Year in Review 2018 Letter Series-You Are Jeff Bezos-Money Isn’t Everything
2018 was the year I started listening to Citations Needed, a leftist podcast focusing on analyzing and explaining the “intersections of media, PR, and power”. It’s a great show, and has helped me learn a lot about power structures and how insidious their reach in our culture is. One thing that really stuck with me was the concept of “lotteryism” (discussed in episode 19 and 20), and how groups like the Olympic committee, and enormous companies, like Amazon, exploit cities and politicians to gain massive tax breaks, property, and access to infrastructure while having to give little to nothing back, or even getting paid to be there.
Learning about this practice through Amazon’s Headquarters 2.0 initiative, along with their horribly anti-union videos being exposed, their fascination with becoming a monopoly across physical and media spaces, and their awful and inhumane treatment of employees pushed me towards attempting to boycott as many of their services as possible (still working on getting off Twitch, a 2019 goal). So I was delighted when, in the same day, I received a text and saw an article about a game where the point is to spend all of Jeff Bezos’ money.
The game in question, You Are Jeff Bezos, is a twine game on itch.io that has you in a Freaky Friday situation with Jeff Bezos. You’ve woken up in his body, and the only way out is to spend all his money. You can’t invest it, and you can’t keep it, so you’re presented with a bunch of different options to get rid of the cash that can also help the world. Some examples are: paying the $293 million in taxes Bezos has managed to evade, upping Amazon workers’ wages to a more liveable $50,000, paying off 1000 grad students’ loans, and many, many more.
What you spend your money on mostly doesn’t matter, aside from a few options that can lead into different prompts (such as buying Twitter and finally banishing Jack and all the Nazis), and that’s the point. As someone who’s still learning a lot about what’s really going on with despots like Bezos and the companies they run, this game did a great job of mechanically demonstrating not only how absolutely disgusting this kind of personal wealth is, but also that wealth in and of itself is not a solution to the problems our society faces. No matter what you do, you can’t solve all the problems you’re presented with by throwing money at them, and ultimately, there are just too many ways for the billionaires of the world to avoid doing the right thing, from their cohorts helping out, to the corruption of our justice system, to the weird fandom of billionaires amongst regular people. It does al this through biting wit and humor that’s easy to understand and digest.
Getting to one of the main three endings takes about five minutes (depending on how fast you read and how long you spend ruminating on what cultural evils you’d like to fix), and there are three secret endings to unlock as well. It’s a browser game you can play for free (though you should definitely support it), and I think everyone should, especially if you’re not exactly clear on how the existence of billionaires is deeply immoral and unjust in practice. It’s not deep theory, but I think it does a great job of getting across that “why” through a real, if wacky, lens.
Play it here.
