Dance, I Said — Dance! And Leave the Package on the Porch.

The TikTok video begins with a fish-eye view of a porch. Beyond it lies a sunny footpath, a yard planted with a sapling, a homogeneous subdivision. We are amid the suburban dream, and yet the view is foreboding: We are peering out from a hidden surveillance camera, and a stranger is approaching the house. We watch him execute a slow variation on the electric slide and deposit a package at the door. Then, in the manner of a servant capitulating to the whims of his liege, he curtsies toward the lens. He does this because, as the TikTok user explains by way of an automated robotic voice-over, “I asked my Amazon driver to do a dance before he delivers my package.”

The first time I saw a video like this was in 2019, when an Amazon customer left a gift of snacks on her doorstep, and her Ring video doorbell (also sold by Amazon) captured the driver’s happy dance as he collected the offering. This video and its many imitators seemed like a cynical bid at virality disguised as a selfless act of kindness, but lately the trend has taken an even darker turn. As Gita Jackson reported recently in Vice News, some Amazon customers are now explicitly asking the company’s drivers to deliver a performance along with the package. They are posting signs to their front doors or tapping unusual delivery instructions into the Amazon app in the hopes of capturing a spectacle on their surveillance feeds. One TikTok user sets a driver’s obligatory shimmy to Justin Timberlake’s “SexyBack”; another soundtracks it with “Teach Me How to Dougie.” This time, there are no snacks.

Though forcing another person to dance for you is a classic villain move rooted in the folklore traditions of many cultures, these customers proceed to shamelessly post the evidence to social media. Sometimes the videos are spun into an online sleuthing opportunity, as the TikToker asks viewers to hunt for the dancing driver’s identity. And they represent just a slice of the “Amazon driver approaches the door” genre of internet video, which has become so familiar that a driver’s arrival works as an instant setup for a visual joke. Punch lines have included everything from the driver skipping down a chalked hopscotch grid to getting violently attacked by the customer’s loose dogs. But whether the video is pitched as heartwarming or sadistic, the customer is enlisting the driver into a nonconsensual pageant that doubles as a performance review. As Jackson reported, Amazon drivers who fail to fulfill customer requests risk demerits.

How did we get here? It all feels like an inevitable outgrowth of Amazon’s ever-expanding product suite. Install its motion-activated Ring doorbell and your stoop becomes a stage; enroll in its Amazon Prime service, and you’ll summon an endless stream of players. Amazon encourages customers to publicize their Ring videos on its safety-minded social network, Neighbors, and makes it easy to share them more widely, too. One of Ring’s marketing lines is “A lot happens at your front door,” and this is meant as both a warning and an invitation — though it suggests it is too dangerous to venture outside, it also implies that a whole world of entertainment is to be found through eyeing your surveillance feed.

Like the hyperlocal crime app Citizen, Neighbors drops the user in the bull's-eye of a bustling emergency map, surrounding the home address with local crime reports and nearby surveillance videos to reinforce the perception that Ring’s technological fortress is necessary. At the same time, it wants to masquerade as a neighborly device. The official Ring YouTube channel is filled with user-generated videos that help inject its growing spy network with warmth and surprise, as the cameras catch spontaneous footage of good Samaritans, grazing cows and, of course, the company’s drivers caught in kooky scenarios, like in this entry from December: “Even a Giant Bear Will Not Stop This Amazon Driver From Making His Delivery.” Amazon obsessively surveils its workers through dashcams, smartphone monitors and machine-generated report cards, and these videos implicate the customer in that exercise, making the violation of driver privacy into a kind of internet-wide contest. The caption for Amazon’s bear video focuses on the heroic actions of a Ring user named Josh, who supposedly aided the delivery driver’s safety by “watching his exit the whole time” on the security camera.

As Amazon creates a new genre, it is revising the pop-cultural figure of the delivery person, who has long been cast as a beloved player in American life. The fictional postal worker, epitomized by Cliff in “Cheers” and Newman in “Seinfeld,” is a slightly pitiful character who demands an esteem he never quite receives. But the UPS guy (he is, with some notable exceptions, depicted as masculine) cuts a more respectable figure. In “The King of Queens,” in which Kevin James’s character works for the lightly fictionalized “IPS,” he is a jocular Everyman with a charming and beautiful wife. Elsewhere — in “Legally Blonde” and a 2019 New York Post profile of the “hot UPS delivery guy driving women crazy in NYC” — he is elevated to hunk status. He lifts heavy things and wears a uniform; in the summers, that uniform involves shorts. In any case, he is a familiar presence, a person who shows up at your office or apartment on a regular schedule to deliver something special and perhaps linger long enough to collect a signature. MadTV’s take on the character, Jaq the “UBS” guy, was in fact overly familiar — customers could never get him to leave.

Amazon has slain that particular fantasy. Its routes are often serviced by precarious gig workers, its quotas are too punishing to allow for socializing, and all potential human interactions have been replaced by one-way surveillance. In many of these TikTok videos, Amazon workers literally run in and out of the frame. If delivery drivers were once lightly teased or frequently ogled, now they are simply dehumanized, plugged into machine-run networks and expected to move product with robotic efficiency. The compulsory dance trend on TikTok suggests that customers, too, have come to see drivers as programmable. While the stunts may signal a faint desire to restore some human aspect to the delivery interaction, they are capable only of conjuring a thin and degrading spectacle.

As the delivery driver has been downgraded in the American psyche, a new beloved character has arisen: the package itself. Now the driver has less status than the box. When a package arrives damaged, it’s an outrage. But when a driver slips on the steps and rolls around in agony, it’s 2.8 million views on TikTok. Much like Wilson the volleyball in “Cast Away,” which acts as an inert companion to Tom Hanks’s resourceful FedEx employee, the Amazon package with its smiling logo has been fashioned into a pandemic companion, pitched online as a source of “light and spirit,” or at least “cheaper than therapy,” during an isolating period. (Some of these posts are in fact seeded through Amazon’s influencer program.) In Amazon ads, the boxes giggle and sing as they journey from warehouse to porch.

Amazon’s aggressive shipping schedule may have turned home delivery into a quotidian event, but its surveillance tools have converted this process into a logistical saga that comes to a dramatic conclusion just outside your door — will they arrive, or won’t they? The dominant form of content posted to the Neighbors app is surveillance footage of a package theft, an attempted package theft or a suspected package theft that is not actually a package theft. Though Ring ostensibly exists to help deter crime, one gets the sense that these posters are in fact desperate for something to happen. The Ring trains its users to view everyone who approaches the door as a potential interloper in the central relationship between the customer and the box.

On an even more depressing corner of Amazon TikTok, customers post videos not to backwardly celebrate drivers but just to shame them for delivering the package with less than the customer’s expected level of service. When you set up a security camera outside your house, every visitor invites scrutiny, including the person who is just trying to give you your stuff.