That’s such an awesome way to end that comment.
What’s the argument against capitalism/international trade in this context? Trade increases the cost of war, which is a good thing, right?
> They write that, “Four years later we found ourselves on the largest container ship in the world on our way from Sweden to China.” As per the trip: “We had started the journey by truck to Middle Sweden, then by freight train to the port of Gothenburg, and after four weeks at sea, we filmed from a truck again, this time from the port of Shenzhen to a factory in Bao’an.”
The idea of following a single, real object from point of manufacture to destination--documenting all the transfers and hiccups along the way--is interesting to me. Presenting it in reverse chronological order is an artistic decision I'm ambivalent about. But it doesn't sound like that's what they did. They didn't track a pedometer; they just took freight vehicles along a path that maybe the thing went on, without following the actual transfer of the item from box to container, from truck to ship, etc.
I'm disappointed. I was ready to actually watch the whole thing. But it's contrived.
I wonder what were they importing on that ship.
Disclaimer, I cut this clip.
Feel free to ask us anything!
official site is logisticsartproject.com
The stream is live now at https://www.twitch.tv/logisticsartproject
The article makes a big deal out of finally seeing a person. Is that person aware of the movie?
Sounds like an interesting film, thanks for answering questions about it.
Yes he is aware that the camera is recording, he needed to wash the windows on the bridge.
Why not simply record the sound near the camera?
I suppose it would be nice if you could view a map with the current position while watching the movie.
What was the easiest?
Any advice for other film-makers?
It was comparatively easy to design the concept, it then took a very long time to implement.
We are not professional filmmakers, but something that helped us was to be stubborn.
It brings me to a story from two years ago about Norwegian (...) fish - branded as "environment friendly" - is sent from Norway to China for filleting, and then back to the market. About 25% of all the cod sold by one of the biggest companies in Norway has endured this trip.
It's worth mentioning that the fish in question comes from "all over the world", but still.
Google translation: https://www-nrk-no.translate.goog/norge/miljomerka-torsk-ver...
A container ship is sailing through a water highway, docks. The containers are getting unloaded/loaded.
I don’t see any info on their page either https://logisticsartproject.com/
I wonder how large (in file size) the final cut was and what codecs were used. Such slow moving footage probably compresses well, but at 857 hours of footage it’s probably still big.
The original film is around 10TB of mpeg2 1080p 25mbit/sec 25 frames per second.
We later transcoded to h264, it now clocks in at about 2TB.
We did livestream it on Youtube back when you could opt out of commercials. And in a way a livestream is our preferred way of showing the work but doing so from home forces us to make sure the stream is running 24/7 for 37 days...
It is extraordinary but then again it's just "the container will be here in three weeks"
Please do tell us where we can see the full work / where it is available.
International trade is not the same thing as capitalism. International trade existed before capitalism, and if capitalism disappeared tomorrow, short of everyone simultaneously adopting anarcho-primitivism, we would still have trade between nations.
And in any case, that's mostly orthogonal to capitalism. Capitalism is far from the only economic system where people keep secrets.
If I wanted to strawman marxists, yes; that is what they believe ;)
To be more real, eh... if you look at how soviets did their planning they really did attempt to have everything "within 15 minutes." While that probably doesn't apply to something as specific as a pedometer... they do tend to extend that philosophy as far as it will go... reasonably or not.
Bit of a stretch. Would anarchist shipping take less time or be less boring somehow?
Someone wants a pedometer, and magically, or not so magically, one appears on a shelf near them, or on their doorstep.
> "Money isn't bounded by time nor space"
Wha? Money is not a constant of the Universe. Expressed as currency, it's explicitly limited to particular regions and eras. I cannot use Finnish markka in the US (bound by space) nor even in Finland (bound by time).
It's literally bounded by time and space, like everything. Seriously, anti-Capitalist rhetoric relies on these sort of poetic images, but cannot level any kind of effective critique.
Since eggs go bad and produce is heavy, maybe we could invent a durable “value storage” or “token” or “fiat” to trade instead. Storage and transmission of this value store could become useful trades in their own right.
This sounds like a very natural thing to do, almost like it would arise on its own without anyone having to _force_ this on anyone, as opposed to literally every other economic system, including your definition. In your “anarchism” how do you enforce the non-ownership of the means of production except by force? Do you force the farmer not to grow anything?
If you ask me though, based on this paragraph they did actually find the world's longest horror film! As for the anti-capitalism hints in the article, try watching an 857 hour film without starving in a non-capitalist economy!
