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.

本文分析了资本主义如何通过物流数字化而得以复制。我研究了数字化集装箱运输流程的两个案例：航运数据的全球标准、简化船舶进出港的新“可持续”平台。在这两个案例中, 对实用性的理解和实践, 塑造了在巨变中能维系技术、商品和能力不均匀分布的数字基础设施。航运业的宣传往往强调自动驾驶汽车等新颖性, 但大部分数字化工作都基于广泛的、相对不可见的、旨在实现数字化货物迁移过程的数据基础设施。通过分析新数字基础设施的实施, 我认为, 资本主义复制中的狭隘行为是通过数字化航运来实现的。特别的, 我试图理解实用性的一个关键方面：在物流中保持某些政治学的迁移, 从而将物流复制成技术官僚科学（例如, 将劳工和反种族主义政治排除在考虑范围之外）。因此, 物流行业正在将数字化塑造成一个复制现有不公正的过程。

Este artículo analiza el modo como está siendo reproducido el capitalismo a través de la digitalización de la logística. Examino dos casos donde se acometen esfuerzos para digitalizar los flujos de trabajo del transporte marítimo de contenedores: un conjunto de estándares globales de los datos de transporte marítimo, y una nueva plataforma “sustentable” para agilizar el movimiento de los barcos a través del puerto. En ambos casos, las concepciones y prácticas de la practicidad configuran las infraestructuras digitales de modo que contribuyan a mantener la desigual distribución de la tecnología, los bienes y las capacidades en tiempos de, por lo demás, drásticos cambios. La publicidad de la industria naviera tiende a destacar el carácter novedoso de objetos como los carros autoconducidos, aunque una gran parte del trabajo de digitalización se realiza a través de las extensas y comparativamente invisibles infraestructuras de datos que se están desarrollando para digitalizar los procesos de desplazamiento de mercaderías. Por medio de un análisis de la forma como se implementan nuevas infraestructuras digitales, arguyo que el estrecho rango de lo que se produce para que sea práctico, bajo el capitalismo, se reproduce a través de los modos como el transporte marítimo se digitaliza. En particular, pretendo entender un aspecto clave de la practicidad: los esfuerzos por mantener el desplazamiento de ciertas formas de la política de la logística. Tales esfuerzos reproducen la logística como una ciencia tecnocrática mientras se marca, por ejemplo, el trabajo y las políticas antirracistas como situadas fuera de los límites de la consideración. Así, los agentes logísticos están configurando la digitalización en un proceso que sólo se implementa en la medida en que reproduzca la injusticia existente.

Key Words:

• digitalization
• infrastructure
• logistics
• reproduction
• shipping

关键词:

• 数字化
• 基础设施
• 物流
• 复制
• 航运。

Palabras clave:

• digitalización
• infraestructura
• logística
• reproducción
• transporte marítimo

This article analyzes how capitalism is being reproduced through the digitalization of logistics. Bringing together the critical logistics literature (Cowen 2014; Rossiter 2014; Steinberg and Peters 2015; Chua et al. 2018; Lehman 2018; Khalili 2020; Peters 2020) with work on reproduction in feminist geography and science and technology studies (Katz 2001; Murphy 2017, 2011), 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 related to practicality shape the new digital infrastructures in ways that are set to maintain the uneven distribution of technology, goods, and capacities in times of otherwise drastic change (N. Smith 2008; Akhter 2018; Neilson 2018; Tay and Rossiter 2019). I focus on the role of digitalization in facilitating particular forms of circulation and streamlining trade while maintaining existing power relations, and follow the call by Chua et al. (2018) for work on logistics that includes “a rejection of the field’s self-depiction as an apolitical science of circulation” (625–26). I thereby seek to understand how dominant industry players work to displace specific kinds of political frictions from logistics by mobilizing and adapting technological change.

