The World After Amazon: Speculative Stories from Amazon Workers was released in September. The radical charge of the publication, visible even from its title, inevitably grabbed our attention. We talk to Max Haven, one of the driving forces behind the project. He is a writer and teacher and Canada Research Chair in the Radical Imagination. His most recent books are Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire (2022), Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts (2020) and Art after Money, Money after Art: Creative Strategies Against Financialization (2018). Haiven is also an editor of VAGABONDS, a series of short, radical books from Pluto Press. He teaches at Lakehead University, where he directs the ReImagining Value Action Lab (RiVAL).

Stanislav Dodov: It seems like you’re quite busy with the launch of the book. How is it going?

Max Haiven: It’s going great, we just did our launch in London on September 15th and we have the launch here in Berlin coming up on September 26th. And then we have also launches in Toronto, New York and other places in Canada and Germany. It’s nice that the book is getting around.

SD: Sounds like a movie premiere – launching simultaneously in ten different places!

MH: I increasingly feel that books serve as catalysts for certain types of conversations and foster community and communion as well. It seems we’re in an age where fewer people are reading, yet more and more are drawn to books – it’s a strange conundrum.

Defense mechanisms

SD: While preparing for this interview, something came to my mind that might seem unrelated to the topic. It’s about two types of comments and reactions I often receive when working with people, especially in group and educational contexts. The first one is: ‘This is all well and good, but give me something practical – give me a step-by-step guide on how to achieve this.’ The second, which I believe is somewhat connected, is: ‘This is all well and good, but it’s utopian. People or the system are not like that, so even if I try, I know it’s bound to fail, so I’d rather not even discuss it.’ These reactions seem quite common, and I wanted to hear about your experience with them and how you manage to address them.

MH: It’s tough. I think these responses are fear-based, but rooted in real experiences. We inherit a world that has seen its fair share of destructive utopian schemes, and many of us live in the ruins of these visions – whether it’s the communist utopianism of the Soviet Union or the remnants of neoliberal capitalist dreams. Those aftermaths contribute to people’s cynicism.

However, I believe these responses you mention are often driven by another kind of fear. If you genuinely believe that utopia is possible and that society can change, it implies you might have to behave differently, you might have to challenge yourself and those around you, take uncomfortable risks, and act in ways that strive to bring about a better world, or alternately dwell with the reality that you could have tried, but didn’t and therefore bear some responsibility for the consequences of its failure.

Even people who aren’t particularly thoughtful quite intuitively grasp that embracing utopian thinking could imply difficult changes in their lives. So I think people respond very reactively to such proposals, defaulting to notions of ‘human nature’ or to a distorted version of a history that never happened, so as to license themselves to say, ‘This is impossible, so we can safely put it aside’.

Alternately, as you pointed out, they ask for a practical step-by-step guide to utopia. But I would say that 95% of the time they don’t genuinely want such a guide – they want to nitpick and problematize the steps, again to prove it is impossible and indemnify themselves from the consequences. 

There are perhaps a few ways I deal with this, depending on the circumstances I was recently doing a workshop with Amazon workers and some were really frustrated, saying, ‘We’re supposed to be doing organizer training, and you want us to imagine a better future where we run Amazon, but this is useless.’ I decided I was going to get really reactive, saying, ‘No, there is importance to imagination – it’s part of our basic human dignity! We have a right and a duty to use it! For once, let’s put aside our obsession with pragmatism and take half an hour to imagine together, just for the joy of it. For the fact that it makes us bigger and wider as humans. For the fact that not everything needs to have an outcome!’ So, sometimes as a facilitator I get a bit pushy, and people are usually surprised by that, and the surprise itself opens up a kind of space. Sometimes you need to be the problem you want to see in the world.

Another approach I take, if there’s enough time and the right circumstances, is to gently observe participants’ fear-based response to utopianiasm and then I’ll ask the people in the room, ‘Why? Let’s analyze ourselves and figure out the source of this fear.’ Usually, most of the audience quickly reaches the same conclusion I shared a moment ago: that people are afraid of the consequences, they’re afraid of getting their hopes up, they’re afraid of having their hopes betrayed, they’re fearing they won’t be good enough. That can be quite a generative experience as well.

Understanding dystopia

SD: Let’s talk about the collection The World After Amazon: Stories from Amazon Workers – it’s quite dystopian, isn’t it? Most, if not all, of the stories are quite bleak, which I didn’t expect. There seem to be small glimmers of resistance here and there, but that’s essentially the ‘utopian’ spice. So, what were your expectations regarding this dystopia-utopia dichotomy, and how do you interpret the final outcome?

