Aw, that’s a way more mundane answer than I was hoping for, but I appreciate you explaining. (And I find myself doubting that it does much to AI scrapers, yes.)

Hang on, you have successfully thorn-baited me. Are you typing them manually or do you have a macro or something swapping them in? For what purpose are you doing this? Give me your villain monologue.

Don’t forget the slave labor!

I am a big believer in regulation, and some governments right now are in a position where they can be pressured to take anti-monopoly action against Amazon, which I want very much to see. Being in the U.S. as I am right now, though… There are some state governments I would like to see act (and shout-out to California for doing so here), but I am also brainstorming other nonviolent disruptive action which could be taken, because the federal government right now is actual fascists and Amazon is in league with them.

Frustrating, but I appreciate your answer; thank you.

Why is “(most favored nation status)” in parentheses?

I have often wondered whether targeted internet boycott days would shake up AWS, but I don’t know enough about their billing structure to run the numbers to see how much that would dig into AWS profits + how much of their income is flat subscription fees vs. billing on number of calls and haven’t had a chance to dig into it yet.

This feels like a “read the room” kind of comment.

All humans are biologically considered animals, and there are many times when I feel that viewing human behavior through that lens genuinely encourages compassion and understanding, and yet: there is a long history of people being called “animals” as a dehumanizing measure in order to justify doing the same horrible things to them that humans routinely do to non-human animals. This is particularly true for historically marginalized groups.

Likewise, there is a long, racist history of white people calling Black people “apes” or “monkeys” to justify racist systems and treat Black people the way they view monkeys and non-human apes, as resembling humans but not fully human.

This representative is specifically responding to a video shared by Trump, who has a long history of racist behavior, in which the Obamas were depicted as distinctly non-human apes (I cannot recall the specific ape and cannot readily look it up. Gorillas, I think?), echoing that racist trope.

When someone responds to Trump trafficking in racist tropes with “Black people aren’t apes,” they are not getting into the nitty gritty of taxonomical clades, they’re countering that trope. “Well, actually”-ing about humans technically being apes is undercutting the focus on countering Trump’s racism. Time and place.

The other commenters here are right about Amazon’s initial methods, but I’m also going to highly recommend Cory Doctorow’s Enshittification for a detailed explanation of how this happens (including a breakdown on Amazon specifically) and what to do about it.