Digitalization is expected to have a profound effect on container shipping workers’ everyday labor in the near future. This is felt in the posited, if not yet widespread, implementation of gig-economy apps and labor management mechanisms in container shipping. It is also effected through the categories, forms, and practices for making and using data about shipping workers and goods. The latter might determine, for example, who comes to count as a worker and whether data for labor are visible at all in online platforms that manage the movement of ships within the port. All of the above form part of the digital infrastructures “through which security and insecurity are mediated and distributed” (Strauss 2020, 1215). Digital tools also reshape “the extended commodity chains” that continue to create “new social and spatial relationships among consumers, workers, and regions” (De Lara 2018a, 3). The study of these extensive digital infrastructures of shipping is thus both a useful approach and also a partial corrective because, as Strauss (2020) noted, “scholarship on infrastructure has had relatively little to say about labor” (1218).

This article thus brings together the study of infrastructure and labor by analyzing the capitalist shaping of the data categories and digital platforms through which container shipping labor will soon be managed and understood. It is not yet possible to study the implementation of the cases analyzed here, because they have yet to be implemented. Instead, I contribute an analysis of the practices that enable specific forms of politics, such as labor and racial justice, to continue to be displaced from logistics as workflows are automated and made digital. Such efforts reproduce logistics as a technocratic science (Cowen 2014; Chua et al. 2018) while marking politics as outside the bounds of consideration. I draw primarily on document analysis of materials from shipping consortiums and digital platforms, including Web sites, reports, terms and conditions, regulations, operational manuals, and investor handbooks. I also build on two years of participant observation at shipping technology conferences and webinars from 2018 through 2020. The materials focus on the Port of Rotterdam, one of the most automated ports worldwide and the largest port in Europe, a region with a vested interest in reproducing current imbalances. This makes visible the technical work that will continue to influence labor and the organization of maritime shipping as digital tools become widespread. I thus demonstrate the broader political consequences of standardization and platforms, two of the “multiple passages” of digitalization (Pelizza 2017, 36).

Standards and platforms involve a form of preemptive work that aims to forestall “data frictions” (Edwards 2010; Pelizza 2017), such as conflicts over which systems produce reliable data, while also papering over logistical frictions (Chua 2018, 6) between imaginations of flow and social and material relations. They are thus crucial aspects of determining the categories for data display and analysis and come to shape which decisions are made and how in the course of everyday work. There is also a politics, however, to which potential frictions are forestalled (e.g., those that reduce profit) versus those that are exacerbated (e.g., those that deepen worker exploitation). Preventing friction among technical actors or companies might be viewed as a worthy goal, even as digitalization can be used to displace political concerns in ways that intensify (or make invisible) friction for racialized workers.

Reproducing injustice takes ongoing work, but logistics has transformed capitalism in ways that selectively streamlines such work, and by design. Tsing (2009) thus referred to “supply chain capitalism,” whereas Harney and Moton (2021) posited a new form of “logistical capitalism” marked by first a shift from the product to the “production line” and the supply chain, and second a shift to the production line’s “continuous improvement” (38). Cowen (2014) argued that “it is precisely the shifting relationship between the circulation of stuff and the circuits of capital that is at stake in the story of logistics” (11), and de Lara (2018a) showed how logistics represents a “major rearticulation of modern capitalism and space” that reterritorializes race and class far beyond the boundaries of the port (1).