"There came a point about three weeks into my viewing where the maddening, non-Euclidean shape of Logistics fully formed in my mind. I had an unnerving migraine. I could barely get myself together, let alone watch a boat not move for nine hours. I thought about quitting or taking a few days off, but then it occurred to me: the crew of the ship couldn’t quit, and the filmmakers couldn’t take a day off. I was now a part of this filmic thing, and I couldn’t stop until it was done."
we get it, the film is an art piece making a point about how capitalism compresses time and space into inconsequential objects. it was a big undertaking schedule-wise. you don’t have to say this backwards and forwards 5 times
compress your article space and time-wise
this isn’t to say you’re wrong to enjoy it, or that my impressions were correct, just that I felt differently. I’m also extremely aware of the irony of complaining about the length of an article about the experience of watching an 857 hour film, but c’est la, as they say
*i.e. how it is an art piece about capitalism compressing time and space into innocuous objects; and how much of a time and schedule commitment it was for him
>> Logistics may have been birthed into this world in 2012, but the past few years have given the film a second life, with the pandemic laying bare the fragility of just-in-time logistics.
I so hoped we got past that already... JIT had nothing to do, as a root cause that is, with the supply issues the world is facing since the pandemic. I hate this meme so much.
That being said, I live the film project! Even if I would never watch 35 days plus on part of my day job, the idea is great so!
At the core of the current problems are the demand and aupply shocks caused by Covid and lockdowns early on in the pandemic. You can think of it as the same thing that impacted toilet paper, just on a global scale across all industries. Tgen we had the mess of containers not being where they should be (again, due to covid lockdowns and shipping disruptions) which made a recovery from the lockdown induced disruptions difficult. On top of that we have the war in Ukraine, which cut of Ukraine and Russia from flobal trade. While it seems that everything is coming from Ukraine at the moment, it is true that some things do, especially food stuffs and automotive parts. That happened while global supply chains still coped with the effects of Covid disruptions.
What JIT did, again not as a root cause, was to make these disruptions being felt much faster due to lower inventory levels. Not that any JIT was in place between suppliers in China and customers in, e.g. Europe so. With that long trabsportation lead times JIT is just impossible.
Tge alternative so, having huge buffer stocks, would have helped neither. Simply because one component shortage can bring supply chains down. Holding ebough stock of everything to buffer those global issues would require so much inventory that nobody can afford it, or the resulting products. High inventory has its own challenges so, and not per se resilient.
In the puplic mind JIT is associated with zero inventory (JIT aims for the minimum inventory which is never zero in reality). The current issues are, in the publics view, easily explained by insufficient inventory (which they are not). So it is easy to combine those two and blame JIT for everything.
I've been a fan of Matt Stoller's work on monopolies for some time. He's a bit aggressive, but I find his analysis interesting. What do you think of the argument that monopolistic concentration makes issues like this worse? E.g. as put forward in this article https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/too-big-to-sail-how-a-leg...
> In other words, mega-ships like the Ever Given are a new phenomenon that are tied not to economic logic but to the consolidation of ocean carrier lines and their ability to offload risk onto counter parties. As Jensen observed, without the consolidation, “ships would likely not have grown above 12,000-14,000 TEUs [twenty-foot equivalent units].” So we’ve moved from a grid with lots of different size ships owned by different lines that could dock in lots of ports, to one dominated by hundreds of mega-ships that can only go to certain ports, all controlled by a de facto small cartel. The game in the business is to acquire market power and then use mega-ships to offload costs onto others and block new entrants.
Would you watch a real time "movie" of the countless man-years it took to design and develop the infrastructure that made it possible for you to "watch", write and publish about this? I thought so.
This is what the submission redirects me to, a 1x1 image the browser says: data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==
This is meaningless bullshit. The fact you can purchase, for an hour's wage, a digital pedometer than was built on one continent from raw materials from another and then shipped to a third is a breathtaking triumph.
Either you're working or you're watching a movie. I know people who claim they do both at the same time, but I don't think they're actually doing either.
the progression of my career has looked like this:
- need total quiet: no music, no talking.
- some music is fine: it can’t have lyrics though and it’s best if it’s more textural.
- i can listen to (and process the lyrics to) hip hop and rap and still type.
- i can listen to YouTube educationals and catch about a third of the content.
- i can rewatch movies i’ve seen before and keep up with the important plot parts.
sure, for the parts of the day where i’m working out differential equations or solving circuits and such, i go back to silence. but if 90% of your work is just plumbing values from one place to another… if you’ve progressed anywhere along that sequence i listed then i think it’s naive to take that simple “either/or” view of things.
I find neither particularly enjoyable though.
So deep. So profound.
> Logistics is the filmic annihilation of capitalist relations to time by a force of ultra-cinematic space. Logistics isn’t a feat of temporal duration, it’s a feat of spatial presence.
Such overwrought prose. Such "forcing everything into a Marxist framework."
Leonard A. Read talked about the pencil and how no one person could possibly make one, in 1958: https://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/rdPncl.html?chapter_n... and he wasn't the first, either.
The supply chain expands, but the principle stays the same.
One of the reasons Marx is so popular is that his writing is vague enough that people can read a very wide range of meaning into the words. Religious leaders and politicians often follow the same playbook to great success.
Stalin had only read scraps of the first volume, the one that divides people into good and evil, the one that doesn't actually try to find the underlying problem, it was only natural that he was doomed to failure. Imagine being wrong while fully believing your cause to be infallible.
