Amazon annual revenue

Few correlations are as pointedly unflattering as this one: Amazon's revenue and the share of Americans who doubt the Earth is round grew together between 2011 and 2022 (r = 0.960), a kind of pact between commerce and epistemology that nobody signed. One company delivered everything within two days; it turns out it also delivered some things we'd rather it hadn't.

Amazon's net revenue climbed from $48 billion in 2011 to over $514 billion in 2022, riding Prime, AWS, and the inexorable logic of free shipping; the share of Americans telling pollsters they suspect the Earth is flat rose from under 1% to roughly 2% (with 'not sure' climbing higher), according to YouGov. The real engine of both is the same: the internet's ability to deliver exactly what a person wants, whether that's 40-roll toilet paper or videos of people arguing that the horizon curves. A 2019 Texas Tech study found that over 80% of surveyed flat-earthers had arrived at the belief via YouTube's recommendation algorithm, which is, somewhat poetically, hosted on the same kind of cloud infrastructure Amazon pioneered.

One empire delivered knowledge to every door. Knowledge didn't always stick the landing.