Today the speed of logistics is also largely computational, but this is not to say virtual, immaterial, or distant. Quite the contrary. Supermarket shelves, for example, are a human interface to a vast internet of things: a network of supply-chain, demandchain and customer-relationship management softwares, steel containers, ofshore factories, inter-modal exchange protocolsall forming an unimaginably complex, robust and nimble assembly of everyday purchase commands with vast economies of production and distribution. Today's "fleets-in-being" are the exabytes and gigatons of component inven�ories in permanent transit, hurtling between trade zones as the consumable artifacts of their sponsoring corporations' technological and legal eficiencies. Finally, these (disin)corporations and their far-flung suppliers of parts, labor, and expertise, guard nothing so dearly as the legal agency of brands, those operational fictions which they so carefully embed into the demographically-microsegmented experiential touch-points of everyday life. This "flat world" imagines itself as slippery, oceanic grid modulated by diferentially transporting, activating, internalizing, and/or prophylactically exteriorizing technologies: from shipping ports to aerotropoli, from banking software GUis (graphical user interfaces) to web browser layout engines and - data security protocols. Like an Andreas Gursky photograph, this "frictionless" landscape of interconnected objects and subjects is the constitution of a new architecture, one that relies on fragile alibis of virtual immateriality and procedural transparency to achieve the political, economic eficacy it enjoys. The reality of its performance, however, is also a uncontrollable accumulation of-very real and opaque-unintended consequences.
Introduction: Logistics of Habitable Circulation
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