The injuries of platform logistics

Abstract

In order to understand the social impact of digital platforms, we need to examine the ways in which they reconfigure space – not only through critique of that reconfiguring but also examination of the conditions within the spaces it forms. This article offers a typology of the injuries enacted by platform logistics, taking online retail as its focus and using Amazon as an exemplar. Cognitive Injury occurs when platforms act to conceal their operation from the awareness of users. Hidden Injury is enacted on the invisible labour that sustains platform functionality, a precarious workforce that labours under harsh conditions and within hostile spaces, somewhere below the cognisance of the user. Moral Injury speaks of the way that platform logistics, in concealing from awareness the conditions that sustain its operation, attacks the ability of users, or of a society at large, to act with responsibility. These injuries are shown to be at play in the processes that facilitate buying online and order fulfilment. It is argued that the speed of purchasing and delivery enacts an unconscious consumption, which dislocates users from the labour that delivers the goods, creating a kind of perceptual pollution that diminishes a sense of moral responsibility.

Trajectories in platform capitalism

“…The ubiquity of Amazon -a product of its easy interface and the tendency of platforms towards de facto monopoly -programmes users as ubiquitous consumers, casting consumption as an 'unnoticed component of social reality ' (McGuigan andManzerolle 2015, 1832), a kind of unconscious act that goes unquestioned because the arrival of our orders gives no answers as to their origin or the labours that brought them to our door (see Hill 2020). The fulfilment of desire becomes automatic.…”

“…And this comes to bear on how we understand the orchestration of trajectories by platform systems such as Amazon, where moving bodies are traced by sensors to escalate and accelerate work tasks (Moore and Robinson 2016), where automated headsets dictate the orientations of workers in logistical spaces (Kanngieser 2013), and where apps plot out courses that are often haphazard and unsafe (Hill 2020). Amazon labour incorporates the worker's body and its trajectories into the platform's machinery (see Delfanti 2021).…”

“…An attention to moral experience allows us to look past ethical consumerism and focus instead on how platforms construct experiences in such a way that they obscure the real violence of capital. If we think not of ethical consumption but of the consumption of morality, its depletion and degradation as a mode of awareness, then we better understand how moral agency is turned away from the injuries of platform capitalism and how those injurious conditions become entrenched (see Hill 2020). Overall, by looking at the everyday experience of platforms and what this ordering of agency achieves, we can better understand how platforms, as Srnicek (2017a, 3) puts it, give capital 'priority of agency'.…”

Browsing with Alexa: Interrogating the impact of voice assistants as web interfaces

“…By re-presenting information as the utterance of an assistant, moreover, its source may be obfuscated and labor erased (Hill, 2020). For instance, Wikipedia is used by voice assistants as a knowledge source to answer user queries.…”

“…Ultimately, voice assistants such as Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant can only exist embedded within a wider system of material and algorithmic structures that guarantee market dominance to companies such as Amazon, Apple, and Google (Hill, 2020). They are gateways to the cloud-based resources administered by these companies.…”