I’ll come right out and say it. I hate Jeff Bezos. I hate Amazon. Very brave stuff, I know.
But the man is such a chump, the kind of two-bit P.T. Barnum who poses proudly by his space capsule instead of riding the thing back to earth, then has the gall to swagger around the landing site in cowboy boots.
Yee-haw, Jeffrey.
Not to mention Amazon itself, which has stretched the income gap in my home city to unprecedented lengths, helping transform Seattle from a logging town with a software problem to some kind of soggy dystopian Monaco.
That loud idiot up at the bar of the lifeless, cold-stamped downtown corporate sushi chain? There’s an Amazon Web Services badge strapped proudly to his puffy gilet. Guaranteed.
In some ways I do admire Bezos; He worked his ass off and latched hold of the Dot Com Boom’s wily mane. While others let go, Bezos had serious foresight, envisioning a world where the bookstore came to your doorstep instead of the inverse.
More importantly, he had the fortitude to pursue a vision to its absolute end. It cost him a marriage in the end, and I’m guessing his hair. Maybe everything else in his life. This is a rare tenacity, emblematic of the type of man who changes history. The rest of us are simply along for the ride.
Boy, just look at us now.
Thirty-ish years since the AMZN IPO, we won’t even step out of our houses to buy fucking toilet paper. We are now wholly of the world, but rarely in it.
My colleague Chris Perkins has an appropriately skeptical take on Bezos’s role in our increasingly Philip K. Dickian future, wherein Amazon’s vertical integration sinks its seedy vines through every last crack in society’s damaged foundation.
In Bezos’s endgame, as Perkins notes, the Amazon prole rides to work at a sensibly mandated speed in his Slate pickup (leased at an eye-watering APR from Amazon Corporate Financing, but never owned).
Down at The Prime Warehouse, AI software (Powered by AWS, of course) monitors his work rate in real time, observing at high resolution for any drop in productivity. A pause for a breath. A moment to lean on a shelf. Both forbidden.
The Amazon Basics diapers don’t fit our worker well, but the chafing comes with the paycheck; He’ll trade any amount of dignity for a grain of efficiency. At least he doesn’t have to leave the house for toilet paper.
I swore off Prime membership years ago and tell everyone I meet to do the same. Bezos and his union-busting, anti-worker, small-business-crushing hordes can all suck the same egg. And yet I’m beyond excited for the Slate truck.
Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself.
A Bezos-backed minitruck may represent some small step toward a Blade Runner future, but I can’t help but get carried away by the sheer charisma of Slate’s pickup.
Look at it! It’s cool! We should love cool things.
I swore off Prime membership years ago and tell everyone I meet to do the same... And yet I’m beyond excited for the Slate truck.
The Slate’s single body line broadcasts the egalitarian values of many old totems, from Willys to Bronco to Trooper. Small pickups carry an authenticity that many of us will recognize. They’re carefree, unpretentious. They evoke wholesome memories.
My late Grandpa owned a single-cab S10 that still sits in Grandma’s garage. It’s run like a top for 25 years, eager as ever for that weekend haul from Home Depot.
It’s as much truck as many Americans will ever want or need, the type of conveyance (compact, functional, reliable, affordable) that left dealership lots many moons ago when the screens took hold.
With Kei truck importers popping up in every American city, it’s clear there’s still a market for this form factor. It’s only natural that the market responds, offering buyers an affordable bare-bones EV pickup for local handymen, couriers, hobbyists, and small-business owners. Amen.
But beyond market forces, I can imagine a genuine enthusiast culture springing from these trucks. If the price is right, you’ll see them at your local autocross, you’ll see them slammed on their batteries at lowrider meetups, you’ll catch them rolling on knobbies and lifted suspension at the BMX trailhead.
The idea of an affordable canvas should appeal to us all. Any way to democratize car ownership serves to democratize car enthusiasm.
Then there’s everything about Slate that isn’t Bezos, who, by all accounts, swooped in and splashed some money into the pot because a small EV pickup is a good idea, but who doesn’t call the shots or even take any credit for Slate’s products (it’s mostly the media who’ve picked up the Bezos Truck storyline, not corporate marketing of any sort).
According to reporting done by TechCrunch’s Sean O’Kane, Slate hired up tons of engineers, managers, and workers, luring them from America’s other automakers to Slate’s Michigan headquarters.
The idea of an affordable canvas should appeal to us all. Any way to democratize car ownership serves to democratize car enthusiasm.
Job postings and government filings (also reported by O’Kane) indicate that Slate will build the truck in Indiana. This is obvious, but it should be noted: This truck will use American labor.
Isn’t that what we all want? Cheaper options, built by Americans for Americans? A rebirth?
Now, this country does not have a stellar track record for producing benevolent industrialists; Robber Barons were never Robin Hoods, even if they built a few nice public libraries while lying on their deathbeds.
Will buying a Slate pickup enrich this morally bankrupt wannabe cowboy Rockefeller, Jeffrey Bezos? Yep, probably will. Will it also put money back into the pockets of hard-working Americans? Yes, that too.
As they say, no consumption is ethical. So you can either starve to death in an empty field or make choices. So it goes.
The problem with America is not that hypocrisy exists. Or even that billionaires exist. Our problem rests with the people who delight in ignoring their own hypocrisy, who wield that indifference against us. The ability to ignore hypocrisy is what power looks like in 2025, and some people just keep lapping it up.
It’s a monumental problem. I don’t know how to fix it, but I know that buying a cool EV pickup won’t move the needle on that issue one goddamned inch. In either direction.
Might as well rip around in a cheap EV pickup with enough bed space for a couple of pallets of toilet paper, even if you’ll never actually need to haul them yourself.
