Displacement without Redistribution: Practicality and Reproduction in the Digitalization of Logistics

Abstract

This article analyzes how capitalism is being reproduced through the digitalization of logistics. I examine two cases where efforts are made to digitalize container shipping workflows: a set of global standards for shipping data and a new “sustainable” platform for streamlining the movement of ships through port. In both cases, conceptions and practices of practicality shape digital infrastructures in ways that help maintain the uneven distribution of technology, goods, and capacities in times of otherwise drastic change. Shipping industry publicity tends to emphasize the newness of objects like self-driving cars, but much of the work of digitalizing occurs through the extensive, and comparatively invisible, data infrastructures that are being developed to digitalize processes for displacing goods. Through an analysis of how new digital infrastructures are being implemented, I argue that the narrow range of what is made to be practical under capitalism is reproduced through the ways in which shipping is being digitized. I seek to understand one key aspect of practicality in particular: efforts to maintain the displacement of certain forms of politics from logistics. Such efforts reproduce logistics as a technocratic science while marking, for example, labor and antiracist politics as outside the bounds of consideration. Logistical agents are thus shaping digitalization into a process that is implemented only insofar as it reproduces existing injustice.