The boxes crowd the porch - this is up in a tranquil stretch of the Blue Ridge Mountains - before gradually making their way inside, past the patio table, which came from a box, and its four chairs, from boxes all. The living room was largely furnished from the boxes: a couch, an end table, rugs, the love seat. In the bedroom, the boxes account for artwork, linens, a clothes rack, the mattress and several pillows, of course. The extra window unit air-conditioners: white boxes from brown boxes. The kitchen is stocked from the flow of boxes - the knife block, the espresso machine, the convection oven - as are the home's closets.
K.T., 54, shares this home, and these boxes, with her husband and two dogs. She's a volunteer animal rescue transport driver and a former proofreader, but now much of her time and attention is devoted to box intake and processing. She does most of her shopping online, she said; the nearest town only has about a thousand residents, and it's usually more convenient to order. That, and the fact the vast majority of these boxes arrive free of charge courtesy of Amazon itself.
Now Vine was recreated in the image of the internet around it - an internet of interminable feeds and customized content, an endless space that can be checked and rechecked but never quite finished, demanding as much as you're willing to give it. If Facebook's feed let you gorge on birth announcements and conspiracy theories, and Instagram's on photos of dogs and, I guess, mimetic desire, Vine's feed - similarly aware of your habits and always refreshed - opened the door to actual things, distributed in the manner of content.
In a Craigslist forum, for example, users spent recent weeks commiserating about their suddenly shrinking review queues. (They were restored shortly after, but posters weren't happy with how: "Mine has been restocked as well, but with things I don't need," said one. "That's it - junk." Another user warned others off a particular brand of chocolates he'd gotten for his wife: "They weren't even edible and had a strange odor." They discussed a recent investigation by the website The Verge into Amazon's treatment of sellers ("great reading and it confirms everything we already know!"). They attempted to troubleshoot minor issues (Amazon's brand Solimo, which makes a variety of household goods, seems to break the Vine interface for some reason) and major issues (a "technical error" reported last year, which exposed some Amazon users' data, including email addresses, has created a huge problem for affected Vine reviewers: a flood of emails from overseas sellers attempting to bribe them for reviews and, in some cases, threatening to falsely tell Amazon that they're doing it anyway). The forum has a resident tax expert.
"We are the same as any quilter's group, or book club, that meets or chats about whatever common interests they enjoy," she said. These are her Vine people. The other Goodreads forum has its Vine people too, and they all have Vine, and Amazon has them all.
"From a sky-high view, the reason Amazon is so successful is that it's easy for people to find things on Amazon," said Rachel Johnson Greer, a former Amazon employee of eight years, and currently the managing partner of Cascadia Seller Solutions, a firm that helps sellers on Amazon's Marketplace.
But then the feed came along. "I found myself checking the queue a dozen times a day," she said. "I didn't want to miss the next great thing."
But she was also a dedicated early adopter - she was a Google Glass Explorer, for example, helping the company test out its controversial and since-shelved smart glasses - and had been seeking a sense of purpose after retiring from her secular career in information technology. Ms. de Avila was also living with multiple sclerosis. Vine arrived at the right time. "It gave me a way to build meaning," she said, "leaving a corporate job with a lot of responsibility." Receiving boxes from Amazon, and completing the corresponding Vine tasks, gave her a temporary new identity.
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