Logistical Media
Source
* Article: Ned Rossiter. LOCATIVE MEDIA AS LOGISTICAL MEDIA: SITUATING INFRASTRUCTURE AND THE GOVERNANCE OF LABOR IN SUPPLY-CHAIN CAPITALISM
URL = http://nedrossiter.org/?p=380
Discussion
Ned Rossiter:
"The larger research of which this chapter forms a part will investigate the material dimensions of software systems operative within global logistics industries. That project identifies how software driven systems generate protocols and standards that shape social, economic and cross-institutional relations within the global logistics industries. Such operations result in the production of new regimes of knowledge and associated modes of “soft control” within organizational paradigms. The emergent “algorithmic architectures” are computational systems of governance that hold a variable relation between the mathematical execution of code and an “external” environment defined through arrangements of data.5 The capacity of algorithmic architectures to organize and analyze data on labor productivity in real-time, for instance, means they operate as key technologies for governing labor within logistical industries. My claim is that this has implications for the scope of research on locative media.
This chapter recasts locative media as logistical media. It is interested in how logistical infrastructure is made soft through ERP systems designed to govern the global movement of people, finance and things. Questions of securitization, control, coordination, algorithmic architectures, protocols and parameters are among those relevant to a theory of logistical media. The chapter brings logistics, software and infrastructure together in order to elaborate the conceptual and empirical qualities of what John Durham Peters elusively terms “logistical media.”6 For Peters, the concept of logistical media “stresses the infrastructural role of media.”7 In addition to storage, transmission and processing systems, I would suggest the study of logistical media might also include attention to the aesthetic qualities peculiar to the banality of spreadsheets, ERP systems and the software applications of locational technologies more broadly. The combinatory force of logistical media has a substantive effect on the composition of labor and production of subjectivity. The flexibility of global supply chains and just-in-time modes of production shape who gets employed, where they work and what sort of work they do. Logistical systems, in other words, govern labor. Logistical labor emerges at the interface between infrastructure, software protocols and design, and labor situated across global supply chains. The chapter therefore requires an analysis of how labor is organized and governed through software interfaces and media technologies that manage what anthropologist Anna Tsing identifies as “supply chain capitalism.”
Locating Logistical Media
Locative media are media of logistics. Logistical media consist of various locational devices such as Voice Picking technology, GPS tracking and RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tags. The spatial and temporal properties of these information and communication technologies have shaping affects on the production of subjectivity. Their primary function is to optimize the productivity of living labor and supply chain operations. Logistical media, as both technologies and software, are very much about locational devices and algorithms that coordinate and control the movement of people, finance and things. Yet at the conceptual and empirical levels, research on locative media has next to nothing to say about logistical media and supply chain operations whose spatial-temporal operations are frequently enough overseen by locative media – GPS, RFID, voice picking technology, ERP systems, social media software, etc.
The deployment of these technologies across logistical supply chains produces what Anja Kanngieser calls “microtechnologies of surveillance” designed “to track and trace workers by constantly tying them to territorial and temporal location[s].”9 From the embedding of RFID microchips under the skin of employees to the automated instructions on picking lists for workers in warehouses and distribution centers, the use of locational devices within logistical industries results in the extraction and relay of data that holds high commercial value.10 While geodata may be used in positive ways in the case of managing delivery fleets aimed at fuel efficiency and “ecorouting,” locative media also generate data that affects how workers are monitored in workplace settings. Along with privacy issues that arise with the tracking of consignments in transport industries via GPS and cell phones that make visible in real-time the location of workers, there is also concern by unions over how the software parameters of Voice Picking technologies and the generation of data by RFID can also result in the profiling and categorization of workers along lines of race and class that may have deleterious effects on employment conditions and prospects in industries that are frequently characterized by insecure modes of work.
