Author: John Herrman / Source: New York Times
A U.P.S. driver once said the house set his delivery record: 32 packages in one day. There have been bigger days since, and the burden is now spread across three carriers. Most of it falls to the local postal carriers. They used to make the rounds in a sedan until the sheer volume of packages delivered up the hill each week required them to upgrade to a truck.
The boxes have slowed lately, but something arrives almost every day.The boxes crowd the porch — this is up in a tranquil stretch of the Blue Ridge Mountains — before gradually making their way inside, past the patio table, which came from a box, and its four chairs, from boxes all. The living room was largely furnished from the boxes: a couch, an end table, rugs, the love seat. In the bedroom, the boxes account for artwork, linens, a clothes rack, the mattress and several pillows, of course. The extra window unit air-conditioners: white boxes from brown boxes. The kitchen is stocked from the flow of boxes — the knife block, the espresso machine, the convection oven — as are the home’s closets.
The office is almost all box — furniture, printers (regular and 3-D), computer, at least 13 hard drives and four routers. The art on the walls came this way; the new shelves installed to store the items from the porch boxes came through porch boxes. The camera system through which the porch boxes are surveilled was itself unpacked from a porch box. The worry is thieves, though the camera mostly catches wildlife: rabbits, turkeys and mice, with an elk every once in a while, and, so far, one coyote and a bear.
K.T., 54, shares this home, and these boxes, with her husband and two dogs. She’s a volunteer animal rescue transport driver and a former proofreader, but now much of her time and attention is devoted to box intake and processing. She does most of her shopping online, she said; the nearest town only has about a thousand residents, and it’s usually more convenient to order. That, and the fact the vast majority of these boxes arrive free of charge courtesy of Amazon itself.
K.T. is an Amazon “Vine Voice.” Amazon sends her free stuff; she, as an established and trusted reviewer, tests it out and writes reviews. During a recent gathering she joked with family that her spouse was wearing Vine socks, Vine jeans, a Vine shirt, Vine underwear, and had on Vine cologne. There are thousands of Vine Voices, but K.T. is almost certainly among the most prolific. Over the years, she has passed in and out of Amazon’s overall Top 100 reviewer rankings. The Times agreed to not identify her. For Vine reviewers, identifying information — names, email addresses, websites — can be construed as a solicitation for free products from non-Vine sources, which Amazon can decide is grounds for removal from the program.
And K.T. takes her responsibilities seriously, dedicating time to each new item that emerges from the boxes and writing reviews that are succinct but complete. She helps run an online community for other Vine Voices — there’s another Viner in her town; she traveled out of state to meet the co-moderator of her community, whom she considers a close friend — and has reshaped her life around the program. “It’s only been about three years,” she said, “so I’m sort of new.”
The Secrets of Stuff
If you invested $5,000 in Amazon in August of 2007, when Vine was announced, your stock would now be worth more than $100,000. If, instead, you had started reviewing your Amazon purchases, built a reputation as a reliable reviewer, secured an invite to the Vine program, kept your head down, filed your assignments and avoided the occasional purges of reviewers, your take-home total might today exceed that number, although in somewhat less liquid forms: five vacuums here; 14 hard drives there; some laptops and cellphones; Bluetooth speakers, and headphones, and headsets, and, well, pretty much anything with Bluetooth, so much Bluetooth, mouthful after mouthful of blue teeth.
The program was intended, in the company’s telling, to help its vendors “generate awareness for new and prerelease products” by “connecting them with the voice of the Amazon community.” Then, as now, but especially then, the Amazon reviewer community was at turns close-knit and competitive.
“Being part of the Vine program at the very beginning gave me a sense of duty,” said Diana de Avila, who had already been writing Amazon reviews since the mid ’90s. “I thought, oh my gosh, this large, emerging company is just growing by leaps and bounds, and they wanted me to be part of this apparatus,” she said.
