 Nine days after Richard Branson's first flight to the edge of space, Jeff Bezos has left and returned to the Earth's stratosphere. Bezos' company Blue Origin, Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic and Elon Musk's SpaceX are all hoping to launch a new space tourism industry. And these two flights are just two small steps in that direction. We're going to focus on Bezos' flight. So the run up to that launch, to my mind, was particularly dystopian. Let's take a look at a TV anchor for over the world's richest man as he prepares to take off in his penis shaped rocket. I'm excited. You know, people keep asking if I'm nervous. I'm not really nervous. You're not. Jeff, Jeff, Jeff. I'm curious. Jeff, you're not nervous. I want to know what we're going to learn. Wait, Jeff, Jeff, back up a second. You're not, how is that possible, Jeff? I'm sitting here in New York and I'm nervous. How are you not nervous? None of us are nervous. We're excited. We've been training. This vehicle is ready. This crew is ready. This team is amazing. We just feel really good about it. How Dr. Riva was that? I mean, that phase, that love. I mean, he clearly has had lots of filler. The whole thing is surreal. We're going to now look at the penis rocket taking off. D minus 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4. Command engine start. 2, 1. Go, Jeff. Go, Mark. Go, Wally. Go, Oliver. You are going for space. That was the lift off. We can take a look at where the rocket went. This is a graphic from the BBC that shows the phases of the flight. So you can see here phase one, which is what we just watched. The capsule and the booster takeoff vertically. So that's this very powerful rocket getting it super high. Then when it is super high, this is the technical term. The capsule separates and that's 76 kilometers above Earth and then continues to about 106 kilometers above Earth. Now apparently people consider space to be 100 kilometers above Earth. That's called the Karman line. So once it gets up there, then it's got to get back and the booster, that's the big rocket underneath it, that gets back and lands two miles from the launch pad and the capsule parachutes back to the desert floor. All very interesting. All also a little bit grotesque, I think. Space tourism, if it does take off, will obviously be a preoccupation of only the super, super rich. A seat on the first flight with Bezos sold for $28 million. It turned out actually the guy had double booked, so he had to postpone his first flight. The seat was taken by an 18-year-old. It's also probably not what we need when it comes to global warming. Now Bezos' rocket is powered by liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, so it doesn't have direct carbon emissions. It could be a lot worse, but creating those fuels does have emissions and even water vapor, which is what those fuels release, creates global warming close to the stratosphere because it hangs around there for ages. Richard Branson, who I mentioned in the introduction, his rocket is much worse environmentally because it's a hybrid, so half of it's powered by carbon fuels. That's apparently 60 times more carbon-intensive per person than a long-haul flight. So while we're dealing with this problem of how do we limit or regulate normal air travel between countries, which is often socially useful, really difficult conversation, now we're going to have to do the same thing for the super rich flying around in space. Now Bezos has a defense when it comes to the environmental impact of his rockets. He says, we need to take all heavy industry, all polluting industry, and move it into space and keep Earth as this beautiful gem of a planet that it is. It's going to take decades and decades to achieve, but you have to start, and big things start with small steps. That's what this sub-orbital tourism mission allows us to do. It allows us to practice over and over. Now the argument there is on one level coherent. He's saying, you might not think that the super rich flying to just a little bit out of the stratosphere so they can look back at the curvature of the Earth. It's a particularly socially useful thing to do, but it is this consumer product that is going to allow us to perfect the technology that will then mean we can do these solely useful things, such as move heavy industry to out of space. The part that I don't get from that, maybe I'm not a good enough physicist or maybe it doesn't make sense, is how would heavy industry in the outer space work because the heavy industry is inherently heavy. You're going to get the raw material for steel, land it on the moon or a space station, then smelt it and everything, and then drop loads of steel down in parachutes to the desert. I don't really get it. Dahlia, I don't know if you're an expert when it comes to space travel, but do you think the environmental story for why this makes sense when it comes to climate change, does it stack up for you? What is socially valuable about this? That is just the central myth of capitalism, right? Like that we need the profit incentive, we need power and wealth and resources to be centralized amongst a tiny few because that will trickle down to everyone else, right? And that somehow the only way