Digitalization contributes to this rearticulation of capitalism while also reshaping it and being reshaped by it, as is evident in the technocratic management of platform labor in firms such as Amazon and Uber (Van Doorn 2017). Container shipping’s digital transformation has received far less attention to date than the platform economy, but it stands to be profoundly influential although (and perhaps because) shipping’s everyday labor has been less visible in recent decades. Yet to date, digitalization in shipping is notable more for the absence of data about workers than, as in the platform economy, attempts to control worker movements at ever finer scales (e.g., International Taskforce on Port Call Optimization [ITPCO] 2020a). Thus, container shipping’s digitalization could harm workers through omission rather than, or in addition to, microlevel forms of surveillance. Furthermore, although unions have certainly expressed concern about the implications of automation for labor (e.g., Stam 2020), both industry texts and union debates on digitalization tend to emphasize technological objects like robots, sensors, or self-driving cars. In contrast, here I focus on the industry’s relatively invisible, but far more pervasive, data infrastructures (Bowker and Star 1999; Star 1999), including nascent international standards that shape the form and content of data, as well as the digital platforms developed to display and analyze those data. Together these standards and platforms help to determine the form and display of data for the ships that enter port, including how they move, where they stop, and for how long, among myriad other factors. As such, they are potentially consequential for the daily labor of everyone whose job is related to ports or commercial ships.

In terms of displacement, my emphasis is thus partially literal: This is an analysis of how the shipping industry is digitalizing the process of moving shipping containers from one location to another and the impact on workers. In addition, this study is relevant to another form of displacement with consequences for global injustice: the displacement of specific forms of politics, such as labor and racial justice, from logistics itself. Cowen (2014) argued that one major goal of logistics is to excise politics by presenting logistics as a rational science that was supposedly free of political concerns. As such, logistics might be seen as an “anti-politics machine” (Ferguson 1990), a way of strategically marking certain political decisions as outside the bounds of consideration. This helps both to maintain the violence of capitalism and to perpetuate what McElroy (2019), drawing on racial capitalism, called “racial technocapitalism,” and which Strauss (2020) argued are plural “racial capitalisms” (1215). As such, this study is also in conversation with foundational work in feminist political economy (Werner 2015; Werner et al. 2017; Strauss 2020) and on race in science and technology (Nakamura 2002; M’charek 2010, 2013; Noble 2018; Benjamin 2019; Jefferson 2020).

The Unevenness Distribution of Reproduction

Recent critical studies of logistics have examined how logistics “works through and reinscribes uneven geometries of power, facilitating and speeding up circulation in some cases while intensifying containment and fortifying borders in others” (Chua et al. 2018, 626). De Lara (2018a, 2018b) has shown how even apparently progressive policies such as “green growth” nonetheless have “cemented racial, environmental, and class precariousness” (De Lara 2018b, 538). I draw on this work to study how technical transformations are made to retrench injustice. Yet it is necessary to perpetuate capitalism to improve it, and digitalization thus also serves to reproduce capitalist relations. This goal is achieved in large part by attempting to maintain the (supposed) displacement of politics, including labor concerns, from discussions that instead focus on technical details. Reproduction thus contributes to what Li (2011, 57), adapting Rose, called the rendering technical or “a set of practices concerned with representing ‘the domain to be governed as an intelligible field with specifiable limits and particular characteristics’ (Rose 1999, 33).” As Li showed, such an intelligible field can then be used to displace some forms of politics as outside the realm of what is intelligible and, in my formulation, practical.

Of relevance to the bounds of what is intelligible, feminist geographers have contributed important analyses of how social reproduction in families and schools, although often disregarded, is nonetheless essential to the continuation of capitalism (Katz 2001). In science and technology studies, feminist studies of reproduction have drawn on this work to analyze areas such as biological reproduction and population statistics. Of particular relevance to studies of displacement, Murphy (2011, 2017) argued for the study of distributed reproduction that varies over space and time and “stretches beyond bodies to include the uneven relations and infrastructures that shape what forms of life are supported to persist, thrive, and alter, and what forms of life are destroyed, injured, and constrained” (Murphy 2017, 141–42). Murphy wrote about contexts quite different from logistics, but her focus on how population and economy were mobilized for “the economization of life” parallels processes whereby shipping became rationalized and rendered technical. The notion of distributed reproduction is thus relevant to critical logistics in its analysis of reproduction as a variegated process that occurs within and beyond individuated bodies and infrastructures. As a complement to work on the gendering (Peano 2019) and queering (Cowen 2014) of logistics, Murphy’s insights also enable an analysis of how gendered processes and conceptions come to be influential in a wide array of contexts, including those related to technical practices.

