Both are up shit creek for a start.
Global online retail giant Amazon, now embroiled in its own internet related scandal – the #amazonfail list is now at 1,582 books and other products, and rising – has much in common with New Labour.
Both are omni-bloody-present, both collect huge amounts of info about us and our habits; both believe that a] they alone control the internets and b]computers are only a powerful when they use them. Both suffer from megalomania, control freakery and a refusal to accept they could ever have done anything wrong, or even just immoral – even when it’s quite clear that they have.
According to one author, Amazon stated a few days ago that it was now its “policy” to exclude “adult” material from appearing in some searches and bestseller lists, but his book had no “adult” material in it. It seems that books written by lesbian or gay authors, or with lesbian or gay themes, were being classed as “adult”, actively removed from searches, and de-ranked, alongside the books featuring erotic content.
Now both Amazon and Gordon Brown are deep in the proverbial, one for censoring a website, the other for planning one and then continuing to pretend he knew nothing, despite persuasive evidence that he must have:
“This is a den within Westminster. We’re talking about a house in Downing Street, with an office and in that office sits Gordon Brown, Damian McBride and Tom Watson.
“We are talking about three people in this marriage at the heart of this scandal.”
Corporations like Amazon tend to think a computer’s a powerful political tool, but only when they use it. Amazon’s wrong:
Barely an hour after the amazonfail tag first appeared, it was being mentioned four times a second on Twitter search – thousands of people were talking about it; but none of the tweets were positive. Calls for Amazon to be “googlebombed” were acted upon and people were commenting on the politics of “cyberactivism” – contributing to lists of the books that had been affected – and calling for a boycott of the site. Amazon, it appeared, had started to dig its own grave.
New Labour’s wrong too. Daniel Hannan:
A blog has just done something that I thought no one could do: elicited an apology (or as close as we’ll ever get to an apology) from Gordon Brown. Indeed, according to The Guardian, the McBride-Draper scandal might cost Labour the next election. If so, Guido Fawkes would have succeeded where his baleful namesake failed 404 years ago: he would have brought down a government. Even if you think the Guardian story is a bit de trop, the idea that one man with a laptop could do so much damage would, until very recently, have seemed risible.
Both are now desperately trying to spin paddle their way out of the river of cack that attitude’s got them into.
Good luck with that, Amazon and Brown: there’s millions of us, but only one each of you.