MH: It’s something we discussed quite a bit in the team that put the book together, because we were also a bit surprised. Xenia Benivolski, whom I work with on the book, has a theory that most of the writers we collaborated with are between the ages of 25 and 45, and they have been raised on a pretty steady diet of dystopia in our popular media and literary landscape. Especially since the 2000s, there’s been a barrage of dystopian science fiction, and that’s kind of what people have become habituated to and what their imagination focuses on when we ask about the future.

I think that’s probably the soundest explanation, but I have others that are more speculative that I toy with.

In my scholarly work on the radical imagination I argue that it is embodied: it emerges from our lived experience of systems of domination and the way they impact our body-minds and shape our social spaces. If you think about an Amazon worker, they’re the meat that gets fed into a profit-driven machine that’s mostly robots and algorithms. Drivers or warehouse workers, which is the vast majority of their workforce – these people are doing tasks either because Amazon hasn’t invented a robot to replace them or because it’s cheaper to just burn through human meat than it is to build a robot. That is an incredibly dystopian way to be treated by your society. And for what? So that people can get a commodity they want a tiny bit faster and a little more cheaply? This is utter horror. I think the workers’ writing reflects the fact that they are already subjects in a dystopia. That is how they live, and in a way, we ask them to write about a future, but they are actually writing about the present; it’s just future-flavored. 

By the same token, what you can imagine in terms of a different society stems from your social and political life now.

If you want to envision a society where people cooperate differently, care about each other differently, and interact with the world differently, it’s very difficult to do that if you rarely have experiences of that kind of difference.

Amazon, as we know, uses its algorithms, robots, surveillance and extreme managerial control to ensure that workers are divided in space, by scheduling, by protocol. The company is so paranoid about unionization and so interested in fragmenting its workforce that it doesn’t create the circumstances for basic conviviality. There are no break rooms in many warehouses, for example, and the subcontracting of drivers means they rarely have an opportunity to meet. In such a circumstance, where will the utopian spark come from? I think it’s very, very difficult for people to envision much more than saying ‘No!’ 

But this is where I think the utopian kernel comes through in the book. In most of the stories, even though they’re dystopian, there is a character or characters who at some point just say ‘No!’ Often their bodies just say ‘No!’ – they collapse, they reject, they refuse to participate in some way, or they go insane in some circumstances. Perhaps this is the only way a body that has been isolated and torqued by a totalitarian corporate system refuses and rebels.

There is another utopian “spice” (as you call it) at work in these otherwise dystopian stories: the characters’ personal relationships or their relationships with other workers, or with comrades in certain circumstances, and often with their families. Many of the stories focus on the reunification of families who have been broken apart by war, work, or circumstance. I see in that a kind of wish-image, borrowing a term from Ernst Bloch, of solidarity that can’t yet fully express itself in a way that someone like me would like to see solidarity expressed. But it holds open a space.

SD: This reminds me of Mark Fisher’s piece, Dystopia Now. I think your colleague’s argument mirrors his point – that recent cultural production is saturated with dystopian themes. Fisher also notes that if there are glimmers of hope in these dystopian scenarios, they lie in the small, almost impossible connections between individuals, resisting against the odds. 

MH: I think that’s very apt. I’m thinking a lot about fascism lately – as unfortunately we all are – and I return to Bloch, who was trying to understand it from a utopian perspective. He was a writer active in the Weimar Republic and through the rise of the Nazis, then went into exile, eventually becoming a major intellectual of the GDR. He was very frustrated with his colleagues in the Frankfurt School and elsewhere, who, in the 20s, seemed to want to reduce the allure of fascism to just hysteria and irrationality, to a kind of atavism harking back to some primordial tribalness.

His contribution, which was very sympathetic to someone like Walter Benjamin, was to argue that fascism picks up on the vanquished dreams of our revolutionary forebears and perverts and distorts them. I wouldn’t say all dystopia is fascist, but I think there’s a similar observation we could make about people’s attraction to dystopian narratives today: they often emerge from the heartbreaks of history. So a dystopian narrative like The Hunger Games, or the ones we see in our book, often contain a haunting echo, a strain of utopian music, distorted but lingering. 

SD: I find this very interesting, and I can definitely see parallels in the current Bulgarian context. It might sound exaggerated, but it feels as though society here is clinically dead. Over the past few months, things have been worsening rapidly at the legislative level, and the situation is becoming increasingly bleak. I’m trying to understand why people are so reluctant to at least say, ‘No! This law is absurd, we won’t accept it,’ or something similar. What you’re saying makes sense, that some fascist tendencies seem to be feeding off the broken dreams of the past 35 years and turning them into monstrosities.

