's also a musician and he seems to do a bit of dealing with re-selling vintage toys and collectibles. So the Amazon hit is significant, but he seems to have other income streams while he reformats his comics work for other outlets.
I suspect there are a lot more incidents like this going around, and I just happened to hear about Ray's. His is interestingly both a cautionary tale as well as a best practice. Cautionary because he put all his webcomics income into a single vendor, and became subject to their whims as to whether or not they're willing to sell his work. Best practice because he has other income streams to fall back on.
Regardless, this is increasingly the world we live in. Where they make so much money from so many other people that they don't care whether you remain as an individual customer or not. Whether you're trying to sell your comics online, or whether you just want to watch the latest episode of Invincible. Realistically, I don't know how much you can completely separate yourself from Amazon and Google and Microsoft and Apple and all the other monster coporations without removing yourself from society altogether and living in an off-grid cabin somewhere. But the more you're able to bring all your services "in-house" and actually own yourself, the better off I think you'll be.
I originally set up my Amazon account decades ago when they literally only sold books. The slow creep of their services meant that I'd add one service here or there as they became available until I eventually realized how embedded I was with their system. With the realization, I began trying to ween myself off starting about a year and a half ago. It was good timing, in retrospect, because once they did cancel my account entirely, I found it annoying only in their complete lack of any reasonable explanation. I responded to the actual loss of services mostly with a shrug.
But that's me as a consumer. Whether or not I'm connected with any of Amazon services doesn't impact my income stream at all. (OK, technically, I expect some of my books get sold via Amazon and I would lose out on some profits from that, but annual sales of all of my books under all platforms combined is a couple dozen at most. That's barely enough for a nice dinner out once a year.) What happens if your income IS dependent on Amazon specifically?
The suddenness with which his and my accounts were canceled, coupled with the complete lack of any sort of appeals process, leads me to believe this is the result of Amazon turning over their account review process to AI. Amazon created an AI agent to look at every account and, instead of flagging them for any potential violations, had them canceled outright. I'm not sure what the thinking was on their part. In theory, with something like this, you would have tested the process by simply running a report before doing anything to actually impact any accounts. But if they did that, they would've gotten tons of obviously false positives like Ray and could've seen their agent was too aggressive with flagging. Which suggests one of three possibilities to me:
- They didn't actually test the process at all. They just assumed it would work fine and pushed things into production. This is not only not a "best practice" but it would generally be considered a "worst practice."
- They did test it, saw that it raised more flags than they had the manpower to properly investigate, but felt that whatever loss of revenue they'd incur from false positives would be less than whatever they'd stop 'losing' from shrinkage. "Shrinkage" is what retail stores call theft, but in an online environment, there is no real shrinkage. If someone is able to somehow "steal" a digital file, it's not like Amazon has lost anything -- they could sell the file an infinite number of times before and they could sell the file an infinite number of times after. At worst, they miss out on the opportunity to sell one more copy, but studies have repeatedly shown that people who pirate files digitally were never going to actually shell out money for the file in the first place. But in the interest of pursuing a "not losing any potential opportunity" they rolled things out anyway.
- They did test it, saw that it raised more flags than they had the manpower to properly investigate, but said, "We're the 800 pound gorilla in the room here. F--- them!" and rolled the AI agent into production anyway.
Ray is obviously frustrated and annoyed with this. He kind of had all his webcomic eggs in the Amazon basket, so to speak. From what I can gather, though, it does sound like he's at least got some other income streams that are unrelated to Amazon. In addition to cartoons, he's also a musician and he seems to do a bit of dealing with re-selling vintage toys and collectibles. So the Amazon hit is significant, but he seems to have other income streams while he reformats his comics work for other outlets.
I suspect there are a lot more incidents like this going around, and I just happened to hear about Ray's. His is interestingly both a cautionary tale as well as a best practice. Cautionary because he put all his webcomics income into a single vendor, and became subject to their whims as to whether or not they're willing to sell his work. Best practice because he has other income streams to fall back on.
Regardless, this is increasingly the world we live in. Where they make so much money from so many other people that they don't care whether you remain as an individual customer or not. Whether you're trying to sell your comics online, or whether you just want to watch the latest episode of Invincible. Realistically, I don't know how much you can completely separate yourself from Amazon and Google and Microsoft and Apple and all the other monster coporations without removing yourself from society altogether and living in an off-grid cabin somewhere. But the more you're able to bring all your services "in-house" and actually own yourself, the better off I think you'll be.
Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...
Mark D. White's latest book at the intersection of comic books and philosophy is Ethics of the Fantastic Four. In it, he discusses... well, the ethics of the Fantastic Four. He's not looking at individual decisions, but at the cumulative overall approach each character takes that helps to define who they are. He devotes an entire chapter to each of the four primary members, as well as one for Dr. Doom and another for Galactus and the Silver Surfer. He of course offers an introduction to some broad ethical frameworks to work from, and he does have a sort of case study by way of Marvel's Civil War event.
