Quick! Name a market category that Amazon doesn’t have its hands in.

Okay, fine, they, thankfully, discontinued the Fire Phone. And yes, maybe you came up with something else, but odds are that that category is either already dominated by some other evil oligopoly or that there will soon be an Amazon Basics version of it. Amazon’s reach is enormous. AWS cloud hosting has 34% of the market share (~9 million live websites). 4.1% of all consumer goods are sold on amazon dot com, 11.3% of books are bought for Kindle,* there’s probably an Alexa or two in your home, or maybe a Ring doorbell on your door. Look outside and count the number of Amazon boxes in sight.

Plenty of others have written all about the evils of Amazon’s extensive tendrils. I will add only one more here: as a software engineer, some mornings I struggle to navigate a horribly designed user interface in the AWS console, and then, breaking for lunch, I struggle with the horribly designed user interface of my Whole Foods red pepper flakes. The holes in the top are smaller than the flakes!

The recently released Season 3** of “The Boys” on Amazon Prime does an excellent job of highlighting the dangers of an all-powerful, all-encompassing, tendril-y evil monopoly. The evil dealings of the Vought Corporation and its employees are broadcast to the public on the Vought News Network. Hughie and co. plot against the Vought CEO using their Vought phones. Everyone drinks Vought branded plastic water bottles. The show almost, almost seems to understand the irony.

But then, die-hard, down-with-Vought-even-no-especially-if-it-kills-me Billy Butcher orders a present for his sort-of adopted “nephew” on… Amazon! In the writers’ defense, maybe they wanted this scene to reflect the way that many people would buy Connect 4 today. But, really, this scene shrieks of weird, self-indulging product placement. For a show whose central theme is the corruption and evilness of a corporation to portray the use of technology from an evil, corrupt company without any comment is hard to understand, until you realize that it’s the very same company producing the show. It makes the criticism of Vought fall a bit flat.

Before this scene, it’s easy to imagine that Vought is a satirical stand-in for Amazon: evil mega-corporation, check; run by an egotistical bald man, check; has deep, questionable ties with the federal government, check; sells everything, check; promotes its image through its own movie and television studios, check; frequently causes people to die horrible, bloody deaths, check? But then Butcher uses Amazon, so it also exists in this world and, unbelievably, hasn’t gotten into the unethical business of manufacturing supes. Imagine how much more efficient its warehouses would be with Temp-V-ed up Fulfillment Associates!