Logistical media are also very different from location-based media characterized by the capacity of users to “control and personalize” the borders between public and private spaces.11 The agency afforded to users of locative media is much less clear in the case of logistical media, which as an instrumentalization of location-aware mobile technologies are designed to exert control over the mobility of labor, data and commodities as they traverse urban, rural, atmospheric and oceanic spaces and traffic through the circuits of databases, mobile devices and algorithmic architectures. A further distinction between locative and logistical media is marked by the tendency of users of locative media to search urban spaces for services related to consumption, while logistical media provide the very conditions for urban settings to function in such a way.
Before moving on to a discussion of logistical media theory as it relates to SAP, some overview of the rise of logistical regimes is required. To date the study of logistics has largely been undertaken by researchers working in the fields of business and management studies,12 military history13 and economic geography.14 With military origins, logistics emerged during the Napoleonic wars (1803-1815) as a forecasting technology in the art of warfare, complementing the limits of strategy and tactics.15 Earlier, in the 17th and 18th centuries, logistical oversight of supply lines enabled military planners to overcome practices of pillage and plunder, which kept troops constantly on the move, always in search of food, water and animal fodder. Logistical operations transformed this nomadic condition, allowing battle to become entrenched around the infrastructure of fortified towns and more sedentary as provisions, troops and munitions were transported to the frontlines of conflict.16 From its outset, then, “logistical rationality” approached the management of labor through systems of command and control. However, this chapter’s point of departure is not focused on the military-industrial complex so much as the interface between infrastructure, software protocols and design, and labor situated across global supply chains (shipping, rail and road transport, procurement, warehousing, IT R&D).
Modern logistics turns around the battle of standards that accompanied containerization in the maritime industries. The standardization of shipping containers from the 1950s was accompanied by disputes between engineers, corporations and governments over competing economic and geopolitical interests in the transport industries.17 As geographer Deborah Cowen notes, “Containerization radically reduced the time required to load and unload ships, reducing port labor costs and enabling tremendous savings for manufactures who could reduce inventories to a bare minimum.”18 By the 1970s a global standard in containerization had been established, around the same time economic globalization came into full swing following the end of the Bretton Woods Accord in 1971 and the oil crisis of 1973.19 Sociologists Edna Bonacich and Jake Wilson date what they call the “logistics revolution” from the 1970s, with a particular emphasis on the Reagan and Thatcher eras of market and institutional deregulation along with neoliberal international free trade agreements.20 They characterize this organizational revolution in terms of the rise of retailer power over producers and manufacturers in conjunction with changes in production (flexibility and outsourcing), logistics (“intermodalisation” and freight distribution), and labor (intensification of contingency, weakening of unions, racialisation of labor, lower labor standards).21
Once the logistical problem of container standardization had been resolved, logistical operations shifted attention to the problem of data standards. While present in a rudimentary form in the 1960s with earlier incarnations in World War II, the computerization of transport industries did not take off until the 1980s following the standardization of shipping containers and the advent of just-in-time production.22 Aided by software applications and database technologies, logistics aims to maximize efficiencies at all levels. In other words, the labor control regime is programmed into the logistics chain at the level of code. Similarly, the governance of labor is informatized in such a way that the border between undertaking a task and reporting its completion has become closed or indistinct. As such, there is no longer a temporal delay between the execution of duties and their statistical measure.
In terms of labor management, the optimum state of governance arises at the moment in which the execution of a task, or Standard Operating Procedure (SOP), is registered in the real-time computation of Key Performance Indicators (or KPIs). As Katie Hepworth writes, “KPIs and the real-time measurement of labour implies a constant acceleration described in terms of improved productivity.”23 Yet logistics is not bound to the pursuit of speed. The temporal horizon of maritime industries, for example, may just as often require a slowing down of movement, or even periods of stasis.24 The capacity to calibrate time according to multiple and frequently conflicting economic interests constitutes a form of “transactional impedance [that] relates to the power-geometries within supply chains.”25 As Hepworth explains, “It describes how diverse stakeholders and individuals are placed in quite distinct relations to commodity flows and the interconnections between global sites, as well as the ways in which these relations are manipulated for the benefit of particular actors within those networks.” Logistical software, ERP systems and technologies of location play a central role in the mediation of such economies of transaction and data extraction." (http://nedrossiter.org/?p=380)