Moving from biological reproduction to logistical reproduction, and vice versa, is less of a leap than it might at first appear, given that both involve networks for perpetuating life by different, but related, means. For example, the centrality of logistics to the reproduction of life under capitalism is especially apparent in the widespread concern about the COVID-19-related supply chain disruptions. Such fears demonstrate how central logistics, and particularly the Global South, are for providing the goods and materials for daily life in the Global North, which currently cannot function without shipping containers or the goods they bring. Extending conceptions of distribution even further thus makes it possible to see how biological and logistical reproduction are fully intertwined.

Making Injustice Practical

Reproduction is crucial to theories of capitalism, but in the everyday it is often a very practical concern. Drawing on the work of A. Smith and Stenning (2006), Lee (2006) analyzed the link between practicality and everyday economic practices, including understandings of how economic practices “might be set in motion and sustained” (422). Practicality shapes the varied everyday economic practices that make the distributed reproduction of capitalism possible. Notions of practicality might also help explain why the digitalization of container shipping has taken longer than in other industries. Despite being an early innovator with respect to container standardization (Klose 2015) and computerization in terms of modeling logistical flows after the Vietnam War (Cowen 2014), in recent years container shipping has been relatively late to adopt technologies that have become widespread in other sectors. Initiatives like track-and-trace for packages have been in daily use for more than a decade in land and air shipping, but they are only beginning to be implemented for sea containers. There are concerted efforts in shipping to become a frontrunner in future digitalization, and they have only intensified due to the COVID-19 pandemic and its attendant disruptions. When attendees at shipping conferences discussed digitalization, however, new initiatives were routinely assessed in terms of their practical limitations. For example, one presenter noted that “everybody starts to see the potential” of digitalizing container shipping but that despite its potential, “you cannot do it without [the large] companies,” because even though it is technically possible, it will not ever succeed. This means that in digitalization efforts, “you’re working with [industry leaders] who don’t know what an internet browser is” (“Project Cargo Summit” 2020). Making digitalization practical, then, involves reshaping it to meet the concerns of reticent industry leaders, which means minimizing the extent to which technological change might disrupt existing power relations. This requires in part that digitalization reproduce the technocratic approach to logistics whereby the welfare of workers is discussed primarily in terms of costs and benefits to the industry. Digitalization is thus political to the extent that it reproduces the displacement of politics and, by extension, of worker welfare, possible. To demonstrate this, in the next sections I examine two cases of digitalization, turning first to data standards and then to a digital shipping platform.

Reproducing Existing Displacement: International Data Standards

Data standards are an influential, but often invisible, aspect of digitalization. Organized labor in Rotterdam in particular has called for greater inclusion of workers in automation processes in port terminals, given that based on their experience “dangerous situations regularly occur in automated terminals” (FNV Ports 2019). Automation and digitalization start far earlier, and have a deeper and more textured influence, than is easily visible within the digital devices that so far have been the focus of much organizing and public debate, however. Standards and platforms are likely to have a profound effect on logistical workers’ daily work in the coming two decades. Data standards regimes can set the categories through which port workers and their labor will be assessed, helping to determine, for example, which activities and cargoes count as work and which workers are considered part of the port labor force. Standards can be applied to any number of aspects of data, from the file formats to which categories are included in particular data sets and how those categories are defined. Although increasingly digitized (Rodrigue 2020), as of 2021 the necessary documents, such as the bill of lading, are often still shared as paper copies or sent digitally as e-mail attachments or even faxes, rather than via any centralized platform.

