What’s surprising is that Amazon is not offering these for free delivery via Prime:
Amazon was lampooned on social media Thursday after sharing a video highlighting “AmaZen”, a small enclosed booth installed in an Amazon warehouse where employees can go to “focus on their mental wellbeing”.
The human-sized box has an interactive kiosk inside, where workers can watch videos about “mental health” and “mindfulness practices”. Critics of the company, which has come under fire in the past for not allowing workers sufficient bathroom breaks, putting them in danger of frequent injury, and forcing them to spend hours on foot, said the company’s money would be better spent supporting its labor force.
“I feel like livable wages and working conditions are better than a mobile Despair Closet,” writer Talia Levin tweeted.
Vice adds:
“With AmaZen I wanted to create a space that’s quiet, that people could go and focus on their mental and emotional well-being,” Leila Brown, the Amazon employee who invented the booth said in the video. “The ZenBooth is an interactive kiosk where you can navigate through a library of mental health and mindful practices to recharge the internal battery.”
Brown is giving away the game by using the language of machines. A worker is not a robot with a battery that needs to be charged. A worker is a human who needs things Amazon simply does not provide its workers. Amazon drivers piss in bottles and shit in bags. Amazon drivers sued for being paid less than minimum wage and fought against an initiative to install surveillance cameras in their cars.
Perhaps an Orgasmatron would have been more welcome.*
Given the anti-democratic trajectory of our republic, the Despair Closet just could be the next big thing. Under Republican authoritarians (or worse — looking at you, Tom Cotton) to suppress the vote, pack the courts, instigate insurrection, steal elections, kill their own voters (with anti-science), and undermine faith in the country they profess to love just, just so much, despair is tempting. Fuck it.
But despair is no more helpful than performative cynicism or moving to Costa Rica. Those who once preached, wore or displayed on their cars “If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem” need now to take their own device … um, advice.