that the little people can have good things or have a chance of experiencing a good life is if they're trickled down on by people who are inherently better than them. We know that that's not true. When it comes to technological innovation, technological advances, the most revolutionary tech advances tend to actually be the ones that are funded and resourced by the public sector and made for the public, like things like the light bulb, things like the worldwide web are perfect examples of this. Whereas the kinds of technological advances that are made in the private sphere are things like the difference between the iPhone 8 and the iPhone 8 Plus or nifty new surveillance technologies that you can use to monitor whether or not your workers are slacking for like a minute so that you can deduct that from their paycheck. And this whole saying like, let's leave the planet as it is. Like if a seven-year-old said that, if a seven-year-old said, let's solve climate, why don't we solve climate change by just hurling carbon-intensive industries into space, we would find it adorable and we'd laugh. But because it is laughable, but because it's being said by Jeff Bezos, we're all being forced to take this seriously and talk about it rather than actually talking about and implementing the real genuine solutions for climate change. First of all, the economies and infrastructures that are created by companies like Amazon are directly part of the problem when it comes to climate breakdown as is the lifestyles of someone like Jeff Bezos of the ultra-rich. And the idea that we can, while this seems super ridiculous, there is still the underlying logic of what he's saying is actually incredibly prevalent amongst climate policy makers, amongst governments, which is this idea that we can solve the systemic problem of climate breakdown by just continuing as we are and hoping for some kind of magical one-stop-shop tech fix. And sometimes it sounds as fanciful and ridiculous as this. Sometimes it's something like carbon capture, which is this idea that we'll have the technology to suck all the carbon out of the air by the time it gets too bad, which obviously it already is getting bad. And it's a perfect example of, much actually like the vaccine passport, I would argue, a way of dealing with crisis that does everything that it possibly can to evade the systemic and obvious solutions that lie in front of our very eyes in order to go for the most exploitative and the solutions that most entrench the existing inequalities that we have and actually using that crisis that is a symptom of the system that we exist in as an excuse to re-entrench that system. The investment of, Kate Crawford writes about this really chillingly. I remember reading this earlier this year and being like, and now that I'm seeing all this, it's kind of digging a lot of bells, where the investment of Silicon Valley billionaires of the ultra-rich into space travel is part of a genuine sort of judgment that a lot of the ultra-rich have actually made, which is that Earth is kind of done. Like they kind of look at, you know, have quite a good understanding of climate breakdown. It's kind of the sense that, you know, Earth is kind of doomed, so let's sort of figure out where we can go when and what we can do and how we can deal with things when shit hits the fan. And, you know, as fanciful as that sounds, I don't think it quite works like that, but as fanciful as it sounds, it kind of tells us about the ideological framework that these people are operating in and the extent of the them, us kind of, you know, the little people versus us who need to be protected and who kind of deserve to have access to all these technologies that are going to keep us safe as, you know, we experience planetary crises, much like the COVID crisis over and over again. It kind of makes me think sometimes about how, you know, despite Silicon Valley, despite it clearly not being possible, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and, you know, elites will talk about, you know, automating the entire workforce, you know, the Uber CEO has poured loads of money into trying to come up with driverless cars and realizing that actually like no one actually can operate a taxi system and no one can actually replace the knowledge and the sort of instincts and the embodied understanding of their job, the way that an Uber driver can. But if we take the fanciful sci-fi to one side, it actually gives us an insight into the ideological framework that these entrepreneurs are operating in. So for in that example, okay, they can't abolish the worker, but everything that they're doing is still looking towards abolishing the worker as a human being. So if we can't actually replace all workers with robots, let's just slowly figure out a way to just treat human workers like robots anyway. And ironically, it's not to come full circle, the way that Amazon workers are treated is sort of the most pristine example of where we can't automate, we will simply just dehumanize. The other reason why this is all a bit grotesque is because of how Jeff Bezos got rich, how he is able to afford this. And in fact, he made a joke after the launch about this. It's gone down like a cup of cold sick. I also want