A number of digitalization efforts are underway to address the nondigital or quasi-digital nature of contemporary ports. One industry-wide initiative, ITPCO, has both the explicit goal of furthering sustainability and the potential for wide adoption, although it is still in its relatively early stages and has yet to be implemented widely (see, e.g., Pernia 2020). The ITPCO provides supranational standards for exchanging data about how and when ships travel through port, including aspects such as size, speed, volume and the contents of cargo and ship documents, with widespread implications for port and ship workers. So far such data have largely remained nonstandardized and under the control of individual companies and ports, with the notable exception of the International Maritime Organization’s (IMO) Facilitation of International Maritime Traffic Convention (IMO 2019a, 2019b, 2019c; O’Dwyer 2020).

The ITPCO standards are designed to centralize data, a highly political process. Yet to date the implications of automation for labor remain largely absent in negotiations over the form and content of the coming standards, and vice versa. The erasure of labor is demonstrated both by the focus on the standards, where data about workers are largely absent, and by the composition of the ITPCO board and focus of attendant discussions. The ITPCO is dominated by the major shipping conglomerates, particularly the liner companies that offer, among numerous other services, regularized transport along specific lines or routes. Liner companies’ influence was regularly mentioned in conversations with representatives of logistics companies at industry events organized by groups like Port Technology International, Trans-Pacific Maritime, and Nieuwsblad Transport (a Dutch transport newspaper), and it can be seen in multiple aspects of the standards down to the finest details. Liner companies have been an integral part of determining which data are shared and how companies, as one ITPCO flyer notes, can “identify the exact areas” that will be optimized. This broad and forgiving language allows companies to select which data they share. It contrasts with the contributions of ports, which are not granted the power to choose which data to share or how but rather are simply “invited to endorse” the standards. Labor unions or governing bodies are not even mentioned (ITPCO n.d.). The constitution of the ITPCO also favors larger conglomerates, meaning that some of the world’s greatest polluters with notorious labor track records are among the primary parties who decide which data, information, and forms of knowledge become the default for ships in port (ITPCO 2020a, 2020b).

The ITPCO erases workers both by not including them in the data and by not involving them in the data negotiations. It thereby conforms to the prevailing climate in shipping, where attempts to enforce more systemic change must meet the demands of the industry’s big players to be practically possible. In Murphy’s (2017) terms, large shipping conglomerates manage many of container shipping’s “tension-filled knots of relations that arrange capacities to persist” (142). Furthermore, if the ITPCO standards are adopted, they might well become the most practical solution for defining data, their categories and fields serving as the de facto requirement for smaller players as well. Through the very constitution of these standards, logistical displacement therefore becomes one facet of capitalist reproduction.

Displacement as Reproduction: Platforms and Data Sharing

The ITPCO data standards are being developed at the same time as several digital platforms that will make use of such standardized data for a range of shipping services. Platforms function as Web sites or interfaces where varied types of data can be combined, mapped, graphed, and compared. One major initiative, PortXchange, is global in its aspirations, and might also further the democratization of shipping by making previously siloed data more widely available and accessible. Yet even such a relatively independent platform must be made practical. As such, PortXchange is also shaped by the role of major shipping conglomerates in ways that perpetuate the narrowly technocratic nature of digitalization processes in the industry.

PortXchange grew out of an earlier initiative in the Port of Rotterdam and is conceived of as a “neutral” company that aspires to “have a positive global impact,” including to “measure, monitor and reduce our own environmental footprint” (PortXchange n.d., 1). As an environmentally conscious startup, PortXchange faces even greater challenges than the ITPCO in terms of requiring sign-on from big players. As such, they are working closely with partners like Shell and Maersk to “mitigate the environmental harm of shipping,” conceptualized in terms of a “mission to increase efficiency” (PortXchange n.d., 1–2). Environmental impact is thus narrowed to mitigation, and mitigation is translated into helping ships avoid extended wait times in port, thereby reducing carbon emissions from idling engines. Such a framing of sustainability as a means to reduce the friction of trade serves to avoid wrestling with the industry’s broader social and environmental effects, and it is thus a cogent example of the redistribution of politics under logistics.

