Digital platforms, new energy configurations

“The faster the logistical orchestra accelerates the flow of commodities, the greater the ability to interrupt them”: this is the focus of the Black Box Collective Research Project’s latest book, capital borders. How New Logistics Organization and the Power of Algorithms Changed the World (Red Star Press, p. 258, 22 eur).

in success A (voluntarily messy) ensemble of scenes and footage, the book weaves along two lines of research that have characterized Into the Black Box’s academic and political work over the past decade. Logistics, on the other hand, is taken not only as a research topic, but also as a methodological lens through which to interrogate “the city, production, factory and citizenship” in its transformations and in its contemporary assemblages. Thus the narrative displaced the neutral rationalism that regulates the smooth spaces of capitalist circulation, the logistics became rather a logic that produces, and also resorts to violence, new spaces and formations of power in competition or cooperation with the state. Another quest line, which was already opened earlier Capitalism 4.0. Genealogy of the Digital Revolution (Meltemi, p. 178, 16 eur), focuses on a capitalist platform. What ends up under the lens is the city as a logistical space organized by digital platforms. By mining data and carrying out informal activities, platforms define social, political, and economic relationships. In short, the infrastructures whose soft power produces dystopian imaginings about the future, work, and society are created.

Joint search In the Black Box embodies a double movement: if capital continually disturbs production and reproduction, class struggle continually calls these new forms of control and exploitation into question. Here we find the political heart of the investigation, made up of an active participation in the struggles of northern Italian logistics workers and food delivery riders. However, the logistics and platforms do not exhaust the richness of the (rather recent) contributions gathered in the book, which also touch on global history, the geographies of contemporary capitalism, the relations of production and reproduction, and the intersection of digital technologies, labor and exploitation. On these issues, In the Black Box eschews obvious answers, inviting readers into a process of assembling and deconstructing the research, hypotheses, and suggestions collected in the volume. In presenting its research in a degenerate manner and without resorting to linear reconstructions, the group indeed releases a challenge, but at the same time presents its entire course, reinforcing its intuition (for example, the idea of ​​counter-logistics revolution), but without masking overlaps, awkwardness and absence.

so that it overlaps, analyzes of production and circulation conflicts; Missing, to reproduce. However, reproductive work in 4.0 is changing thanks to logistics and platforms, two cornerstones of Into the Black Box research. In particular, it intensifies and extends through the reproduction of hierarchies of gender, race, and class beyond geographic and political boundaries, making social reproduction an arena of transnational class struggle. Watch the battles of essential workers, mostly women and immigrants, during the pandemic crisis. It is an insignificant piece, without which the “counter-logistics” risks turning into a bet on the possibility of an algorithm and a trade union platform, ignoring the forms of refusal and interruption of work already practiced by people who proceed from capitalism. It invests at the level of social and corporate reproduction.

However , The method of counter-logistics remains a very valuable approach that, while taking a closer look at the struggles of reproduction, has the potential to speak of class struggle far from an outdated orthodoxy that does not conform to the definition of Capitalism 4.0. An approach that allows a group of researchers to address the joints of their studies not only in their theoretical implications, but through political practice