In 2007 it was, as apparatuses go, primitive. On the third Thursday of each month, Ms. de Avila would take a seat at her computer a little before 3 p.m. and start refreshing, knowing that around the country, other Viners were doing the same. A monthly list would be posted to an internal portal and go out in an email as well. There might be a dozen items, each in limited quantities. The lists were heavy on books at first. Many of them would be gone in seconds, she remembered, and there were often technical difficulties. “That was the excitement of it,” she said.
“I was pretty quick at the draw, so I got some pretty good stuff,” Ms. de Avila said. “I got multiple cameras, video cameras, probably more than a dozen.”
Users could then go to a special Vine-only forum on Amazon’s site and discuss what they’d gotten. It was a fairly small world — there weren’t very many products or very many reviewers and also there were limits on how many users could claim. The forum thrived and suffered in ways that were characteristic of online communities of the time: There were habitual posters, show-offs, trolls and critics, and of course a steady supply of know-nothing newbies, newly invited by Amazon. The company itself was nearly silent: Aside from occasional announcements and necessary interventions, it left the forum to the Vine reviewers. “I sometimes think that maybe Amazon was reading,” Ms. de Avila said.
The program swelled in both membership and inventory. A monthly email from 2011, for example, contained over 400 items, including a baby food maker, a line of Taco Bell sauces, a package of sticky notes, a dispenser for sticky notes, a few wall mounts for TVs and books, lots of books. The letters “USB” appear 42 times.
Vine was a relic of an older web for a long time. Email newsletters! User forums! But in 2016, the service received a substantial overhaul. The emails and posts were replaced with a pair of feeds: One was targeted to each individual Vine user, based on preferences and shopping habits, and the other was visible to everyone. Old limits were lifted: You could now review as many products as you wanted.
In 2015, Amazon had begun asking Vine reviewers for their tax information, which meant that, over a certain value, Vine products were no longer free, really. Review products count as income; their tax value, as calculated by Amazon, can be a major factor in which products Vine reviewers choose to have delivered. The most prolific reviewers have tax burdens in the tens of thousands of dollars. There are rules, loosely enforced but taken seriously. Amazon-branded products belong to you immediately; other products can be recalled up to six months later, and therefore can’t be sold or given away. (This rarely happens, if ever. The boldest Viners sell products right away, while some become extremely generous with charity. A super-Viner almost doesn’t have a choice, for space reasons alone.)
“We ask Vine Voices not to resell products for six months,” Angie Newman, an Amazon spokeswoman, said in an email. “After that, the product is theirs and they can use it or dispose of it as they see fit.”
Many donate enough to alleviate their tax burdens, but no more, so as not to attract the wrong kind of attention to their arrangements, unique as they are, and lacking anything in the way of guidance from Amazon itself.
Now Vine was recreated in the image of the internet around it — an internet of interminable feeds and customized content, an endless space that can be checked and rechecked but never quite finished, demanding as much as you’re willing to give it. If Facebook’s feed let you gorge on birth announcements and conspiracy theories, and Instagram’s on photos of dogs and, I guess, mimetic desire, Vine’s feed — similarly aware of your habits and always refreshed — opened the door to actual things, distributed in the manner of content.
Inside the Big Mystery Box
While most of us experience Amazon’s surveillance with a mixture of annoyance and bemusement — you are never allowed to forget what items you’ve looked at on Amazon, at least not until you buy them — Vine reviewers have learned to exploit it. “You can try to signal to it,” K.T. said. “I searched for drones, hoping they would show up in my targeting.” (No luck yet.) Sometimes Vine’s behaviors give the impression of something far less intelligent: Some Viners described getting clothing in more-or-less “random” sizes.
In 2017, Amazon removed the Vine discussion forums from its site; Amazon didn’t share its reasons with Vine reviewers. (Logged-in reviewers still see a link to the forums on their profiles, but it leads nowhere.) To the extent there is a coherent Vine community still, it is spread across multiple private groups on Goodreads, the book review site owned by Amazon, and smaller communities further afield, on Reddit and Craigslist. They are throwbacks to the old Vine, and the old web: There are groups and splinter groups, cross-forum enemies, reputations and rivalries.
Mostly, though, the forums serve the same needs that the old official forum did. They’re a place where people who are part of this odd program that they’re…
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