Crosscut Festival

In less than a decade, Amazon has rewoven Seattle's urban fabric. The e-commerce giant is adding jobs at a breakneck pace, redeveloping an entire section of the city center, and drawing new people to the city by the thousands. While Amazon has helped bring a new wave of prosperity to Seattle, it has become emblematic of the city's growth and its challenges. As the company seeks a second city to accommodate its dramatic expansion, we'll examine Amazon's impacts, for better and for worse, here in its hometown.

In the competition for Amazon’s next headquarters, cities and states have offered the company billions in tax breaks. Is this a smart investment to secure local jobs — as many politicians have argued — or a giveaway of public money to private shareholders? It's a worthwhile question here in Washington, responsible for the largest corporate tax break ever granted by a state, to the Boeing Co. in 2013. This panel of Washington leaders will debate the value of corporate tax breaks, as well as what might happen if Amazon starts asking Seattle what the city has done for it lately.  

Seattle is well-known for business leaders who are not afraid to take a stand on environmental protection, race and immigration issues, and LBGTQ rights. John Levesque of Seattle Business Magazine leads a conversation with four local trailblazers about why they have stepped into advocacy roles, the potential pitfalls of activism, and what more business leaders could do to create a more equitable and sustainable society.

The gig economy — think: Uber, Postmates, Task Rabbit — is radically reshaping work in America. These new platforms offer new flexibility in work schedules and incredible convenience for consumers, but the new work is coming without the same protections traditional jobs have offered, from forming a union to saving for retirement. Now, some gig economy workers and lawmakers want to change that. We’ll talk to a labor law expert, a state representative and gig workers about efforts to allow ride-hailing drivers to unionize and other moves to create security and equity in a disruptive economy.

It’s no secret that the industry that props up the Seattle metro area's gangbusters economy is largely staffed by white males. In some cases, this has had disastrous consequences, from creating biased products to forcing out talented employees. Nationally, women make up less than 30 percent of the employees at tech companies like Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook. That number drops even further when you look at the percentage of women in leadership roles. And the number of Hispanics and blacks working in tech are vanishingly small. We’ll hear from one of the women caught up in the infamous “Gamergate,” and talk about how local businesses and government are tackling this problem, and what more they could do. 

Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin, Steve Jobs and Paul Allen all cite science fiction as key to shaping their worldview. For global leaders, science fiction is both a way to help anticipate and plan for the future, and a blueprint for the technologies they’re building today. In this session, the founders of the online publication Scout.ai will lead an interactive science fiction scenario planning game that posits participants as hedge fund managers, making bets on climate change's future impacts in the Seattle area and on the region's economy and biggest businesses.