MH: I think we’re seeing it everywhere on some level. There’s much we could say about people’s fear, complicity, acceptance, and individualism in the face of rising fascism. But I think, on some level, we’re also in this very strange moment in many societies where, when a new horror reveals itself, the response is extremely blasé. Part of that, I think, is people saying to themselves, maybe unconsciously, ‘Well, if I oppose this new horror, I would need to oppose everything else, I’d have to oppose the one before that, and the one before that…’ and then that stacks up quickly to an insurmountable problem. And how do you live with yourself for having let it get so far? We accept the new horror because we have also accepted the previous horrors. It’s a sick loop.

But what that seems to generate, though, are these weird moments where those systems suddenly implode on themselves. Suddenly, tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people who are otherwise completely complicit or quiet, or resigned, flood into the streets based on prompts that sometimes make no sense. But the danger is that this blows in many different directions. These kinds of explosions can very easily be manipulated by fascist and reactionary forces who offer simple and seductive reasons and solutions, while left-wing forces tend to be in utter disarray.

SD: Going back to the book, I feel there’s a contradiction between the title and what’s actually described in the stories. It doesn’t seem like a world after Amazon – it’s more like a world where Amazon is on steroids. So, if we were to look at the stories together – though it may not be entirely fair to the authors – what historical epoch are they describing? What kind of future do you think this is and what would future anthropologists make of this book?

MH: The stories don’t take place in a shared world; the world-building of each author is different. However, the vast majority of them take place in the same time frame, which is basically the next 20 years, though sometimes it extends up to the next 100 years. Most of the authors are thinking about the world after Amazon based on fairly near-future projections. In one story, Amazon takes over the prison system and starts creating human-animal hybrids to work for them. In another story, they replace humans with robots, and then the robots and humans rise up and overthrow Amazon…

SD: And there’s revolutionary love between robots and humans!

MH: Yeah, I love that story by Ibrahim Alsahary… A lot of the stories resemble a Mad Max, fall-of-civilization scenario. I think these stories will be remembered as a reflection on our present, they represent what Steven Shaviro calls a kind of ‘extrapolation politics’ in his new book Fluid Futures, where you take current trends and extrapolate them into the future. 

In decades past extrapolation used to serve as a kind of warning: if we continue on our current trajectory, we might reach this grave point, so let’s change our ways. But today, it seems to me that speculative and dystopian fiction serves a more therapeutic function. We have learned to enjoy the warning for its own sake, perhaps because, as I’ve alluded to earlier, it reflects our own dystopian conditions back to us.

Anyway, who could act on such a warning now? The idiom of dystopia-as-warning is itself a bit utopian, because it implies that the reader is part of some polity that has some agency to change the future. We readers almost never feel that kind of agency today, and so the warning functions mostly as sad entertainment.

But then there are a few stories that are a bit different. The story that closes the book is actually about a society far in the future where humans have discovered not only a source of infinite energy, a mystical form of energy in some ways. What’s interesting about that story is that it speculates that this discovery can only be achieved once there is a kind of revolution, and it’s a very tricky revolution. The author really wanted to highlight that this is also a future where there aren’t other forms of propaganda and manipulation instilled in the machines themselves.

So, I think what future anthropologists would make of this book is that it represents people’s hopes and fears in 2024 on some level. Those hopes and fears are expressed in a genre that is very much shaped by the cultural habits of 2024. If we were to go back 1,000 years to Europe and ask people what their hopes and fears are for the future, they would mostly express them in a religious language. And they did: workers’ struggles 1,000 years ago often articulated themselves in terms of the Second Coming of Jesus and the fulfillment of the Book of Revelation. This was the cultural idiom through which they could express hopes and fears, aspirations for the future.

I think our cultural idiom in this allegedly secular, hyper-mediated society is often the dystopian narrative.

You, too, can and should do it!

SD: The stories have very clear class dimensions, which I somewhat expected, although it’s striking how explicitly this theme is present throughout. The systems of class subjugation are central, and I was particularly impressed by the story featuring the housekeeper. In terms of topics beyond class as such, the stories also cover a wide range, including critiques of cultural assimilation, technology, etc. But why would people choose to read this book? Or why is it important for them to read it?

