Rocketman Jeff Bezos (Image: EPA/Blue Origin handout)

On July 20, Jeff Bezos, the centibillionaire founder of Amazon, will be shot into space with five other people, including his brother, in a rocket launched by his space exploration company, Blue Horizon. The journey is nothing more than a parabolic shot — up and then down — and is timed to take 11 minutes.

Hopefully it will take less time than that, because if all goes well Jeff Bezos will explode in space.

Well, not in space — it would have to be mid-atmosphere, oxygen supply and all that. Hopefully it would occur well clear of the launch site. Should it happen, it will be sad about the other five people, but they’d never know what happened (narrator: they’d survive and burn up on re-entry… so, no) when Jeff Bezos exploded in space.

Let me be clear about my desire for Jeff Bezos to explode in space. I do not want Jeff Bezos to be shot down in space. I do not believe in the politics of assassination, even if you could get a commercial surface-to-air missile launcher from Bunnings. Still, I’ll probably get an AFP visit.

There would be no political point in blowing up Jeff Bezos in space. You can’t blow up a social relationship, as the anarchists say. It has to be an act by the universe, a punishment for hubris by nature indifferent to human desire, a brute way of bringing a man in the clouds back down to Earth. In many thousand tiny pieces.

Even then, his boosters — the ones that didn’t blow up, at least — would say that it was a form of blessing, fragments of Bezosite showering over us, imparting his entrepreneurial acumen to all, mandrakes growing where lands the dejecta of his big space spooge.

When I think about my fervent desire for Jeff Bezos to explode in space, I note that I have no desire for Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google to blow up in space. I don’t even want Bill Gates to blow up in space, even though he’s a sinister megalomaniac on another level from the trifling Bezos.

Zuckerberg? Like everyone, I’d like to see him cored, ass first, by a Florida alligator coming out of a toilet, having been disposed of there as a baby pet. Blowing up in space is too noble for Zuckerberg.

Richard Branson? The gurning clown whose life’s ambition was to slap his brand on everything from planes to clear cola? Blow up in space? He wishes.

Finally, I can’t work out how I feel about Elon Musk, though he’s the closest to being a gilded-age villain of the lot, scion of a white South African emerald-mine-owning family. But he does make stuffy-type stuff happen, like electric motors and big batteries, so there’s a Bolshevik touch to him. A techno-fascist one too, but the political perineum is thin between those two.

I also note that I think things like parties to celebrate Margaret Thatcher’s death are pathetic — losers’ balls held after an enemy has become frail and harmless and still victorious over us.

No, it has to be Bezos. His sudden giant fireworks display would be a death befitting a pharaoh, and act as a counterbalance to the baleful effect of Amazon on the world, its ever-greater extension of buying and selling into the deeper corners of our life.

That is why all these types go after the space “exploration” thing: a material correlate of some sort of divine transcendence, per ardua ad astra and all that, to counterbalance a life in the muck of commerce going on below. Nor do I see this as the politics of class envy, etc. Bezos owns a slice of Amazon, the company he founded with nothing but that famous paper sign and folding desk in the corner of an office — oh, and the $300,000 he got from the bank of mum and dad.

He essentially owns a share in a new mode of human interaction, the way Standard Oil’s John D Rockefeller once owned an entire new mode of human energy use.

Bezos, in some ways, can be compared to a state bureaucrat who controls a whole department (in the way that Forbes magazine, during the Cold War, used to list Castro, Brezhnev, etc as multibillionaires because of the resources under their command).

Bezos and others’ vast wealth, or the claim of it, is used by elements of the left to rally activism, but in this they conspire with capitalism’s overvaluation of itself. Wealth is a projection into the future of continued control of a slice of capital, and the dividends accruing therefrom. But the numbers flying around are taken by the public to be liquid wealth.

Bezos’s liquid wealth, what he could get tomorrow in cash, is still pretty eye-watering, around 4-8% of his stated wealth — say, $10 billion. He could buy 10,000 houses in $1 million median-price Melbourne (or 17 in Sydney).

The wealth of humanity lies overwhelmingly in “public plant”. These private space explorations demonstrate that — they’re tin-pot rocket shoots that NASA, etc would have done as test launches. Bezos’s parabolic trip describes the shape of a big zero, gravity’s rainbow.

The tech billionaires, inventors or financiers, have taken a slice of new forms of human sociality — Google is the search capacity of connected computing circa 1998 augmented; Facebook arises from a level of connectivity emerging at a certain stage of Moore’s law progression, etc. All of it is built on (among other things) the enclosure of a free good — Tim Berners-Lee’s unpatented world wide web.

In the case of Bezos and Amazon, that has involved a vast extension of low-wage dehumanising Taylorism extended to the retail sphere; workers as warehouse meatbots, chivvied into inhuman endurance tasks with inspirational messaging, something even Henry Ford wasn’t arsehole enough to do.

The workers are another counterpart to Bezos’s spaceflight; their total unfreedom on a shift is the means by which Bezos gets to explore new existential possibilities of human liberty.

But as Amazon and other privatised dimensions of life expand towards total coverage, their inherently public and collective nature becomes more visible. What better way to make that as starkly rendered as possible than for Jeff Bezos to explode in space?

Brute force’s propaganda of the deed, reminding us of our earthly nature. Amazon would continue on, and Being’s revenge on the commodity would be a rallying point. I’m not above using the residual human belief in sky gods to advance the cause of a more just world.

Think of the irony — the founder of Amazon being dissolved by a payload delivery system! That is why it would be good for Jeff Bezos to explode in space. My team captain, Mr C Porter, will now complete our argument. Should Jeff Bezos explode in space, I will be holding a Melbourne wake and pinata party as soon as it hits the news at, where else, Spleen Bar in Bourke St. Rocket Fuels are on me.