Logistical Worlds

Ned Rossiter
2014 Cultural Studies Review  
The unruly worker, the software glitch, wilful acts of laziness, sabotage and refusal, traffic gridlock, inventory blowouts, customs zealots, flash strikes, protocological conflicts and proliferating standards. Disruption generates logistical nightmares for the smooth--world operations of 'supply chain capitalism'. 1 Contingency prompts control to reroute distribution channels and outsource labour to more business friendly client--states and corporations. Enterprise resource planning (ERP)
more » ... are parameters are adjusted to calibrate key performance indicators (KPIs) in ways that demonstrate enhanced productivity and economic efficiencies. Peasants revolt across IT special economic zones in West Bengal and the infrastructural transformation of farming land comes to a grinding halt. Global architectural firms export Chinese visions of high--speed economies coupled with new world urban integration and social utopias. Shipping container yards and warehouses coordinate the movement of people and things through technologies of remote control. Wharf-side loading and unloading of cargo becomes increasingly automated, with labour displaced by algorithmic tracking devices and human oversight of machine-operations. VOLUME20 NUMBER1 MAR2014 54 These are possible scenarios of Logistical Worlds, a computer game that does not as yet exist. Set against operational fantasies of real--time labour management and the governance of things within logistical industries, this article registers code as a site of struggle for labour and life. Located somewhere between SimCity and the Grand Theft Auto series, Logistical Worlds envisages a multiuser game environment within which players collectively stage wildcat strikes at port facilities, misplace consignments in container yards or write code for patches that mess with models of supply chain integration by rerouting stock to warehouses already burdened with excess inventory. Whether it is a technical process or operative principle, Logistical Worlds explores code as a system of the future--present in which living labour must reckon with logistical regimes of governance and control. -PARAMETERS OF PLAY The tension between the capacity of computational systems to govern in non-representational ways through the rule of code and the various contingencies special to living labour will serve as an analytical architecture in an ongoing study of global supply chains. Initiated by the Transit Labour project, we intend Logistical Worlds to help draw out aspects of these tensions within the parameters of a video game. 2 The term 'parameter' is invoked in two key ways here. First, it is used as a border concept that delimits the range of activity and action. Second, the article draws on the field of computer science where a parameter is understood as a function, command or 'formal argument' that establishes the reference for an 'actual argument', which then executes the command of the parameter. 3 A change in parameters thus alters the operation of a program, model or simulation. In the case of Logistical Worlds, the play of the game is specific to the values that define functions of parameters. This suggests that gameplay is determined by parametric rules, and here one always wants to keep in mind that within game space rules are accompanied and perhaps preconditioned by the possibility of breaking and remaking the rules through the aid of cheat codes and 'mods' (game modifications). 4 The ability to cheat the system is central to the gameplay of Logistical Worlds. Registered through the contingency of the event as it arises through the disruptive force or interpenetration of the constitutive outside, the capacity to break the rules Ned Rossiter-Logistical Worlds 55
doi:10.5130/csr.v20i1.3833 fatcat:pkmbmemmhzgnvnmft2mjmvdsnm