That concrete box off the freeway wasn’t designed for storage so much as capture—of markets, workers, and, now, people detained by immigration agents. It’s a disappearing machine. We need to see it clearly:
Picture the warehouse, then another: each one marked by indistinction. From the air, they resemble data chips, casting sharp shadows on the hard parking lots. We could be in suburban Chicago, or San Bernadino, or a floodplain south of Dallas—any flattened periphery where distance is abstracted into commercial time. How quickly can a thing get from here to a zip code of consumers, or simply the next delivery node? The warehouse is a place where placelessness is produced. Or it wants to be…. [F]ew building types have a larger footprint and a greater impact on landscapes and lives. If warehouses are missing from the collective cultural atlas of North America, that’s by design. Logistics companies track everything that passes through these loading doors, but they don’t want to be tracked themselves. They don’t want to be perceived, known, situated, emplaced, by journalists or workplace safety officers or labor activists. Invisibility is efficient.
More pics about labor
You Could Be Next
“Laid-off lawyers, history PhDs, and scientists are now part of a miserable gig economy in which they’re teaching AI how to do their old jobs.”
Say Goodbye to the Undersea Cable That Made the Global Internet Possible
“History was unmade last year, as engineers began the massive project of ripping the first-ever transoceanic fiber-optic cable from the ocean floor. Just don’t mention sharks.”
‘Fill It With Reality’
“A girl from my home country told me such upsetting things about her life at her employers’ house that I swore to get to the bottom of it.”
