I grew up and lived in Seattle. I left because of Amazon. My rent spiked, Capital Hill's cultural landscape that raised me was bought out and appropriated for the new influx of tech workers who couldn't care or know the musical miracle of what they had plundered.
I live and breathe computing systems and I want less of me wherever I go. Our effect when we enter local ecologies is stultifying, ruining, yet is celebrated as progress by some nebulous measure none of us can touch or taste or feel except for the wealthy.
With Amazon's entrance came foreign Chinese investment to buy out family run businesses like Mama's Mexican Kitchen. My aunt worked at Mama's for more than a decade. She was a fixture: articles were written up on her special brand of caustic wit she brought to every table. The Chinese investors bought out the whole block to convert Mama's and other neighboring cultural waystations into soulless high rises for the likes of me.