Clodagh Finn: Jeff Bezos built his big space dream on the work of the 'little' people

It’s up to us to think about who benefits when we click and buy. We might not be able to stop the billionaire space odyssey, but we don’t have to help finance it.

A year-long study of one of Jeff Bezos' Amazon warehouses by the New York Times, found that their system “burned through workers, resulted in inadvertent firings and stalled benefits, and impeded communication”. Photo: AP/Tony Gutierrez

What was most unsettling about Jeff Bezos’s 11-minute journey to the edge of space was not that the world’s richest man was joyriding while planet earth burned below, or even that he did so in a phallic rocket, but that he thanked ‘us’ — Amazon customers — for paying for it.

And which one of us hasn’t been an Amazon customer at one point or another?