Seattle, WA: Demo Outside Amazon Manager’s Luxury Apartment

The following anonymous report was originally published on The Transmetropolitian Review website.

“The grandfather of this anonymous source lives in his RV and works at an Amazon facility in Tennessee. Many of the source’s words can be found in the following text which was stapled to telephone poles around the manager’s apartment.”

On April 25th, 2018, a small group held a noise demonstration outside the luxury apartment of a local Amazon manager.

After filling the air with shrieking whistles that set every lap dog into a frenzy, a smoke bomb was set off beneath his window near the entrance to the apartment complex. This small action occurred while the manager was sleeping before his shift.

This event was encouraged by an enraged local resident who provided copious amounts of information regarding this well-paid underling. The grandfather of this anonymous source lives in his RV and works at an Amazon facility in Tennessee. Many of the source’s words can be found in the following text which was stapled to telephone poles around the manager’s apartment.

This mundane world is run by mundane people and they live in mundane apartments. A wealthy 25 year old man can order around a 65 year woman simply because Amazon made him the manager. Exploitation is everywhere, just as it needs to be challenged everywhere. While the cybernetic-man-child Jeff Bezos presents an obvious target, his banal minions are much closer to the ground, although just as arrogant. In the words of the late Utah Phillips: The Earth is not dying, it is being killed, and those who are killing it have names and addresses. In case anyone missed the daily memo, capitalism is killing the planet, just as it’s destroying everyday people. No one needs to wait to challenge the richest man on Earth or the people who do his bidding.

All out for May Day!

-friendly neighborhood anarchists

Full text of flier:

Adrian Lupusoru is the twenty-five-year-old shift manager of the Georgetown Amazon Flex distribution center (DSE2). While studying Industrial Engineering at the University of Michigan, he was recruited to become an intern at an Amazon facility in Tennessee where he oversaw the shameless exploitation of homeless elders through the company’s Amazon Camperforce. After glimpsing the bleak capitalist future where, according to Jeff Bezos, “by the year 2020, one out of every four work-campers [the RV- and vehicle-dwellers who travel the country for temporary work] in the United States will have worked for Amazon,” the neophyte Adrian then traveled to the very center of the contemporary Amazon dystopia: Seattle.

In 2016, he was installed as one of several managers in DSE2 before being elevated to shift manager in 2018. We became aware of his existence after stumbling across this poster (image enclosed) when we snuck into the DSE2 facility following a local tipster’s advice. Adrian is pictured with a neutral grin in the driver’s seat of his black convertible. According to him, his favorite aspect of Amazon is “the generally upward trend in the stock price,” implying the youngtechbro overlord owns stock in this nightmarish company. According to his poster, Adrian enjoys “writing about himself in the third person” as he oversees the blue-collar factory workers under his command. While flooded with fantasies of his heroic destiny as the DSE2 manager, Adrian “maintains a semi-regular breathing schedule” and, like many Millennials, has a passion for eating Tide Pods.

During his workday, Adrian monitors workers three times his age and treats them like toilet paper when by all rights they should at least have a pension, housing, and economic stability. Adrian is allowed to have all those things, and yet Amazon warehouse workers are systemically denied every benefit provided to Amazon’s tech-workers. This separate, unequal, and arbitrary division between those who “deserve” a future and those who are denied one is Amazon’s template for our future society unless we stop it.

Once the home of working class Seattlite pensioners, Ballard has been transformed into a yuppie playground filled with people like Adrian. The Scandinavian culture of the neighborhood has been replaced with Scandinavian-themed luxury apartments that not even the children of locals can afford. As homeless people drift beneath his fourth story window, driven into the cold night by Amazon’s relentless gentrification, Adrian lifts a Cheeto to this mouth with putrid, greasy fingers. As he devours this bag of Cheetos, Amazon continues its reckless course of sponsoring alt-right tech-bro, Breitbart News, Counter-Currents Publishing, and Neo-Nazi security workers in its European fulfillment centers.

In spite of years of protest, Amazon continues advertising on Breitbart News, Steve Bannon’s mouthpiece which vaulted Donald Trump upward in the 2016 Republican primary. Also, in the last few months, Amazon has resumed selling the unhinged racist screeds of Seattle neo-Nazi organizer Greg Johnson. While Jeff Bezos basks in the fame of nominally opposing Donald Trump, Amazon continues funding hate. At the end of the night, when Adrian has shifted from eating Cheetos to Tide Pods, the price of Amazon’s stock price rises thanks to its relentless exploitation of workers around the world. We must stop this nightmare before it’s too late.