The problem with Marx isn't that he is vague, it is that you have to read 2700 pages of difficult to read text which nobody, not even the staunchest supports have done. Why? Because it would take more than 160 hours to both read and understand what he has written. You may have to reread it twice because the third volume gives you a new context for the first and second.
Marxism is doomed due to bounded rationality.
If no one, including you, has read it, then how can anyone, including you, possibly know whether or not it contains "the good answers"?
I don't think this is true, and I say this as someone who's read Marx (almost) back to back. The ambiguities are sometimes mathematical, and there are debates as to meaning in some places, but the overal thesis and critiques are anything but vague, whether you agree with them or not.
For those interested, I recommend Michael Heinrich's biography of Marx ('Karl Marx and the Birth of Modern Society'; volume 1 covers the young Marx up to the end of his studies and delves deep into the intellectual and political context of that time in Germany and Europe. Very informative.)
His 'An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx's Capital' is on my to-read list:
https://files.libcom.org/files/Karl%20Marx%20and%20the%20Bir...
https://files.libcom.org/files/Michael_Heinrich,_Alex_Locasc...
I imagine the same city folk laughed at all the things country rubes like my grandparents didn't know. Of course, one being the child of an immigrant and the other immigrating as a child, and quite poor to boot, they would have faced plenty of derision for that as well. IIRC they also didn't get indoor plumbing and toilets until the early 1950's, so they probably would have been laughed at for that too.
A farmer be forgiven for believing that their fertilizer is made from manure and not petrochemicals made thousands of miles away?
Speaking of the latter, there's one related phenomenon on TikTok which I never see talked about, but is quite interesting / educational. Some production workers set up a TikTok live feed at work so you can see their part of how things are made or shipped. I've seen factory workers in Vietnam, farmers from all over the world, loggers, construction workers, and too many craftsmen to count. Once had insomnia and ended up watching a 5 AM livestream of a sawmill worker methodically turning various sized tree trunks into uniform planks. That was oddly relaxing and fascinating.
Interesting about TikTok. But all the content niches are so segregated now due to algorithm recommendations, I'm not sure if these are being watched by only the interested, or are they watched by "everyone" in general?
"Computer, 1 whole of chicken please. Roasted."
Every week at least a few end up in the trash, because they turned black and no one wants them anymore
So some dude, thousands of kilometers away, grew his bananas, put them in a boat, for a weeks long trip to Europe, followed by hundreds of kilometers in a truck, to end up in my office trash
This is a simple example
It's not about what was possible before, of course we've been shiping stuff world wide for a long time, it's about the scale and banality of it and the scale and banality of waste that comes with it. Nothing is measured with the "absurdity" scale, everything is measured with the "money" scale. A lot of what we now consider normal is complete madness
Along with millions of other bananas that got eaten. You're arguing against economies of scale here, and you'll need to show your work rather than dismissing long-distance trade as "madness".
Environment, living and working conditions, resources and materials being taken from non-renewables sources, all of those are unimportant under capitalism, all of those are unimportant with capitalism and are the reason why no one asks themselves whether it's really worth shipping fruits from the other side of the world. Sometimes even by plane.
So long before they turn all black, they're taken to the food bank and given away to whomever wants them at their central location. If a banana does make it all the way to black, it means someone bought it and then didn't eat it.
There is actually competition among the food banks for supermarkets' unwanted food. One will go to the supermarket manager and ask for their unwanted food and get told "Sorry, we're already giving it to Second Harvest."
It isn't only produce. The gleaner regularly fills up his car with breads, milk, and lots of other stuff.
I eat plenty banana and almost never throw any away. And when I do, the reason is never "because I didn't eat it in time".
I took a single banana as an example, now think about the millions of animals we slaughter every year which end up straight to the bin etc.
It's like cars, a single car is fine, 1.4 billion cars are not, I think most people just don't comprehend the scale of it all
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13166586-the-fish-that-a...
Capitalism is absurd, what it makes humans do is absurd. It's also useful and has some worthwhile properties.
In trivially provably less efficient ways.
Some things cannot reasonably be produced domestically.
Some things are about attempting to shrink labour costs.
It’s cheaper for Britain to send its shellfish to China to be de-shelled by hand, then send it back than it is to pay some folks to do it in the UK (or mechanise the task).
This is an extreme example (and a real one) that highlights what the parent is talking about.
Even when accounting for the human, fuel, cooling and spoilage cost of shipping around the world it’s “cheaper”, but that doesn’t make sense to me because at the end of it there is much less fuel and much less fish than it would have otherwise been.
There’s also not a strong reason to buy shoes made in China except for economic reasons, and more recently supply chain ones.
We can weave fabrics and we have domestic cotton. However, the economics (pushed cheaper by dirt cheap freight) are emphasising a global supply chain where one isn’t needed in most cases.
I’m picking on China a bit but it applies to basically everything where the labour is cheaper and the supply chain bends itself in a more inefficient path (everything else being equal) to capitalise(heh) on the lower labour costs.
Instead, they’ve decided that minimum wages at home need to be X $£€ and X/100 everywhere else, so they can offshore everything. Nobody is forcing the West to make shoes in China!