In addition to the platform’s content, PortXchange’s method of encouraging user adoption narrows its potential impact. Data partnerships between established and newer ports are one common method to encourage platform adoption, with the established port helping to digitalize the new port’s workflows, and the new port benefitting from the existing port’s data infrastructures. Such partnerships also rely on the agency of larger players, however. This can be seen by comparing the terms for the sharing of data with the terms for incorporating newer ports into the platform. For example, in 2003 the Omani government began building the port of Sohar as part of a 50–50 joint venture with the Port of Rotterdam Authority, with the intention of future cooperation on digital port management systems (Port of Rotterdam 2020). In return for making their digital infrastructure compatible with Rotterdam’s, Sohar’s owners are assured that their port will operate in such a way that it is legible to international shipping networks.

Yet the costs can be steep, because local authorities do not just agree to adopt particular standards; they also allow for foreign ownership, including 0 percent import duties, 0 percent income tax for international workers, ten- to twenty-five-year exemptions from corporate tax, and preferential visas for foreign employees (Sohar and Freezone 2020). The details of the agreements do push back by providing a threshold for a number of local employees and benefits if the percentage of Omani employees increases over time (Sohar and Freezone n.d.). Yet this will likely result in the piece-wise expansion of a small elite, rather than any more sustained challenge to existing imbalances of power. This then represents an exporting of dominant conditions of labor to new areas as “naturally” more practical solutions instead of thoroughly incorporating safety and other labor concerns through the increased oversight that digitalization might bring. Digitalization is thus allowed to expand and intensify, but not to challenge, the technocratic sphere within which certain political questions, particularly those related to labor, are displaced.

The Uneven Practicality of Distributed Reproduction

Although digitalization might yet bring large-scale changes to container shipping, in the short term actors aim to do what is believed to be practical, the liners in the sense of maximizing profit and new ports and platforms in terms of making concessions to be incorporated into dominant flows. The digitization of container shipping serves as a form of distributed reproduction of existing relations, with technical variation allowed only to the extent that it fails to challenge the status quo. Practicality thus becomes performative in the sense that it produces what it assumes to be true: The changes wrought by digitalization will reinforce existing regional and labor power imbalances. Digitalization is unlikely to ameliorate labor conditions given that workers are only rarely consulted as to its conception or design, and because inclusion in the transformation, by definition, requires the displacement of labor concerns.

Through practicality, the willingness to displace certain forms of politics is thus maintained as a price of entry into digital logistics. As a result, the displacement of politics is not only a personal choice but also a systemic and material necessity for those who wish to take part in logistics at all. Attending to the variability of reproduction makes it possible to understand how sociotechnical change itself is shaped in varied ways by existing dominant actors and uneven landscapes. Yet across much of the variation, existing conglomerates become naturalized as the only practical option, thereby producing digital landscapes in ways that make alternatives impractical if not impossible. This has far-reaching implications for the daily labor of logistical workers, implications that are deserving of further study as these technologies become more widely implemented. In a related vein to the very constitution of logistics as a narrowly technocratic sphere, responses to digitalization that focus on robots and devices might miss other equally or more influential aspects of digital transitions that are omitted from public debate. These include the standards and platforms analyzed here that, to date, have received little attention within national and organized labor approaches to digitalization in Rotterdam and related ports. For often practicality becomes the means for entrenching the displacement of political decisions onto technical ones, of highlighting digital tools at the expense of human workers, and of emphasizing certain processes and aspects of digitalization at the expense of others. Thereby, the physical displacement of goods is carried out only to the extent that it involves little to no redistribution.

Acknowledgments

The author is grateful to Kendra Strauss and two anonymous reviewers for their detailed and very helpful comments. She would also like to thank her family, especially Jayne and its newest member.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jess Bier

JESS BIER is an Assistant Professor of Urban Sociology in the Department of Public Administration and Sociology at Erasmus University Rotterdam, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, 3000 DR. E-mail: [email protected]. Her research interests include critical logistics, digital infrastructures, racial capitalism, decolonization, and feminist theory.