Soylent Green Ships in Two Days
The documentary sat in my queue for a day before I finally watched it. Diana Löbl and Peter Onneken’s investigation into Amazon’s temporary warehouse labor, broadcast on German public television, was the kind of film you delay because you already know it’s going to make you feel implicated in something you won’t actually stop doing.
The film follows workers recruited from Spain, Poland, Latvia—people desperate enough to take the deal. They’re housed seven or more to a bungalow, bussed in shifts to the warehouse, and monitored by security staff from a firm called H.E.S.S.—a name that should have been a red flag on its own—some of whom turn out to be affiliated with the far-right scene and advertise the fact through their Thor Steinar clothing. That’s a neo-Nazi brand. So not only are migrant workers living in overcrowded conditions for almost nothing to pack your books and dildos, some of the men watching them are actual fascists who seem to enjoy the power arrangement.
Frank Lübberding wrote in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that the filmmakers showed, methodically, how intimidation functions as a business model at Amazon. They had what good journalism requires, he said: time. They rented rooms in the same resort complex and documented the reality of Europe’s migrant labor force from the inside. What the rural poor of China are to Apple’s supply chain, the south and east of Europe are to Amazon’s. From housing to bus transfers to security surveillance, thousands of employees are reduced to pure objects.
They exist for one purpose: securing Amazon’s commercial success. Protest and you’re out.
After watching, the familiar moral nausea arrived. The same feeling you get from animal welfare footage, from documentaries about garment factories or industrial farming. The immediate urge to opt out—stop ordering, cancel everything, refuse to participate. And alongside it, the quiet certainty that you won’t. You’ll hold out for a week, maybe two, and then you’ll need something and it’ll be easier to just click.
Where do you draw the line, though? The iPhone in my pocket was assembled by people working conditions we’d prosecute here. My sneakers traveled through more hands than I can count, not all of them paid fairly. Even the organic produce with its reassuring certification stickers sometimes comes with its own quiet horrors underneath. And the horse meat that turned up in frozen lasagna across Europe that winter was the dark punchline to the whole farce. Soylent Green is people. It was always people.
René from Nerdcore drew his line clearly: no more Amazon links on his site, and if no satisfying explanation followed, he’d wipe every existing one from the database. His tolerance for Nazi involvement in any commercial operation he associates with is, he said, functionally zero. Which is the only reasonable position. Mine should be the same.
I just haven’t figured out what I’m actually willing to give up yet.