Jeff Bezos Archives - Public Seminar

Habitats

Some Notes on the Earth Seen From Space

We have turned the sky into a mirror of our persistence and our forgetting

February 4, 2026 • by Laurie Sheck

1. It has been almost 58 years since astronaut William Anders lifted his Hasselblad camera toward the window of Apollo 8 and captured the now-iconic image of Earth hovering beyond the gray, desolate edge of the moon, blue-white and small and fragile, hanging in the pure blackness of space. How beautiful ...

Interviews

The Promise and Perils of Life in Outer Space

A conversation with architect Fred Scharmen

April 19, 2022 • by Emma Celebrezze and Fred Scharmen

I got really obsessed with these paintings from a NASA project that was about designing giant, free-floating, spinning cities to orbit Earth. I decided to take them seriously as real proposals that were in the lineage of architecture and urban design. What I found was that far from being this ...

The Promise and Perils of Life in Outer Space

Corporations

Amazon Extracts Billions from Communities Globally

March 21, 2022 • by Kenneth Thomas

Last month, UNI Global Union and my organization Good Jobs First released a report detailing the subsidies Amazon.com, Inc. has gotten around the world. I was the lead author of the study. Months of research by our multi-lingual team found that the company has received at least $4.7 billion....

Amazon Extracts Billions from Communities Globally

Democracy

Expanding Democratic Ownership

The ownership model of the public corporation should no longer be the aspiration for startups in the digital economy

January 14, 2021 • by Trebor Scholz

In August 2019, a group of 200 chief executive officers of major U.S. corporations, calling themselves the Business Roundtable, issued a statement committing to invest in their employees, compensating them fairly, and providing benefits. They also committed to fostering diversity, and inclusion, dignity, and respect. And this was newsworthy given ...

Capitalism

Can We Trust Monopolies to Play Fair?

Current debates on Big Tech and antitrust law lack a clear definition of “competition”

October 19, 2020 • by Sandeep Vaheesan

----- For the anti-monopoly movement, the past three months have been exciting but sobering. In late July, the House Antitrust Subcommittee held a landmark hearing at which members of Congress forced the CEOs of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google to admit to business practices they would rather have stayed private. Amazon ...

Activism

Americans Have Been in the Streets for Almost Ten Years

The legacies and lessons of Occupy Wall Street, the Women’s Resistance, and Black Lives Matter

June 11, 2020 • by Peter Dreier

In his call with governors on June 1, President Donald Trump said the current protests are “like a movement, and it’s a movement that if you don’t put it down, it’ll get worse and worse. This is like Occupy Wall Street.” Astonishingly, like that broken clock that is correct twice a ...

Americans Have Been in the Streets for Almost Ten Years

Feature

Cardi B, Jeff Bezos, and Lyndon LaRouche

Past Present Episode 167

February 19, 2019 • by Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, Nicole Hemmer and Neil J. Young

In this episode, Niki, Neil, and Natalia discuss the celebrity of Cardi B, Jeff Bezos’ “below-the-belt selfie,” and the death of Lyndon LaRouche. Here are some links and references mentioned during this week’s show: Cardi B became the first woman to win the Grammy Award for Best Hip-Hop Album, and she’s been a ...

Cardi B, Jeff Bezos, and Lyndon LaRouche

Economy

Think Outside the Boss

Cooperative alternatives to the sharing economy

April 5, 2015 • by Trebor Scholz

Digital labor touches all of us, whether you are browsing Tinder profiles in your spare time, searching for “Jersey Shore” on Google, or ordering an Uber taxi.

In this afternoon’s talk, I will highlight what is and what could be successful about 21st century work and what are some tendencies that ...

Uncategorized

The Politics of the Sharing Economy

June 30, 2014 • by Trebor Scholz

“As best we can tell, the politics of the venture capital elite boils down to fending off higher taxes, keeping labor costs low and reducing the 'burden' of government regulation. … Silicon Valley could start by putting a stop to pretending that the sharing economy is about anything other than ...

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