Al Jazeera America

Thanks to a recent New York Times exposé of work conditions at Amazon, the world now knows that the e-commerce giant’s ability to quickly and easily deliver an expansive list of items comes with a side of white-collar worker misery.

This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. Over the past few years, there have been many investigations into Amazon’s warehouses’ grim labor conditions. Because of advanced monitoring technology, surveillance of warehouse workers is omnipresent; every movement is tracked and optimized. Every second is monetized, and accruing mere minutes of “unproductive” activity is an offense (or “time theft,” as Walmart, which operates similarly, calls these infractions) that must be weeded out.

These organizational structures, corporate cultures and surveillance systems are essentially technologies of exploitation. Amazon is not the only company putting them to use, but it has been a pioneer in instituting them widely, thoroughly and luc…