#Amazonfail

Most of you will have noticed the furor on Twitter, and elsewhere, which was linked to the #amazonfail tag. I don't need to describe what happened because the BBC have some reportage here.

What I'm interested in is: do we dare call it Conspiracy?

Well, no. From my position inside Tinfoil Hat Central (a bunker deep in the desert), I'm pretty sure it wasn't.

For one thing, people have a tendency to trust technology when they absolutely shouldn't. It very often does exactly what we tell it to, which is why the IT industry coined terms like PEBKAC and the infamous ID-ten-T error. It is remarkably easy to screw up even the simplest set of instructions and take out your own website. How easy? Forgetting which naming convention is important for your webserver, for one. Like if your webhost runs 'nix servers and you built your website in a Windows product, and save the opening page as "Index.html". 'nix is case sensitive, so if all the other references to your index page are for "index.html", it won't show up. It's the simplest error in the world.

Something of that magnitude, a cockup that looks like a conspiracy, happened to Amazon. I'd put money on it. Human error is so very much more likely than Amazon trying to sneak a bit of censorship past us; for one thing, it failed immediately. For another, had this been a deliberate policy by Amazon.com they must have realised on some level that they were lining themselves up for an online arse-kicking. They must have known that an issue like this wouldn't simply blow over. Right now, one imagines, they are feverishly trying to sort out whether the guy who made the goof is a malicious twat or just phenomenally unlucky.

Of course, the stigma of Conspiracy simply won't go away. People have already concluded that Amazon tried to slip a piece of grim behaviour past them and their perceptions will not be changed unless Amazon does something to placate them. The thing is, there isn't anything that Amazon can do.

If I'm right and it's a cock-up, they've already owned up to it. No more need be said.

If I'm wrong and it was the failed implimentation of a draconian anti-GLBT policy, it crashed spectacularly and there's no way they can say sorry.

My own feeling is this: no matter what the cause, support your local bookshops. Go and buy books from shops, make friends with the staff and if you have a local bookshop that isn't part of a chain, cherish it, love it and spend lots of money there. Then you won't have to worry about what Amazon are doing, a group of people you know will be more than happy to order you any book you might want to read.