That's not the way monopoly works, though.

In a world without Amazon, I would have to go outside to buy shoes. There are a number of cloistered white people in my neighborhood; we consume shoes (and other goods, but let's stick with shoes). There is a local demand for shoes, that could be satisfied by a shoe store opening up in any one of the many shuttered storefronts. They could sell shoes to rich cloistered white people, they could sell shoes to brown people, they could sell shoes to cops and bus drivers. The economic need of my neighborhood to wear shoes would provide an economic incentive for someone to come to my neighborhood and sell shoes.

But in a world with Amazon, I can buy shoes directly from the Chinese gray market through a top-down Internet marketplace that is willing to profit five cents per pair of shoes so long as they sell all the shoes. Not only does anyone selling shoes on the Internet have to do it as cheap as Amazon, they actually have to do it cheaper because there's no real way to attract my attention other than by price since, as previously argued, there's nothing in meatspace to see. Ain't nobody signing a five-year lease for the right to attempt to profit against Amazon.

Thus I have no choice but to use Amazon to buy shoes.

Speaking seriously, there's a whole lot of disingenuous sleight-of-hand in the essay that disregards externalities as if they were a figment of the hippies' imaginations. Going down the list, Amazon already covered:

Facebook, Twitter, and other social media let us socialize with our friends, comfortably meet new people, and explore even the most obscure interests. The price: free.

Facebook has co-opted earlier forms of online communication (mailing lists, newsgroups, etc) and replaced them with an "engagement-driven" hierarchy. Thus the "group" for my town has useful information about meetings and the like, but they're buried under flamewars over the homeless and raccoon memes. I cannot find out when we're meeting about the park without wading through 900 outraged comments for/against/about the homeless. Twitter, meanwhile, has turned communication into a battle over which side can "ratio" the other.

Uber and Lyft provide high-quality, convenient transportation. The price: really cheap.

Uber and Lyft have spent about about fourteen billion dollars eliminating the taxi industry. Their prices, meanwhile, have increased 50% a year every year. It used to cost $30 to take a taxi to work. It now costs $28 to take a Lyft. The difference is the taxi driver had a license, was in a licensed car, and knew what he was doing. The Lyft driver is making less per mile than the IRS is reimbursing him and she only goes where her GPS tells her. She had to invest in the car (because you can't make any money at all without having something 2 years new or newer) and venture capitalists had to sink their money into the monomaniacal mission to annihilate a working class profession but I guess that's okay because I'm saving $2 on a 15-mile trip.

Skype is a sci-fi quality video phone. The price: free.

Skype is an open-source video codec and an open-source audio codec transmitted across an open-source protocol wrapped in a proprietary wrapper that Microsoft paid $8.5b for so they could nudge you into their pay-by-month ecosystem. Public funds paid for the development of everything in Skype but it primarily exists now to prevent an open protocol that would do the exact same thing with better interoperability.

Youtube gives us endless entertainment. The price: free.

Youtube has driven the cost of production so low that it has become far more effective as a disinformation engine than anything else. Low-income families used to sit their kids down in front of Mr. Rogers and Sesame Street (been there, done that, got the latchkey). Now they sit their kids down in front of Finger Family.

Google gives us the totality of human knowledge! The price: free.

No cost at all!

Amazon, for their part, is spending $700m retraining some of its employees. And good on 'em. Thing is, they're retraining a third of their employees so that they can do higher-tech jobs. What do you think will happen to the other two thirds?

And what do you think about the fact that Sears has lost more employees in the United States since 2006 than Amazon has hired?