Berlin: Amazon’s parking lot goes up in smoke

Translated from Sozialer Zorn, January 16, 2023

[On the night of January 16 at about 3:40 a.m. in the Berlin-Tempelhof district, about 25 delivery vans of the company Amazon went up in flames in its parking lot along the A100 freeway: 18 were completely burned out, and 7 more were damaged by the flames. Here is a translation of the claim of this attack signed “some anarchists”].

In the early hours of January 16, 2023, we gained access to a well-secured site on Germaniastraße street in the Berlin-Tempelhof district and removed 25 Amazon-Prime vehicles from the road with incendiary devices. A fire in solidarity with the occupiers in Lützerath and the prisoners on hunger strike.

The consumer frenzy of Black Friday and the lucrative Christmas sales are over. The pompous charity and the little bit of contemplation give way again to the usual routine of everyday life. People are once again struggling to keep up in the competitive struggle of today’s society. Despite inflation and the rising cost of living, the race for goods and the plundering of the planet and its resources continues unabated in the new year, filling the coffers of the war profiteers of online commerce. With its monopoly position and vast business model, Amazon has long since proven to be an addictive force for many. But the company is much more than just a supplier of low-priced products.

Your thoughts and feelings are worth gold

The technological developments of this IT giant point to the dark future of a dystopian society of surveillance and control. As a driving force in the establishment of digital capitalism, Amazon is not only changing the economy in a lasting way, but also everyday life, social behavior and even our ways of thinking. Artificial intelligences and algorithms are able to guide and manipulate needs. The resulting calculations are already shaping today what will make money tomorrow. With a wide range of products and technological infrastructure (servers), this company is making its mark in more and more aspects of life to satisfy its insatiable thirst for data. Whether it’s the Amazon Ring monitoring software, which keeps an eye on the properties of the wealthy like an all-powerful eye, and which – now also integrated into vehicles as soon as they are built – constantly monitors the environment. By the Alexa voice assistant, which, as an AI ear, keeps a watchful eye on living rooms and bedrooms and assists even in the most intimate moments. By facial recognition programs and sensors that are supposed to interpret feelings and direct customers through Amazon-Go self-service stores. Or with a multitude of developments in the fields of health and biotechnology, to capture everything physical and break it down into numbers. Amazon knows that whoever has large amounts of information and data and can translate the present into mathematical dimensions, also has the power to influence the future for its own benefit.

On the worldwideweb about the Berlin site

The responsibility for maintaining social order is certainly much more diffuse, yet this group, along with a few other tech giants, plays a very special role in rearranging the world through smartification. The intervention in many areas of our lives is already much greater than we think. It is not only limited to those who have already voluntarily replaced their friends with Alexa, who serve a highly connected on-demand economy by buying Prime products, or who shop on e-commerce platforms on the backs of workers with precarious conditions. On the Internet, it is now almost impossible to miss Amazon. And so that it will soon be the same in physical space, Jeff Bezoz is building a tower that will surpass all others in height in the middle of Berlin. At 140 meters high, it is an unmistakable symbol of the white-patriarchal power claim of an egomaniacal scoundrel. Moreover, the construction of this tower will have far-reaching consequences for the surrounding neighborhoods. The arrival of thousands of Amazon’s IT employees will fuel the price spiral in the housing market and continue and accelerate eviction processes. As always, it will be the excluded who will bear the brunt of this, as they are already feeling the financial pressure of rising costs. It is little consolation, therefore, that from the highest floors of this shamelessly rising tower, one could easily have marveled at the burning of the Amazon car fleet on the other side of town.

Amazon goes over dead bodies

The fact that Amazon-EDGE-Tower is supposedly built with sustainable materials may look good in marketing, but it doesn’t make it any better. On the contrary, it obscures the climate consequences of manufacturing and operating thousands and thousands of servers, as well as the disastrous nature of online commerce and the adherence to the idea of mass consumption in the face of the ecological crisis. If a big company like Amazon advertises sustainability, it is certainly not because it recognizes the consequences of its activities, but out of pure business calculation. The climate protection label is now a good way to make a profit. What is not mentioned is that the techno-industrial complex has developed primarily through countless crimes against humanity and nature, from which the current crises have resulted. Only its total destruction, by means of the necessary liberatory violence, can put an end to it.

Finally, smartification, control and surveillance also primarily concern the battered employees of Amazon’s distribution centers, who, in contrast to their well-trained computer colleagues, have to deliver maximum performance against poor wages and miserable working conditions. Even when one of them dies, this shitty company doesn’t even have the decency to give their colleagues a break to stop for a while and take a breather, as it happened recently in Leipzig. This fire is also for you!

For the anarchist Alfredo Cospito who, in solitary confinement, has been on hunger strike and in struggle against the 41bis regime in Italy for 89 days.
For Thanos Chatziangelou who is fighting for his dignity in the jails of Greece.
For Ivan, on hunger strike in France and for the 11 prisoners from Turkey who are on hunger strike in Greek prisons.

In solidarity with the squatters of Lützerath.
Against the advance of the plundering of the planet – Attack the techno-industrial complex.
Freedom for all prisoners!

Some anarchists

via: sansnom