On 03/07/2012 12:57 AM, Mark Andrejevic wrote:
If you boil it down, the valuation of Facebook is based on the promise of
the power of the social graph and detailed forms of targeting and
data-mining to do what? To serve the needs of advertisers. What needs? To
move products and sell services. There may be all kinds of fascinating
networking going on, but in economic terms, Facebook is about selling
cars and iPads, mobile phones, diet supplements, beverages, and so on.
Indeed. And to sell objects is, in our time, to directly command labor:
both the labor of production in distant factories (often in Asia) and
the closer labor of transportation, warehousing, delivery and sales,
which accounts for an ever increasing portion of the hard,
super-exploited work being done in and around the city where I live,
Chicago. Because all six transcontinental rail lines cross in this city,
it's the 3rd biggest container port in the US, an intershipment point
for maritime cargo from both coasts. But almost no one knows this.
Dazzled by Facebook and the like, people have simply forgotten about the
manufacture of goods and the exploitation of largely undocumented labor
forces.
Last weeked at an event put on by the Occupy Chicago Education
Committee, members of the fledging union OUR Walmart were joined by a
guy from Warehouse Workers for Justice. He explained that the essence of
Walmart's success lay in the military science of logistics. Through
just-in-time distribution they are able to cut inventory costs while
constantly maintaining the availability of commodities. "Their ideal
would be to deliver the product you want to the back of the store at the
very moment you enter the front." What he didn't say was that to do so,
they would also have to control what happens in your head and your heart
and your sensorium - the famous flow of desire that Mark Stahlman was
talking about. Or at least, they would need to be able to predict that
flow. Which is where the Facebook data comes in.
I understood what he was talking about for two reasons. One, because I
have been out to Joliet, an hour outside the city, where many of the
multimodal train-to-truck ports are, and where the vast non-descript
warehouses sprawl over the landscape. In fact we're going out there
again today, to a public hearing concerning the case of a woman who was
raped by her supervisor, then thrown into jail for two weeks when she
went to the police. But I also have a few notions of logistics and the
emerging science of global supply chain management: an integrative
system that links data about production, transport, sales and
consumption into an ideally seamless world model. In a relatively short
article, I tried to do a double genealogy of this system.
On the one hand, the article retraces the fifty-year history of
container transport and just-in-time production which has allowed the US
and other rich countries to effectively displace the majority of their
industrial working classes to Asia. And on the other, it describes the
complex science of computerized tracking, representation and predictive
modeling which serves to control the just-in-time flows, and which, as
far as I can tell, was developed out of the theory of systems dynamics
pioneered by JW Forrester back in the 50s and 60s. The text is called
"Do Containers Dream of Electric People?" Here are some excerpts that
point to the role that information garnered from social networking sites
could and does play in such a system:
"With the advent of electronic data interchange (EDI), every aspect of
production, transport, display and sales could be recorded,
communicated, represented and analyzed, so as to continuously map out
the position and trajectory of each single object being handled by a
world-spanning corporation. The result is an “executive information
system” that gives managers centralized access to a continuously
evolving set of logistical data, bringing dynamic simulation over the
line into real-time representation. This provides the unprecedented
ability to rationalize labor at every point along the chain,
accelerating the pace and squeezing workers for higher levels of
productivity. Still it’s not enough for contemporary capitalism. As
systems designer Paul Westerman explains, “Aggressive retailers (like
Wal-Mart) will not stop there; they will continue until all company data
is available for analysis. They will build an enterprise data warehouse.
They give all this information to their internal users (buyers) and
external users (suppliers) to exploit and demand measurable
improvement.” Such is the formula of global supply chain management, in
an information-age economy where the “push” of Fordist industrial
production and state planning has been replaced by the “pull” of giant
retail conglomerates.
"With enterprise data warehousing, the just-in-time machine becomes both
extensively and intensively pervasive. EDI is correlated with cash-flow,
marketing and financing information. Point-of-sale data is associated
with individual names on credit cards, then combined with cascades of
other data gleaned from the Internet, generating behavior profiles that
can be used for the fine-tuning of display and advertising strategies.
The models of optimal future performance built on the analysis of past
actions are then relayed upstream to govern the behavior of workers,
middle managers and suppliers, and downstream to influence consumers,
creating what Westerman calls a “unified data system” (UDS) embracing
every aspect of corporate planning. The big boxes of Wal-Mart now cast a
70-terabyte information shadow. To be sure, the possibilities of UDS
have not yet been fully implemented. EDI is still rare among Chinese
suppliers, while surveillance operators like Google and Facebook are
only beginning to codify and sell our intimate data-bodies. There is no
need to exaggerate the deployment of data integration. But even less can
one ignore the tremendous advances in communication between
manufacturers and distributors, the increasing granularity of
representation that this communication makes possible, and last but not
least, the accelerating absorption of consumer imaginaries into the
managed flows of the pull economy.
"What appears on the horizon is a self-shaping or “autopoetic” modeling
process that can integrate hundreds of millions of individuals and
billions of discrete objects and desires into a single mobility-system,
where every movement is coordinated with every other in real time. The
integrative capacity of this kind of autopoetic system is what defines
the boundary of each corporate entity, struggling against all others to
increase the market-share that it controls. Under these conditions we
live in an “open” world of universal free trade across national borders,
where giant organizations strive to impose closure on mobile
populations. Their computerized map becomes our intimate territory.
"Such a dystopian state was once the exclusive province of science
fiction: Philip K. Dick novels, where androids dreamed of electric
sheep. But the container, having spawned the big box, now seems destined
to bring a world-spanning containment strategy into being. The
electronic dream is to maintain continuous contact between a global
production system and you, the consumer, whose mobility need not signify
uncertainty of behavior. According to this dream, no desire should
linger free without a sale."
http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2011/08/19/do-containers-dream-of-electric-people
Mark says that "Anyone who has studied the media knows that commercial
imperatives don't just shape advertising, they shape the content to
which we are exposed." I totally agree, but I would go further than
that, and say that via computer-enabled techniques of data-gathering,
representation and prediction, commercial imperatives have reshaped
political geography, creating the strange bi-continent of Chimerica, a
single ocean-linked economy whose Chinese population struggles to
produce what its American population struggles to consume. In my view, a
Marxist approach to commercialized social media would situate it as an
essential imaginary moment within this dense network of exchange. When
one attempts to integrate all the distinct "moments" of the contemporary
circuit of capital, what appears is not just a proliferating flow of
mediated desire and a disembodied financial blur, but also a vast,
heavy, back-breaking flow of goods linking poisonous and
hyper-exploitative factories to largely meaningless and deeply
alienating forms of consumption. These flows are commanded by the
financial "momet" and their content and rhythm is increasingly
fine-tuned through data-gathering and pedictive analysis. This is what I
call "the social form of just-in-time-production."
No one can simply be free of such a system. But to achieve some degree
of autonomy from its pervasive shaping power is, I think, the political
and cultural urgency of our time. Paradoxically (as Jon would have it)
this autonomy can only be envisaged when one has first made some effort
to actually perceive the system, which is spread out in broad daylight
and remains - with its grievously exploited laborers - for the most part
invisible.
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