When Jeff Bezos stepped down as Amazon CEO in 2021, the commentariat treated it as the end of an era.
Because what Bezos left behind isn't just a company—it's a parallel state, and its citizens pay $139 a year for the privilege.
Think about what Prime actually controls in 2025.
It decides which products Americans see first, which books become bestsellers, which shows get made, which local businesses survive.
And when you control the infrastructure, you set the rules.
Here's the part that should keep you up at night.
Prime membership now exceeds 200 million globally, with roughly 170 million in the US alone.
That's more people than vote in a presidential election.
Amazon has assembled a population larger than any single constituency in American life—and it answers to no one.
The tie-ins are where it gets genuinely strange.
Prime Video bankrolls the NFL's Thursday Night Football.
Whole Foods, which Prime swallowed in 2017, now anchors grocery in dozens of American cities.
Ring cameras—also Amazon—have effectively become a private surveillance network, with police departments requesting footage directly from homeowners.
Your doorbell is a government contractor.
During the pandemic, Amazon didn't just benefit from the shift to online shopping—it became the only game in town for countless small sellers.
Today, roughly 60 percent of products sold on Amazon come from third-party merchants, most of whom can't afford to leave.
Amazon takes a cut of their revenue, sets their shipping rules, and can suspend their accounts with a single algorithm.
The antitrust case the FTC filed against Amazon in 2023 gets at this, but slowly, and the remedies under discussion are modest.
Meanwhile, Prime keeps expanding: healthcare through One Medical, prescriptions through Amazon Pharmacy, satellite internet through Project Kuiper.
Every new service makes the membership stickier and the exit more costly.
What makes Prime uniquely American is the consent.
We signed up, happily, for free shipping and a streaming library.
And then the terms quietly became the terms of daily life—how we shop, watch, eat, and increasingly, how we're watched.
The Roman Empire didn't fall because someone conquered it.
It fell because the institutions inside it stopped being distinguishable from the state.
But Prime is the thread that ties the whole thing together, and most Americans are holding it in their pocket right now.
The real question isn't whether Amazon is too big.
It's whether "membership" was ever just a subscription—or whether it was the most successful soft-power play in American corporate history. **Our take:** Prime works so well precisely because it never feels coercive.
Final Thoughts
Convenience has always been the quietest form of control—and Americans have never met a subscription they wouldn't renew.