MH: This is a very good question, and it’s one we’re asked by many publishers. It’s one of the reasons why we ended up publishing the book through my research lab rather than with a conventional publisher. I don’t have a very good answer. I think the reason is to be inspired to get together with their friends, comrades, colleagues, or coworkers and write their own stories. The effectiveness of these stories is not so much that they’re going to be very enjoyable to read – although I find them very enjoyable – or even that they’ll be particularly insightful, but more that what they express silently. It is right, good, and important that we – no matter who we are – honor and exercise our imaginations. That’s not only part of coming together to envision different futures so we can fight for them; it’s also a big part of being or becoming human.

I think this is especially crucial in an age when the future is being written for us by forces far beyond our control. If only it were just the politicians, but the future is now being shaped by billionaires – like Jeff Bezos – who have made ridiculous amounts of money from their corporate empires and use that to, with almost complete freedom and impunity, shape the future of our species in terms of space travel, “artificial intelligence,” geoengineering, research and development in global health, and much more. To a certain extent, I think one small part of refusing this system is, in a very small but collective way, reclaiming our power to tell different stories.

So, I hope the real lesson and message of the book is that you, too, can do this; you too should do this. You should do it for the joy of it and also for the dignity of it, because one of the things this system silently tells us is that the vast majority of us should be happy with what we’ve got and leave the question of the future to the billionaires.

If we’re lucky, we won’t end up like the housekeeper in Cory Gluck’s story “Thalia in Albios”, basically cleaning up after horrible rich people, or like the character in “Always on the Clock” who decides to quit their job at Amazon one morning because they can’t take it anymore and ends up in prison – only to discover that the prison is being run by Amazon. On some level, I think writing with others gives us a way to redefine our own (post-)humanity. That’s actually valuable in and of itself.

Understanding utopia

SD: Let’s focus on utopia for a moment. I didn’t read most of the book, I listened to it through a text-to-speech application.

MH: But we have the audio version read by Sook-Yin Lee!

SD: Yeah, but I realized that too late. Still, I thought my experiment with the app is very interesting, because – of course I hated the robot voice – it made me think about the medium. What is the relationship between the medium and our capacity to imagine different futures? It seems that today, our understanding of utopia—and dystopia, for that matter—is primarily mediated by images, rather than written text or spoken word.

MH: One of the things I really liked about Mark Fisher was his approach to thinking through utopia in terms of sound rather than just text or image. In particular, his thinking around retro-utopianism tries to uncover the ontological trace of past utopias that make themselves felt in musical nostalgia. I think this can also animate utopian imaginings and the radical imagination now in ways that might help us move beyond some of the conundrums we discussed today. When you present a utopia to people – whether in literature or in a workshop space – they often respond by saying, as you pointed out, either, “That utopia would never work; it’s unrealistic, it’s not human nature; I hate it,” or, “Yeah, fine, but show me the ten steps to get there.” I think there might be a different way music can bypass these defense mechanisms. I’d be very interested in exploring that.

Also, I’ve been thinking a lot about C. T. Nguyen’s very good book Games: Agency as art, which explores what it is in games that we find so appealing. I don’t recall if he uses the word “utopian,” but one thing I think about a lot – since I’m also a game designer and I’m doing a bunch of work in games right now – is his point that, when you enter into a game, whether it’s like Monopoly or a video game, the rules of the world are intoxicatingly simplified. Usually, when we interact with the world, our agency is incredibly complex; we’re navigating multiple conflicting systems of power, social interactions, subjectivity and institutions. Agency is a very complicated thing, especially in this neoliberal age when we’re all tasked with surviving and navigating multiple jobs, school, life, romance, sociality – all of these different levels in a world without any guarantees. But when you enter into the game, your agency is clear, what you’re supposed to do is clear, and your affordances for action in your environment are clear. I think of this clarity as utopian. Nguyen writes of how enchanting that simplified agency is, and how dangerous that enchantment can be when we believe that the real world ought to work like a game.

So these are just two examples of non-literature and non-film, and non-image that I’m thinking through in terms of this great question of the medium of utopianism. My sense is that image-based and time-based media like literature and film may be too saturated by this point, both by failed utopias and charismatic dystopias. Utopian thinkers and activists may need to look to other parts of the sensorium to explore these things.

I would, for example, love to make games with Amazon workers. When we were doing the pilot project that led to this book, we gave a workshop of Amazon workers an assignment to imagine a video game that they would force all Amazon managers to play.

There were two very different visions. One group imagined the kind of game I was expecting, that showed how horrible and difficult it is to work at Amazon, placing those managers in the shoes of the workers; it was a kind of revenge game, sort of like an elaborate Tetris where the difficulty just stacks up to impossible levels.

The other group’s game, however, created a game that was basically about retraining mid-level managers to recognize the value of hard-working workers over lazy ones. It was the kind of game Amazon might have itself invented. 

