The People’s Database (PD).
Created and updated by the Amazon Observatory Team. 1
Members and office of the Observatory are dedicated to researching all dimensions of Amazon’s operations and developing a massive shared and open database to aid other activists, artists, and researchers in their efforts to understand and confront this corporation that is transforming capitalism and the world.
We are also dedicated to creating a living database (seen below) of instances and forms of resistance to Amazon.
Yet the sheer size and diversity of the data (financial reports, news clippings, artistic responses, activist techniques) require innovative thinking and experimentation with how to build, maintain, and expand such a database, as well as how to present that data in compelling, useful and generative ways.
The People’s Database is an emergent and ongoing mapping of the evolving and nebulous Amazon ecosystem – from collected data, clippings, responses, and fragments sourced from a variety of areas, including Amazon itself. To see the data assets behind the mapping, click here.
The People’s Database will also explore questions of ethics and information sharing, forms of collecting data, and investigating the best ways to visualize and distribute such data. 2
This information is segmented into several key areas and inquiries to be tracked over time.
This section outlines Who is Amazon? What does Amazon do? Where does it operate? Where is it going?
2. Resistance.
What are the forms of direct action and resistance against Amazon?
3. Data sets
Timeline Map
- The International Observatory for the Abolition of Amazon is an elective consortium of artists, researchers and activists collectively dedicated to imagining and struggling towards a different world. In addition to seeing Amazon as a particular corporation with a damning record of labour exploitation, surveillance practices and environmental crimes, we also see it as the paradigm and driver of a dark future of 21st-century capitalism, one that relentlessly “disrupts” economic and social life with new technology in the interests of ever-greater control.
- Additional activities for this project will include: 1. Exploring questions of ethics, exposure of information, best practices. 2) Collecting data, entering and scrubbing, as well as exploring questions of data commensurability, categorization, and organization. 3)Investigating platforms for data dissemination, visualization, and navigation