Book summary Infrastructure makes worlds. Software coordinates labor. Logistics governs movement. These pillars of contemporary capitalism correspond with the materiality of digital communication systems on a planetary scale. Ned Rossiter theorizes the force of logistical media to discern how subjectivity and labor, economy and society are tied to the logistical imaginary of seamless interoperability. Contingency […]
Category Archives: Logistics
Mediations of Labor: Algorithmic Architectures, Logistical Media, and the Rise of Black Box Politics
05-Jan-15By Soenke Zehle and Ned Rossiter Logistical Media and the Second Machine Age In a recent panel on living and dead labor at a conference in New York City, respondent Doug Henwood delivered a series of salvos on why he finds cultural theorists so deficient in their comprehension of contemporary labor struggles.1 Declaring himself a […]
Abstract Logistical media coordinate and control the movement of labor, people, and things situated along and within global supply chains. The combination of software and infrastructure holds a determining force in the production of subjectivity and the capacity for action. Algorithmic architectures of logistical media extract data and manage labor whose value is exploited as […]
The Aesthetics of Algorithmic Experience
04-Jan-15By Ned Rossiter and Soenke Zehle We did not need the NSA scandal as a reminder that the minute we decide to engage in technologically mediated relations we inscribe ourselves in matrices of control. In fact, one might even question the status of NSA surveillance as a scandal: the democratically legitimated laws authorizing such big […]
This chapter brings digital humanities research into the domain of logistical industries. The primary task of the global logistics industry is to manage the movement of people and things in the interests of communication, transport and economic efficiencies. The software applications special to logistics visualise and organise these mobilities, producing knowledge about the world in […]
The German based company SAP is one of the largest developers of software that drives global economies, offering leading enterprise software solutions – specifically logistics software – that makes possible movements of people, finance and things that coalesce as global trade. In its 2012 Annual Report with the not especially modest title, Helping the World […]
Privacy is Theft: On Anonymous Experiences, Infrastructural Politics and Accidental Encounters
28-Nov-13By Ned Rossiter and Soenke Zehle Urban piracy, data piracy, cultural and media piracy, oceanic piracy, ecological piracy – piracy abounds across the world today. Whether analyzed in terms of property violations or acts of resistance, invoked by commercial monopolies or citizen alliances, addressed through strategies of criminalization or the invention of new rights, analyses […]
By Ned Rossiter and Soenke Zehle Exodus from the General Intellect Defined by the informatization of life and labor, the networked condition is characterized by the comprehensive connection of users to circuits of capital via predominantly corporate communication and information infrastructures. The economic value of these engines of entry into a world of communicative commerce […]
The logistical city is a city of peripheries. These peripheries are occupied by intermodal transport terminals, warehouses, IT infrastructure, container parks and shipping ports.1 The interconnection of peripheries on a transnational scale comprises a special kind of globality, one in which the complex network of distribution systems – roads, rail, shipping, aviation – makes concrete […]
