In 1994, in a Seattle garage, Jeff Bezos created a bookstore. 25 years later, his company owns over 250 warehouses, ships 14 million parcels a day and dominates the market in five continents. The World According to Amazon pulls back the curtain on Bezos' monolith and how it's discretely taken over our lives. If the world's first centi-billionaire has his way, his company will become the only one we'll ever need.
That is if it doesn't destroy us first. Staff in Amazon's 250 warehouses are required to behave like robots, According to a Polish employee, "you work as a machine but you are also controlled by machines. This is something scary." Scarier still is the state of emergency the Seattle government called on homelessness since Amazon took over one fifth of the downtown area. Filling up their shiny high rises are tens of thousands of executives, all who need homes, causing rents to skyrocket and a 600% increase in residents living on the streets.
But for Bezos, dominating a city or the world is not enough, and so he's turned his attention to the skies, or, more specifically, the cloud. Amazon is the leader in online data storage infrastructure. 70% of the world's Internet travels through just one of Amazon's 120 data centres in Northern Virginia.
The World According to Amazon explores how a single company controls the distribution of all our daily products, the infrastructure of our economy, and the data that defines us. Out of the mouths of Amazon workers in Germany, small business owners in India and even an executive who worked in Bezos' garage, we learn the truth behind this global empire, and the disturbing future Amazon has in store for us.
| Directed by | Thomas Lafarge, Adrien Pinon |
| Company | Téléfilm CanadaTéléfilm CanadaTéléfilm Canada |
