Suchergebnisse

This book describes new affective and material modes of print media consumption that emerged in the nineteenth century, when ephemeral printed material and objects became part of everyday modern life. It offers a history of our own moment of digital absorption, information addiction, and social media obsession

The early 2020s commonplace that everything seems a bit unreal is a material truth. Not only our shoes and handbags, but our makeup, phone chargers, glassware, and medications; our oven mitts and bike helmets and airplane parts; the components in our intravenous drip machines and defibrillators, the brakes of our high-speed trains - all may be counterfeit. Counterfeit goods are generally substandard ones that infringe intellectual property rights. The iconic examples are fake Louis Vuitton handbags and Nike Air Jordan sneakers, but fakes can now be found across the whole spectrum of retail and wholesale consumption (Suthivarakom, 2020). Advances in logistics are generating more counterfeits. The burgeoning volume of containerized shipping is increasing the trade in fakes, since the greater surveillance that would detect them would also slow down the flow of legitimate goods. Beginning around 2018, the rise in online shopping, small parcel delivery, and social media shopping multiplied the sales of counterfeits on platforms such as Amazon, Alibaba, Instagram, and TikTok, ushering in a new era of indiscernible copycats of non-luxury products. Pandemic lockdowns exacerbated the problem, creating demand for counterfeit semiconductors and personal protective equipment. Logistics - typically understood to move existing products - creates markets for new, criminal ones. The desire for speed and convenience has given us a counterfeit world of goods. The glib twentieth-century notion of phoniness in The Graduate's ironic advice to Benjamin Braddock ("there's a great future in plastics") has taken a darker turn. Now even the plastic is not really plastic.

AbstractThis essay explores the road and the chain as material and ideological forms of logistical and infrastructural power. Focusing on threechain gang narratives, John L. Spivak's Hard Times on a Southern Chain Gang (1932), Elliot Burns's I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain (1932), and its film adaptation, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang! (1932), the essay shows how these white-authored stories imagine the extraction of Black male labor in the construction of road infrastructure in the early twentieth-century southern United States. The essay demonstrates how logistics—the art and science of moving goods, people, and information efficiently to maximize profit—inheres in the infrastructures it calls into being. It traces the history of the chain gang through the shackles used to immobilize enslaved people on the ship, in the coffle, and on plantations, contending that such iron implements are infrastructure that helped build the nation. Chain gangs similarly relied on the forced labor of Black men who were routinely rounded up, incarcerated, and set to work on roads that tantalized them with the freedom of mobility while punishing them with backbreaking labor and physical torture. Chain gangs were a logistical phenomenon, the supply of labor at the right time and right place to maximize profit for private capital, which obtained this free labor through its collusion with the state. In this case study, the logistical aspect of infrastructure articulates it not as a promise of the common good, but as a threat against the disenfranchised whose freedom was abridged to make it.

Some assembly required / John Durham Peters -- Introduction: The logistics of media / Matthew Hockenberry, Nicole Starosielski, and Susan Zieger -- Habits of assembly / Stefano Harney and Fred Moten -- Inter: Storage solutions -- "Shipped": paper, print, and the Atlantic slave trade / Susan Zieger -- Inter: Logistical magic -- Pan-African logistics / Ebony Coletu -- Inter: The march of data -- The pulse of global passage : listening to logistics / Shannon Mattern -- Inter: beneath the Great White Way -- Colonization's logistical media: the ship and the document / Liam Cole Young -- Inter: Always already assembled -- "Every man within earshot" : auditory efficiency in the time of the telephone / Matthew Hockenberry -- Inter: Logistical software -- Logistical media theory, the politics of time, and the geopolitics of automation / Ned Rossiter -- Inter: "It's loud and it's tasteless and I've heard it before" -- Carry that weight : the costs of delivery and the ecology of vinyl records' revival / Michael Palm -- Inter: Sound from a music container -- Supply chain cinema, supply chain education : training creative wizardry for offshored exploitation / Kay Dickinson -- Inter: Forklift cinema -- The politics of cable supply from the British Empire to Huawei Marine / Nicole Starosielski -- Inter: Who watches the watchers? -- Laugh out loud / Tung-Hui Hu.