[What you need to know to start your day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]

In the days before Amazon’s official announcement that it would situate its second headquarters in two locations, one of them in Queens, many New Yorkers were outraged by the impending incursion as they surely went about ordering their slow-cookers and folding chairs and heavily discounted copies of “Friday Black” from the company, for expedited delivery. The holidays, after all, are approaching.

I count myself among the hypocrites. Along with so many others who think about urbanism, I spent much of Monday ruminating on the paradox of a company with a trillion-dollar valuation receiving billions of dollars in tax credits for bringing high-paying, technocratic jobs to a place already full of them. During the last decade, the city has added 76,000 tech jobs. In September, New York State recorded its lowest unemployment rate in 30 years.

And yet Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo went after Amazon as if he were the desperate patriarch in a 19th-century novel, ready to balloon the family dowry without limit all for the prospect of ensuring that his daughter marry up, even if, in truth, she stood at the pinnacle and could have anyone. Was it really necessary that Amazon get its own helipad when there is one right across the river? Exhausted at the injustice, I tucked into bed at the end of the day with my iPad and streamed the second segment of “The Worricker Trilogy” on Amazon Prime, barely registering the contradiction.

[What you need to know to start your day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]

We have internalized our use of Amazon to such a degree that we have trouble recognizing our complicity in the manufacture of the company’s own arrogance. Last year, I witnessed an adult ask an 8-year old if he believed in Santa, to which the child replied, rolling his eyes, “Santa is Amazon.”