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

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