The Atmosphere is the Amazon-Killer

I don't know if you believe in destiny. I don't, unless I really want something to happen and when it happens, I retcon my life history to conveniently make me deserving of it. My first thought when I heard about the AT Protocol was "wait, what? Can you repeat that?". The second was "This is destined to kill Amazon".

I know, I know... it was built with a focus on social experiences. One advantage of not being the dev™ of an atmosphere project is that I get to be the delusional one who thinks of ever-exponentially-more-complex experiences with zero regard for the practical applications of my delusions (I have coding skills though. They just go to another school). But before we get to those, a lesson on the importance of being a hater:

We could host a bingo of reasons to hate on Amazon, but the OG one is their relentless pursuit of extracting every cent they can from their competitors (Bezos has famously been quoted ad nauseam with the aphorism "Your margin is my opportunity", then seen as cheeky and business-savvy instead of the sociopathic behaviour indicator it actually is). If Google still worked, I'd tell you to search the myriad of articles detailing how Amazon undercuts profits of its sellers, pits them against each other, weaponizes the data from sales to produce its own competing products and then leverages its monopolistic control of its algorithm and platform to boost them; drives local businesses into bankruptcy, etc etc etc.

Yanis Varoufakis said it best in his book "Technofeudalism". He describes Amazon not as a market but rather:

"A digital fief [...] A post-capitalist one, whose historical roots remain in feudal Europe but whose integrity is maintained today by a futuristic dystopian type of cloud-based capital."

Ok, cool, so what does it have to do with my cool semi-cultish nerd hobby?

The end of Amazon's supremacy cannot come from the current wall-street thinking and practices. The idea that someone can create a competing shopping platform that plays within the same rules of data concentration and extraction, get some VC funding and eventually grow it to become a true Amazon-killer is implausible due to the exact same monopolistic tendencies of unchecked capital, intrinsic to this type of thinking, that have enabled Amazon to be what it is nowadays.

I'd be remiss to ignore that there have been projects that tried to take shots at all-powerful Jeff. Mostly local initiatives, driven by values and community-building. Although they represent steps in the right direction, they are not enough to deliver a blow to the eye of the giant. A proper response needs to be focused on rebalancing the distribution of power in a way that favours merchants and gives shoppers more options (and maybe leads to drivers not having to pee in bottles. Oh God, this is the bad place!).

This is where the AT Protocol comes in. There aren't many world-famous forests with names as cool as Amazon, so I picked the Taiga forest. Let's talk about how Taiga could work:

1 - End of the storefront monopoly

This one's the no-brainer. Merchants publish their listings, anyone who wants to create a store with a specific experience in mind can showcase the products. The true differentiator becomes the experience given to the shoppers.

2 - Merchants self-verify via their domains

With added layers of verification being given on a store-by-store basis according to store reputation and other specific criteria.

3 - Custom algorithmic surfacing of products

Imagine two stores: "Cheapass" and "Buylocal". One uses a feed that reads from all available products and displays them in a ranking based on a calculation of price and store reputation. The other filters out all the product knockoffs and returns only options from local merchants.

4 - Democratization of Third-Party Logistics

The protocol itself becomes a 4th-party logistics provider. Warehousing, shipping and last-mile providers have access to the data and can bid directly on the delivery of goods.

There's much more that can be done, but you've got the picture.

But not all is sunshine and cheap imported Bandai Namco Son Goku figures...

Ok, time to be a party pooper. We can't talk shopping on the platform without talking permissioned data. I'll leave the details to the more technical folk (what? I said in the second paragraph that I do that kind of shit) but the reality is that shoppers don't want the details of their purchases publicized. There are people working on this dilemma already (see atmosphere.money). With the eventual prod release of spaces, we might see this issue solved.

Another problem to be solved is how to handle mismatches between available product inventory, publicized inventory across all the different storefronts, returns, canceled orders and updated quantities.

Solving these issues and coming up with a standard.commerce might be the biggest legacy of the atmosphere. It has the potential to inject investment into local businesses, create jobs and level the playing field. It is certainly not going to be an easy task, but I believe it's the closest we've ever got to a plausible shot at dismantling the Amazon supremacy (not Alibaba though. They're huge, we are fucked).

At last, I leave you with an image of the Taiga biome.