Have you ever gazed at an opened Amazon box and contemplated the entire history of paper packaging? No? Well, you’re in luck. Shannon Mattern’s thoughtful and well-researched essay on the history of the cardboard box and the art and science of paper packaging is the deep dive you didn’t know you needed.
As historian Maria Rentetzi writes, “the cardboard box — the waste of our commercial world — is recycled in such a way as to make visible the disorder in our societies, the faults of capitalism.” 7 It is an abject object that touches all parts of the city, from the granite kitchen island to the sewer grate. And for many of us, the cardboard box is our closest touchpoint to globalized trade, structuring our relations with people in distant places. 8 It brings the logistics chain to our doorstep. The magnificently ripped metal freight container may get the Economist cover shot, but the plain brown box delivers messages to our homes. 9 Its very existence in our homes, Marshall McLuhan would say, is the message. In the immortal words of Walter Paepcke, founder of the Container Corporation of America, “packages are not just commodities; they are communications.” 10
