NEW HEURISTICS
In 2018, the Maersk Venta was the first container ship to navigate the Northern Sea Route. Receding ice driven by global warming allowed the vessel to make the journey in almost half the time it would otherwise take. Supply chain managers and shipping conglomerates rejoiced.
In 2020, supply chain managers and shipping conglomerates braced themselves for the consequences of a global demand shock as images of empty shelves triggered panicked hoarding. The general public, suddenly and jarringly, was confronted with the realities of the actual existing supply chain and the brittle workings of the logistics industry. Significantly, as has been said in other parts of this publication and elsewhere, precarious forms of logistical labor are at last getting more recognition—both as heroic forms of essential service and as an increasingly visible and powerful bloc. Such coverage has also drawn attention to the physical, spatial, and environmental aspects of logistics—how and where logistics takes place. The logistics industry has a general allergy to the modern city of congestion, adjacency, and collectivity, and instead privileges control, predictability, measurement, and division. Corporate logistics produces an over-specified version of the world that dreams of isolated consumers and leaves as little room for chance as possible. In other words, logistics has been priming large portions of the population for quarantine conditions for years.
The exposure of the logistics industry during the current global pandemic triggers an urgent reckoning with governmentality and the spatial dimensions that underpin it. Approaches to security, territory, and population—concepts central to logistics–demand to be reconsidered in light of the current failures of the nation as political and geographic concept. Mainstream media coverage of government response to logistics-industry pressures tends to frame the issue as a matter of economic recovery (“when can we reopen?”) versus public health (“how long can we stay closed?”). Only rarely are the underpinning assumptions of this binary questioned. When public health and economic well-being are seen as mutually exclusive, one might be prompted to question the conditions that gave rise to and perpetuate such a situation.
The logistics industry has been waiting for this moment. Amazon’s stock value has increased almost thirty percent, partly as a reflection of the company’s infrastructural disposition and its ability to operate under social-distancing regulations. Any number of predatory ventures of the gig economy are also thriving in this context but, like Amazon, they succeed at the expense of economic diversity and with a monocultural horizon as the outcome. Amazon relies on publicly funded infrastructure as a way of externalizing many of its expenses, and yet it is benefiting tremendously from governmental guidelines that restrict the public from using that same infrastructure.
How can we find ways to hold Amazon and related companies accountable in situations like these? Advocating for necessary protection and support of their workers is a crucial starting point, and I think it can extend into larger measures that consider the conditions that allowed Amazon to exist in the first place. In other words, the logistics industry in its current situation will not rescue us, because it is a direct outcome of the same world-system as COVID-19. Furthermore, averting the crisis of a global pandemic does little to address the crisis of climate change—one that the logistics industry is actively accelerating. One of our tasks ought to be a search for heuristic tools that help us develop models of territoriality, affiliation, and determination outside of the epistemological conditions responsible for our current crises.
Contribution to The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge: TILTING (2), Issue 07, May 2020.