SEATTLE – Tim Bray, an internet pioneer and former Amazon vice president, sent shock waves through the tech giant in early May when he quit what he called “a streak of toxicity” running through his culture.
Within a few hours, his resignation blog post drew hundreds of thousands of visits, and his inbox was filled with requests from journalists, recruiters, and technicians. Soon, lawmakers on Capitol Hill cited the publication. It all made Mr. Bray, 65, the top deserter on Amazon.
But there was more he wanted to say.
In the weeks that followed, he aimed his mental power not to fix a coding problem but to frame a broader critique of the company. In conversations and blog posts that have drawn attention within the company, he has called for unionization and antitrust regulation. In the midst of “antitrust drumming,” he wrote in a post, he would like to see Amazon separate its retail business from its lucrative cloud computing unit.
“And I’m pretty sure I’m not alone,” he said.
Faced with mounting antitrust scrutiny as the coronavirus crisis has strained the company’s operations, Amazon is increasingly forced to defend its record as an employer and its relationship with consumers. On Monday, Jeff Bezos, the company’s chief executive, will testify for the first time before Congress, which is investigating the power of Amazon and other tech titans.
Bray stands out because, while much of the criticism of Amazon comes from abroad (labor groups, legislators and rivals), he spent more than five years at the top levels of the company.
Amazon declined to comment on Mr. Bray.
In a series of video interviews from a small, gently swaying boat docked in Vancouver, British Columbia, which was his office during the pandemic, Mr. Bray presented his ideas directly as a matter of logic.
“I am not in a radical fringe because I think that wealth and power in the 21st century are too concentrated,” he said. “The technology industry is a leading candidate for what could be separated.”
Technological feats and activism
Mr. Bray may have been especially predisposed to think of more than just engineering problems. Born in Canada, he grew up mainly in Beirut, where his father worked as a teacher. Because the political and religious conflict made Lebanon unstable, “it just wasn’t a good place to live,” said Bray.
Her time in Beirut stayed with him after he returned to Canada, so he cannot ignore politics. “Politics there takes the very rare form of riots on the streets and the incoming Israeli missiles,” he said.
While studying at the University of Guelph, near Toronto, Mr. Bray found joy and skill in computing. He used it during the early days of the consumer Internet, digitizing the Oxford English Dictionary and founding two new companies. But he is best known among technologists for helping invent XML, a critical standard for storing and sharing data on the Internet.
By 2014, after several years on Google, Bray had joined Amazon. He became a rare “distinguished engineer”, part of an elite group whose influence does not come from managing large teams but from demonstrating the brilliance of engineering.
Paul Hoffman, who met Mr. Bray in the 2000s while writing technical standards for blogging, said that Mr. Bray was one of those people he really wants to hate but can’t, a polymath that was highly functional with just a few hours of sleep.
Mr. Bray is definitely “a geek geek,” said Mr. Hoffman, “but what’s unusual is that he also has many other interests.”
In conversation and writing, Bray easily quotes economist Thomas Piketty (whose book on inequality he has read “from start to finish”), admits his love of heavy metal (which he calls “something like, ridiculous”), because “The volume is much higher than may be noticeably necessary”) and he talks in detail about the climate crisis (which is alarming to him “as a person who has great respect for quantitative science and understands what it is all about mathematical modeling “).
He turned some of those interests into activism. In 2018, he was arrested while protesting a proposed pipeline in Canada that would export oil from oil sands to Asian markets. And last year, when he saw that thousands of Amazon corporate employees had signed a letter urging Amazon to tackle the climate crisis more forcefully, he added his name. He was the most important person to join.
Their participation excited the organizers. “Having a vice president just confirmed how strongly Amazon employees feel about Amazon taking significant leadership in the climate,” said Emily Cunningham, an Amazon designer at the time who helped organize the letter.
His public dissent angered some leaders at Amazon, Bray said. He said he had been told to remember Amazon’s leadership principle known as “disagree and commit,” the idea of people vigorously debating internally, but that once a formal decision is made on an issue, everyone should align and support it.
