Amazon’s punishing demands on its 1.5 million employees are infamous. Warehouse workers must match a pace set by artificial intelligence (AI) to maximize efficiency, with seemingly more care given to factory robots. A fleet of drivers and subcontracted delivery workers race to make quotas. Digital serfs compete to be paid pennies for microgigs on the Mechanical Turk (MTurk) platform. Even higher-ranking white-collar staff report a ruthless culture where employees shoulder the burden of “customer satisfaction.”

It’s the stuff of heavy-handed science fiction — a dystopian fantasy in which ever more severe working conditions ravage large swaths of the workforce and a panoptic management crushes their self-determination. And it’s all just to maximize profits for a multibillionaire whose wealth is already incomprehensibly boundless.

Yet Amazon’s iconic founder, Jeff Bezos, today its executive chairman, presents his company to customers and shareholders in a rather different light. For this proud sci-fi nerd, Amazon is an angel from the future, disrupting inefficient industries from logistics to health care, from media to groceries, from web services to literature. This tells us one thing: Amazon embodies a form of capitalism not content to exploit workers in the present but bent on colonizing the future itself.