I: Because I don't want to be complicit in symbolic expropriation.
Amazon is not a bookstore, but a hypermarket. In their warehouses the books are placed next to toasters, toys or skateboards.
II: Because we are all cyborgs, but not robots.
Amazon has progressively eliminated the human factor.
Because for us a book is a book is a book.
And its reading - attention and gift - is a rite, the echo of the echo of the echo of what was sacred.
III. Because I reject hypocrisy.
The truth is that Amazon censors or privileges books according to the interests of Amazon.
There seems to be no mediation. Everything is automatic.
IV: Because I don't want to be an accomplice of the neo-empire.
There are no booksellers on Amazon. The human prescription was eliminated as ineffective. Prescribing is in the hands of an algorithm.
V: Because I don't want to be spied on while I read.
It all started with one piece of information. Since then the data has been multiplying, it has been organically grouped in the form of a monster with tentacles. We are constantly writing our autobiography with our keyboards.
When you read a paper book the energy and data you emit through your eyes and fingers are yours alone.
VI: Because I defend accelerated slowness, relative proximity.
Desire cannot be immediately fulfilled, because then it ceases to be desire, it becomes nothing. The desire must last. You have to go to the bookstore; search for the book; Find; leafing through it; decide whether the desire had a raison d'être; perhaps abandon that book and desire someone else's desire; until you find it; or not.
VII. Because I am not naïve.
I am constantly searching for information on Google. And I constantly give my data, more or less made up, to Facebook as well.
But I believe in the minimum and necessary resistance. In the preservation of certain rituals. In conversation, which is the art of time; in desire, which is time made art. In whistling, as I walk between my house and a bookstore, melodies that only I listen to, that belong to no one else.
The books that are not out of print I always buy them in physical, independent, trusted bookstores.
This is an edited version of the manifesto. Read the full text here:
https://www.jotdown.es/2017/04/amazon-siete-razones-manifiesto/
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