“You can’t trust anybody or anything anymore.”
I don’t know how many times I’ve cited journeyman Johnny Whitmire‘s inelegant lament. America’s receding trust in institutions is well trod territory. Our political distemper, with a reality TV star leading the nation, reflects the depleted reservoir of faith the public has in great, long-lasting public bodies.
Grizzling over institutional irreverence is now commonplace in journalism. But fear not! For there is one organization that the people still put their hopes and dreams into. And no, it’s not our cinque-sided, ultra-fortified military headquarters in Arlington, Va.
What is this outsized institution in American life? The bookstore cum everything store, Amazon.com. Much like the sprawling rainforest itself, Amazon’s limbs ramify over an impressive amount of territory, affecting nearly everyone.
And here’s the most surprising part: Amazon is trusted. Despite the immeasurable power its bald-pated founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos, wields, Amazon is seen as one of the few big outfits in America that can deliver, figuratively and literally. “In contrast to the dysfunction and cynicism that define the times, Amazon is the embodiment of competence, the rare institution that routinely works,” Franklin Foer writes in a recent profile of Bezos for The Atlantic.
Foer’s piece, which is critical of Bezos’s Hank Rearden–like stature, was published on nearly the same day as another long-form profile in The New Yorker. Both write-ups expatiate on Amazon’s growing command of commerce and the internet. The company’s portfolio is impressive, if unwieldy: second-biggest private U.S. employer; conduit for 40% of all e-commerce transactions, including almost half of all paperback book sales; a high-quality grocery chain; superintends nearly half the cloud-computing industry through Amazon Web Services, whose servers host Netflix, General Electric, and the CIA. Bezos is also the owner of the Washington Post, which, for almost anyone else on Earth, would mean unexampled influence but is only a garnish on the CEO’s sumptuary stock of cultural control.