Logs and Hacks: Amazon, Surveillance, and Hacking as Epistemic Practice

Abstract

This article examines how artistic interventions expose and contest Amazon’s entanglement with surveillance, platform capitalism, and the politics of data. Focusing on Ring™ Log (2019) by Mark Sample and Dear Jeff Bezos (2013) by Johannes P Osterhoff, I analyze how these works use speculative and hacktivist tactics to reveal the ideological programs embedded in Amazon’s products and services. Sample’s piece stages a parody of automated neighborhood surveillance through pseudo-logs of Ring smart doorbells, foregrounding how machine vision and language transform everyday life into exportable incident data. Osterhoff’s performative work turns a hacked Kindle into a device that emails reading activity directly to Amazon’s CEO, thus exaggerating and exposing the invisible data extraction mechanisms in proprietary e-readers. Read together, these works illustrate a defiant, procedural critique that not only denounces digital surveillance but re-enacts its logics from within. Situating these interventions in relation to Amazon’s broader infrastructural power —shaping the corporate web through innovations such as recommendation algorithms and cloud computing services— I argue that hacking emerges as more than resistance: it is an epistemic practice, a way of knowing and making visible the extractivist logic of commercial technologies as they conquer our daily lives.