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You've probably hit that little orange button on the world's largest e-commerce platform, but have you ever thought about the complexity and orchestration that is required to make whatever you want appear at your doorstep in no more than two days? Mims is a technology journalist by trade, and he traces the journey of a hypothetical USB charger from a factory in Vietnam to a house in the United States. This book is a fascinating tour of many facets of Logistics Space, and the people who make it work, with the book structured around extended interviews. And with global supply chains snarled by COVID-19, war in Ukraine, and the occasional shipping accident in the Suez Canal, the ability of things to (mostly) arrive today is a wonder.
Container cranes at the Port of Rotterdam. Wikimedia
The journey starts via cargo ship and shipping container, the omnipresent 40 foot boxes which contain pretty much every finished product we use, and the massive ships which carry them. There are nods to The Box by Levinson and Ninety Percent of Everything by George, but this is mostly prelude. The first bit of real action comes at the Port of Los Angeles/Port of Long Beach, where immense cranes rapidly unload containers onto automated carriers, which constantly shuffle containers to make sure that the ones which are to be loaded onto trucks and railcars immediately are at the top of the stack. The port is overseen by dwindling ranks of longshoremen, who's union made a Faustian bargain for some of the only decent wages of anyone in this story in return for unlimited automation that constantly cuts their numbers.
Long-haul trucking is the next branch. There are millions of commercial truckers who are vital to making things move, and they have tough lives driving massive big rigs in traffic and spending long weeks on the road. Trucking was substantially deregulated in the 1970s, lowering costs, but also cutting salaries from six figures in contemporary dollars to an average of $48,000 a year. I'm interested in following up with sociologist Steve Viscelli, who is producing scholarly work on truckers.
The truck finally arrives at an Amazon fulfillment center, and this is where Mims launches into the rhetoric of the technological sublime as it relates to logistics and its culminating ideology, Bezosism. More than the scientific management of Taylorism, or the integrated production line of Fordism, Bezosism is a a total transformation of the solidity of stuff into the fluidity of an endless stream, weaving across shipping lanes and warehouses to be distributed evenly and precisely over the world. Bezosism is also a system of psychological management, not one of drill sergeant-like abuse, but of precisely calibrated metrics that ensure that a worker is moving as fast as they safely can, that they handle the sticky bits of sorting random loose items and stacking boxes that a child can do, and a billion dollar robotics program cannot. Mims' assessment of Amazon is based on his own interviews and On the Clock by Guendelsberger (one of my favorite books of 2021), as well as The Everything Store by Stone, but has its own unique spin.
Mims is a Wall Street Journal writer by day, and while he is captured by the sublime of logistics and the coolness of new technologies making it ever faster, he's also about as critical as he can be. In many respects, these are awful jobs: psychologically tedious and alienating, physically strenuous, and paying peanuts. The broken families of truckers and sailors, and the rising tide of people disabled by repetitive stress injuries in warehouses, are hidden social costs of a system which is reliable, fast, and cheap. Mims' sympathy has an aspect of the Great White Hunter tsk'ing 'shame' over a freshly killed tiger, and then reloading his rifle for another shot. Crocodile tears aside, this is a fascinating story about the people and tools of moving stuff in 2020, both engaging and deep, and synthesizing many books I like and ones I want to read into a cohesive whole.
You've probably hit that little orange button on the world's largest e-commerce platform, but have you ever thought about the complexity and orchestration that is required to make whatever you want appear at your doorstep in no more than two days? Mims is a technology journalist by trade, and he traces the journey of a hypothetical USB charger from a factory in Vietnam to a house in the United States. This book is a fascinating tour of many facets of Logistics Space, and the people who make it work, with the book structured around extended interviews. And with global supply chains snarled by COVID-19, war in Ukraine, and the occasional shipping accident in the Suez Canal, the ability of things to (mostly) arrive today is a wonder.
Container cranes at the Port of Rotterdam. Wikimedia
The journey starts via cargo ship and shipping container, the omnipresent 40 foot boxes which contain pretty much every finished product we use, and the massive ships which carry them. There are nods to The Box by Levinson and Ninety Percent of Everything by George, but this is mostly prelude. The first bit of real action comes at the Port of Los Angeles/Port of Long Beach, where immense cranes rapidly unload containers onto automated carriers, which constantly shuffle containers to make sure that the ones which are to be loaded onto trucks and railcars immediately are at the top of the stack. The port is overseen by dwindling ranks of longshoremen, who's union made a Faustian bargain for some of the only decent wages of anyone in this story in return for unlimited automation that constantly cuts their numbers.
Long-haul trucking is the next branch. There are millions of commercial truckers who are vital to making things move, and they have tough lives driving massive big rigs in traffic and spending long weeks on the road. Trucking was substantially deregulated in the 1970s, lowering costs, but also cutting salaries from six figures in contemporary dollars to an average of $48,000 a year. I'm interested in following up with sociologist Steve Viscelli, who is producing scholarly work on truckers.
The truck finally arrives at an Amazon fulfillment center, and this is where Mims launches into the rhetoric of the technological sublime as it relates to logistics and its culminating ideology, Bezosism. More than the scientific management of Taylorism, or the integrated production line of Fordism, Bezosism is a a total transformation of the solidity of stuff into the fluidity of an endless stream, weaving across shipping lanes and warehouses to be distributed evenly and precisely over the world. Bezosism is also a system of psychological management, not one of drill sergeant-like abuse, but of precisely calibrated metrics that ensure that a worker is moving as fast as they safely can, that they handle the sticky bits of sorting random loose items and stacking boxes that a child can do, and a billion dollar robotics program cannot. Mims' assessment of Amazon is based on his own interviews and On the Clock by Guendelsberger (one of my favorite books of 2021), as well as The Everything Store by Stone, but has its own unique spin.
Mims is a Wall Street Journal writer by day, and while he is captured by the sublime of logistics and the coolness of new technologies making it ever faster, he's also about as critical as he can be. In many respects, these are awful jobs: psychologically tedious and alienating, physically strenuous, and paying peanuts. The broken families of truckers and sailors, and the rising tide of people disabled by repetitive stress injuries in warehouses, are hidden social costs of a system which is reliable, fast, and cheap. Mims' sympathy has an aspect of the Great White Hunter tsk'ing 'shame' over a freshly killed tiger, and then reloading his rifle for another shot. Crocodile tears aside, this is a fascinating story about the people and tools of moving stuff in 2020, both engaging and deep, and synthesizing many books I like and ones I want to read into a cohesive whole.