When you get right down to it, nothing says failure like the Internet buzz word “fail.” It has an undeniable elegance, even when it's being yelled in capital letters. Cat got stuck in the Venetian blinds? Call it cat fail! Dog let the Frisbee hit him in the face? Dog fail! Did you have investments before October 2008? Retirement fail!
Yet the implications of failure seemed a little more resonant than usual when Amazon suffered a passing catastrophe that the swarming commentariat promptly dubbed “AmazonFail.” Late last week, authors started noticing that gay- and lesbian-themed books were vanishing from the site's bestseller lists and recommendation functions.
An Amazon representative told one author that his book had got caught in a sweep for adult materials. As more books were discovered to be missing – as many as 57,310 different titles were later determined to have been affected – the alarm went up, spreading quickly around Twitter (which, contrary to previous predictions, isn't dead yet).
It's worth noting that all of these books were still listed in Amazon's database, available to anyone who looked for them by author or title. But Amazon has always courted people with its plethora of bestseller lists and endless reminders about what similar customers bought. Cutting a book off from these lists is akin to taking it off the shelves and hiding it in the back of the shop, available by request only.
Cue the outrage. The spectre of having books removed from public view and sent to the back of the shop touched some raw nerves in the gay community.
To make matters worse, Amazon proceeded to make a grade-A public-relations cock-up of the situation. The company struggled to present a clear and transparent explanation for what happened, and in its absence, suspicions ran rampant.
One hacker attempted to claim responsibility, calling it a stunt. Another news report said that an Amazon employee in France had pressed the wrong button somehow. All the while, their customer service representative's original statement – that “adult” content was being removed – was ricocheting around the Web, painting the picture of a corporation attempting to do a “family values” sanitization job on its catalogue. It was ugly.
Eventually Amazon came out with a statement swearing that it was just a neutral glitch. “This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloguing error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection,” the statement said, ensuring that the words “Amazon” and “ham-fisted” will be permanently, if improbably, linked.
But that announcement still lacked a clear explanation of how those hammy fists managed to target what appeared to be a predominantly queer selection of books, and it left a pall over the situation.
There was, without a doubt, plenty of failure – or as we say here in 2009, of fail – to go around. But even so, there was more than moral indignation at play here. The outrage that rocketed around the Web wasn't just the sound of those feeling philosophically slighted. It was the cry of people whose online incomes were suddenly imperilled. It was reminiscent of the angry responses when Google would tinker with something deep inside its search engine, causing businesses whose sites would come up at the top of the search results one day to get buried the next. Suddenly those companies' phones would stop ringing.
It's a glimpse of the future. Amazon is becoming a global bookseller and, sometimes, it seems on track to become the global bookseller. It's not the only place left to purchase books, but it is the definitive place to look for them online. If it hasn't yet achieved a monopoly as a bookseller, it's certainly working on achieving a monopoly on book-browsing.
In that regard, Amazon is something more than a bookstore. With its endless rankings and reviews and its bottomless catalogue of books that have been out of print for decades, it's taking on a quality that only the biggest websites can muster: the register of reality. A friend who's working on a book says that the reality of his impending authorship only sank in when a listing for his work-in-progress turned up on Amazon, even though it won't be out until 2010.
It's easy, if erroneous, to see Amazon as a kind of commercial Library of Congress, a master record of what's been published and will be published. Amazon might never have asked for such a title or job description, but it has become so big that casual Web browsers might be inclined to ask: If a book can't be found on Amazon, does it exist at all?
Even if you buy Amazon's thin explanation for how it errantly miscatalogued all those books, the episode leaves behind some significant concerns. The concentration of information in such large, trusted sites doesn't just threaten to throttle the flow of commerce when ham-fists go awry, but also the representation of what, well, exists. These private companies are becoming vital to the public sphere, so when something is amiss, and massive protests ensue, it's not just angry authors venting. Amazon really has become too big to fail.