to think every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer, because you guys paid for all this. So seriously, for every Amazon customer out there and every Amazon employee, thank you from the bottom of my heart very much. Now, there was a lot of chummy laughter in that room. I imagine no one invited to that briefing has ever pissed in a bottle or shat in a carrier bag because they had to deliver so many parcels. They didn't have time to stop for the toilet. That anecdote is one from a driver or a bunch of drivers from Amazon. We're going to go through some of the ways in which Amazon workers have paid for Jeff Bezos to go into outer space because he's collecting their surplus labor. He's exploiting them. And boy, does he know how to do it. I mentioned the drivers who are treated appallingly apparently. This is from the BBC. They reported in 2018 the number of parcels drivers had to deliver meant they worked over the 11-hour limit for drivers. So that's the law. So they don't crash into anyone. And as wages were a flat rate, they ended up being paid practically below the minimum wage. Drivers also told the BBC to meet their targets. They would regularly have to break the speed limit. So endangering themselves and others and would resort to peeing in bottles and defecating in carrier bags. That is not the end of shoddy workplace practices. When it comes to Amazon, they have been taken to court by multiple women in the United States who have said Amazon failed to accommodate them once they became pregnant. Now, most of those cases were settled out of court. That's often what will happen with a huge company like this. I'm sure there were NDAs signed. The way they keep it this way, what does the boss want to do if they want to exploit their work? Because if they want to extract as much value from them as possible so that they can ultimately fly off into outer space, well, they have to be viciously anti-union. And Amazon very much fulfills that role in 2001. 850 employees in Seattle were laid off by Amazon after a unionization drive and they continue to spend millions on PR to fight unionization in the US. In the US, you have a vote in a workplace as to whether to unionize slightly different to in the UK. Dahlia, do you think it will be any consolation to those workers who've peed in bottles and shat in bags and lost their jobs because they got pregnant? Their exploitation has led to this man to have enough money to fly himself into outer space. The stuff of science fiction, right? It's so dystopian. And I mean, of course not. And the media is so compliant in allowing this cult of the Silicon Valley billionaire to be sort of promoted uncritically, you know, from Elon Musk being hailed as a savior for providing ventilators during the pandemic, which it turns out they weren't actually ventilators and there were barely any of them anyway. To, you know, Jeff Bezos being portrayed as some, you know, he's so rich because he's just such a genius and such a forward thinker, rather than there's just no bottom that he's willing to kind of hit when it comes to workers' rights and the dehumanization of workers. And I think it's so, you know, and you can see the compliancy in the kind of media through the way that they're laughing and the way that, you know, these, the journalists have been treating and talking about and approaching him when interviewing him about this kind of fake space travel because they didn't go to space. They went in a really high plane. I just want to kind of point that out. But it's ironic that, you know, Bezos himself, who in his own sort of delusion of how much he can get away with actually said what journalists who interview him are probably too afraid to say to him, which is that Amazon workers from, you know, warehouse workers to delivery workers who are, as I said before, treated like machines who are precarious, who are monitored and surveilled and disciplined to the most invasive degree who are, you know, those are the ones that create Bezos' wealth, not him. And, you know, that wealth generation, not, it's not incidental. Wealth generation to that degree relies on those very conditions. Those aren't sort of bugs. They're not accidents. They're not just sort of lack of optimization. That's actually, you know, the very conditions that are necessary in order to produce the wealth generation that someone like Jeff Bezos is able to accumulate. One doesn't happen without the other. And yeah, if you were to watch the footage from this coverage, you know, you would think that this was just, you know, the most genius man who, you know, has developed some kind of incredible technology that has solved all of humanity's problems and not touched a fly or harmed a fly in the process of it. And now, you know, as a reward for that, he gets to fly into space. That's obviously not what is happening. But one thing that you won't hear and one person that won't be interviewed are those very Amazon workers who are peeing in bottles. And even if they're not peeing in bottles, who are in their everyday working conditions, being treated like robots, being treated like less than human. Those are the voices that you won't hear in this kind of celebration of the Silicon Valley billionaire cult.