“As vice president, you’re not supposed to get off track with conflicting messages, which is not an unreasonable position,” said Bray. But that idea would eventually lead to his resignation.
In April, Amazon fired Ms. Cunningham and other workers who had voiced concerns about security at Amazon warehouses. The company said each employee had repeatedly violated various policies. To Mr. Bray, it seemed “like an explicit policy of firing anyone who raised his hand.”
“We support each employee’s right to criticize their employer’s working conditions, but that does not come with general immunity against each and every internal policy,” Jaci Anderson, an Amazon spokeswoman, said in a statement.
For Mr. Bray, the shots crossed a line. He said he had raised concerns internally but could not “disagree and commit,” as Amazon wanted. He stayed for a few weeks to complete a project and resigned, leaving behind $ 1 million in compensation.
He went to his blog to explain the resignation publicly. Mr. Bray stayed awake until 2 in the morning, preparing his server to withstand higher than normal traffic, in case Reddit and Hacker News picked up his post, as expected. The plan worked even better than I expected.
“I was aiming for a soft target, it turned out,” he said.
‘A deep social problem’
In the following days, Mr. Bray’s criticism resonated in Washington, DC. He spoke to Representative Pramila Jayapal, a Democrat whose district includes Amazon’s Seattle headquarters. And a group of senators mentioned the posting of their resignation on the blog when they wrote to Mr. Bezos about the layoffs.
Initially he tried to keep a low profile, responding only by email to press requests. But he continued blogging and eventually spoke publicly, making even more aggressive criticism of the company.
In a live video in early June with National Observer, a Canadian research news site, Bray said Amazon was a symptom of concentrated capitalism. “We really don’t have an Amazon problem,” he said. “What we have is a deep social problem with an unacceptable imbalance of power and wealth.”
“It is not obvious to me why the retail company, the manufacturing company, the voice recognition company, the cloud computing company and the Prime video company should be the same company,” he said at the event. “They are not particularly related to each other, and I think it is actively distorting and damaging.”
A week later, Mr. Bray spoke at a virtual conference called by Amazon’s critical global unions. He said unions should be easier to form in the United States and that “one of the most powerful political programs that we could execute with the goal of correcting the power imbalances that we are concerned with is antitrust.” He also said that the sheer size of Amazon and other large corporations give them inordinate power over politics, policies and working conditions.
The “goodness” Amazon advocates for customers (low prices, endless selection, fast delivery) “is not free,” he said. “Right now, the downside to all this goodness is being overwhelmingly experienced by warehouse workers.”
Amazon has strongly defended its working conditions, saying it has spent billions of dollars to ensure the safety of its warehouses and that its workers are paid at least $ 15 an hour, plus benefits.
Mr. Bray soon set about formulating a business case to dissolve the company. He wrote it in a standard Amazon format, known as PRFAQ, imagining how the company would announce the proposal once it was fully enacted. With mounting antitrust pressures, Amazon may prefer to “proactively” spin off its cloud computing business, Amazon Web Services, he wrote, “rather than being under hostile pressure from Washington.”
He posted the document on GitHub, a collaborative coding tool, asking for help improving tone. Moving AWS away, he argued, companies like Walmart that compete with Amazon would feel more comfortable using the cloud computing service, opening up more leads.
“Organizations competing with Amazon want to take advantage of AWS ‘industry-leading offerings without having to worry that they are strengthening a competitor,” he wrote.
His post didn’t go viral like his resignation. But looking at the logs on his blog’s server, he realized that he got attention somewhere critical: inside Amazon.
His suspicion was confirmed when a former colleague told him that Amazon was concerned that a Wall Street analyst might think the document was a true Amazon document. Could you add a disclaimer?
Mr. Bray updated the proposal. “This document is not an Amazon production,” he wrote. “It describes a hypothetical process that could take place.”