I think both of these games have a “topian” kernel – not necessarily utopian or dystopian, maybe rather heterotopian: an other-space that runs within but also counter to our world, expressing latent hopes, fears, dreams, nightmares…

SD: That’s very interesting. I’ve been thinking also about the importance of dialogue, particularly in relation to Freire’s idea that naming the world changes the world. If we had the time and space – likely the biggest issue – to engage in meaningful dialogue with one another… Isn’t that the foundation for all the other mediums and techniques we’re discussing?

MH: I think you’re absolutely right, and if I were to do this project again, I would maybe build in enough space and time for people to pair up or get in groups of three to write their stories. I have a hunch that if we did that, the stories might be less dystopian.

SD: I guess there are two major theses regarding where we can find utopia. The classical view posits that utopia exists somewhere, sometime – hence its name. The more recent perspective suggests that utopia is here and now, something we live but may not fully recognize, waiting for us to help it emerge at scale. How should we think about utopia today? Which thesis is more viable, or is there a third option?

MH: One other way of framing your question would be, ‘Is utopia a transcendental or an imminent phenomenon?’ The first means that it exists somewhere beyond the shores of our world, either spatially or temporally – somewhere else, in the future, or maybe in the past. I think myths like that can be very useful and also very dangerous. Certainly, around the world, we’ve seen the incredible danger of the myth of a past utopia: back when our country was strong, back when America was great, when men were really men and women were really women, all of that bullshit. But I also think that for a long time, people have organized around the vision that, someday, we might move into the stars or create a better society.

I’m on the side that believes utopia is much more everyday, much more imminent to our lived experience. As in the case of the stories, the way that utopianism typically makes itself felt is simply through refusal – the refusal of the body, the refusal of people to accept their conditions.

Often, I think utopia can only express itself in the word ‘No!’. The work of social movements and cultural creators is to show us that inside of a ‘No!’ there is a utopian seed or seeds. Because, after all, why would we refuse unless we thought things could get better?

And why would we sustain our refusal beyond just the initial spasm unless we knew somewhere deep down that things could be different? But I think most of us are denied the opportunity to think systematically about it.

I would go back to Thomas More’s original 1516 Utopia which is interesting to me not only because it’s a book about a transcendental other-place, a better world, but because so much of it is actually about sociality, conviviality, feasting, talking, being together, it’s about how people treat one another. The real utopianism is in the relationships. In the same way that the Odyssey is really about hospitality, Utopia is also a book about sociality. I think that reveals something about the immanence of utopianism: it is not just this abstract concept of a better society; it is something very much baked into the way we treat each other, the way we interact as a society, and the joy we find in playfulness, rather than a concrete vision of a better tomorrow.

The radical joy and need to imagine together

SD: In dVERSIA, we’re really struggling with the publication this interview will be a part of some day. Initially, we thought it would be an issue of the magazine, but now we’re considering it a compendium. However, we’ve never been able to sit down, put up a plan, and actually follow through. Things tend to fall apart at various stages, and we end up back at square one. It seems to me that when people try to engage in this kind of conscious thinking about utopia—especially when there’s a clear political purpose—the system projects itself onto us, blocking our ability to truly start and commit to the process.

MH: I think you’re absolutely right. I think that our own internalization of the system makes us allergic to optimism on some level. I’m very distrustful of theories that center around trauma, but if I were to dwell with the term I would suggest we are traumatized by living in this dystopian society, and we’re very shy about investing our hearts in thinking the world could be better because we don’t want to go through the heartbreak again. I think being socialized into this society is to be heartbroken, and so it makes sense to me why people would avoid the risk of utopia. Even those of us who are officially, intellectually, and ideologically dedicated to utopianism might also have structures of avoidance.

I hate the answer I’m about to give because I think it’s stupid – but I think if we want people to use the utopian imagination we probably need to make it fun. One of the reasons I like the writing groups is that they’re fun things for people to do; we get together, we imagine, we world-build. I think the dominant culture of late capitalism is one that wants fun to be non-political; it wants fun to be in the form of playing video games or sports – individualized acts.

I’m very interested in creating spaces of collective fun and creativity right now, not so much because I think that anything ingenious is going to emerge from it, but maybe in a Spinozian sense, there is a kind of radicalness to the joy of abounding together. It’s that embodied experience of collective joy, even if small, that becomes the affective bedrock on which you can start to build other forms of solidarity, conviviality, and struggle.

Cover image: Cover illustration of The World After Amazon, by Amanda Priebe

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