I’m not writing The History of Amplifier; I’m writing a history of Amplifier. Jef and Joel had a vision that they were implementing when they founded Copernica/Amplifier, and it’s coherent and compelling. I’m not telling that story. I’m telling the story of employee number 2 – a 22 year old who didn’t know very much about anything when Amplifier started. That’s not fair – Sam Koski taught me everything I needed to know at Miami Springs Senior High, but it was going to take a while for that knowledge to take form.

Jef or Joel subscribed to The Believer magazine that McSweeney’s rolled out back in 2003 – and the magazines came to the office. Early on they had an article revisiting Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. (We rarely know the significance of an event in the moment – it’s in retrospect that we’re able to see the effect one sitting of bathroom reading has on a life.) [Reading the article in the stall] “There’s two thousand pages across three volumes of Soviet prison reflections?? Yes, please!” I went out to Half-Price Books and bought volume 1 of The Gulag Archipelago. Since then I’ve read most everything of Solzhenitsyn’s that’s been translated into English. Recently, Notre Dame has started publishing English translations of his work that had yet to be translated – I’m very excited about this.

I was not a Russian-Lit major – that’s a dead-end – but according to my pedestrian musing, Tolstoy took a sweeping view of history, that we are all carried along by the accumulation of every decision, and it’s an error to attribute the unfolding of time to any specific event or individual. Solzhenitsyn does not dismiss us from agency, nor does he hold to the Great Man view of individuals steering the ship this way or that, but he does believe that there’s a moral dimension to things, and that we can make good decisions and bad decisions, and that our decisions matter and are consequential. He believes that there can be a redemptive aspect to suffering, and that we can be shaped by the experiences and accounts of others. I don’t know if this is actually at all an accurate reduction of Tolstoy or Solzhenitsyn, but I’m going with it, and I fall in the Solzhenitsyn camp.

So I’m writing my account of maturation in the space of third party logistics, and I don’t mean for it to be more or less than that.