https://landscapes-of-fulfillment.org Landscapes of Fulfillment Mon, 21 Oct 2019 20:45:34 +0000 https://landscapes-of-fulfillment.org en https://landscapes-of-fulfillment.org/Home-1 Sat, 03 Aug 2019 15:33:07 +0000 Landscapes of Fulfillment https://landscapes-of-fulfillment.org/Home-1 Interfaces Frontiers <img width="930" height="157" width_o="930" height_o="157" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b46399dca75fc180876dbff1adbfd45c743d8640a3d77e786cd38c803a48db2f/CircuitSlowLargeLess.gif" data-mid="47960640" border="0" data-no-zoom src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/930/i/b46399dca75fc180876dbff1adbfd45c743d8640a3d77e786cd38c803a48db2f/CircuitSlowLargeLess.gif" /> Fulfillment describes a feeling of deep contentment. It is also the process of picking, packing, and shipping e-commerce orders — often gathered under the larger category of logistics. The work collected here, produced during 2018 and 2019 by participants in a seminar at the Yale School of Architecture, explores the ways in which the processes, actors, and technologies related to fulfillment actively shape the built environment. &nbsp; Fulfillment Landscapes <img width="462" height="296" width_o="462" height_o="296" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/863d5f23cd63251837c86c34eff68a3408dded0a8b4b38d02b7ffb5ef5a30857/RoadTaller.gif" data-mid="47942788" border="0" data-scale="100" data-no-zoom src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/462/i/863d5f23cd63251837c86c34eff68a3408dded0a8b4b38d02b7ffb5ef5a30857/RoadTaller.gif" /> <img width="462" height="190" width_o="462" height_o="190" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/5acd0c39b4dd2ffb8fe51de4424e8cd323532b0721b2f3f1db1128f035189bde/BarcodeTaller.gif" data-mid="47942830" border="0" data-no-zoom src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/462/i/5acd0c39b4dd2ffb8fe51de4424e8cd323532b0721b2f3f1db1128f035189bde/BarcodeTaller.gif" /> Of Landscapes Of Fulfillment describes a feeling of deep contentment. It is also the process of picking, packing, and shipping e-commerce orders — often gathered under the larger category of logistics. The work collected here, produced during 2018 and 2019 by participants in a seminar at the Yale School of Architecture, explores the ways in which the processes, actors, and technologies related to fulfillment actively shape the built environment. Fulfillment https://landscapes-of-fulfillment.org/About-Page Fri, 18 Oct 2019 19:36:08 +0000 Landscapes of Fulfillment https://landscapes-of-fulfillment.org/About-Page <img width="930" height="157" width_o="930" height_o="157" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/25ba60dfc2b1dd15214ec31e4080db61012210d9855ff7830a28edc3b9c247cd/CircuitSlowLargeLess2.jpg" data-mid="52949755" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/930/i/25ba60dfc2b1dd15214ec31e4080db61012210d9855ff7830a28edc3b9c247cd/CircuitSlowLargeLess2.jpg" /> Landscapes of Fulfillment is a seminar taught by Jesse LeCavalier at the Yale School of Architecture during his appointment as the Daniel Rose Visiting Assistant Professor. All work is the the property of the authors credited, unless otherwise noted. This site was designed by Page Comeaux with the support of Dean Deborah Berke and the Yale School of Architecture. Please send corrections and comments to: info@jesse-lecavalier.com Fulfillment Landscapes Of Landscapes Of Landscapes of Fulfillment is a seminar taught by Jesse LeCavalier at the Yale School of Architecture during his appointment as the Daniel Rose Visiting Assistant Professor. All work is the the property of the authors credited, unless otherwise noted. This site was designed by Page Comeaux with the support of Dean Deborah Berke and the Yale School of Architecture. Please send corrections and comments to: info@jesse-lecavalier.com Fulfillment https://landscapes-of-fulfillment.org/Barcode-Source-Book Sat, 06 Jul 2019 19:02:00 +0000 Landscapes of Fulfillment https://landscapes-of-fulfillment.org/Barcode-Source-Book Interfaces ← The Barcode Sourcebook <img width="3840" height="2496" width_o="3840" height_o="2496" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e3e0b9e225f81dd127ee9bb7cf146a944d143fe3349820ce7bf4b6cc6b03e46e/Barcode1.jpg" data-mid="46628933" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/e3e0b9e225f81dd127ee9bb7cf146a944d143fe3349820ce7bf4b6cc6b03e46e/Barcode1.jpg" /> David Knowles / 2018 Yale School of Art &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; The Barcode Sourcebook is a catalog of patents, standards, and histories surrounding the creation of the machine-readable languages which make landscapes of logistics possible today.<img width="3840" height="2496" width_o="3840" height_o="2496" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/cebf0c22e90def830d3c3d2d8e11e0e6f1a342067491c17970021c5c3d2834c0/Barcode5.jpg" data-mid="46628943" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/cebf0c22e90def830d3c3d2d8e11e0e6f1a342067491c17970021c5c3d2834c0/Barcode5.jpg" /> <img width="3840" height="2496" width_o="3840" height_o="2496" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/80f238b22d0842d97458d38e02505389e1d407893d39fa32688f7ad7d58b79a8/Barcode2.jpg" data-mid="46628934" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/80f238b22d0842d97458d38e02505389e1d407893d39fa32688f7ad7d58b79a8/Barcode2.jpg" /><img width="3840" height="2496" width_o="3840" height_o="2496" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b4f7ba4ddace2ee0d8fbd05ab6ffaf305e8ada0ea0f55cf1f367afa6af8c3b56/Barcode3.jpg" data-mid="46628936" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/b4f7ba4ddace2ee0d8fbd05ab6ffaf305e8ada0ea0f55cf1f367afa6af8c3b56/Barcode3.jpg" /> <img width="3840" height="2496" width_o="3840" height_o="2496" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/98e523637afa6c1a61ff1af436000d26f729942bf50e9e4ef81fff115311c321/Barcode4.jpg" data-mid="46628939" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/98e523637afa6c1a61ff1af436000d26f729942bf50e9e4ef81fff115311c321/Barcode4.jpg" /> <img width="3840" height="2496" width_o="3840" height_o="2496" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/42c9c284d97470b45f295fca6752b3caf642344f2dcf7c3aecfe8e85583a30ca/6588255a-3575-473b-9dea-b22efa230165_rw_3840.jpg" data-mid="46628932" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/42c9c284d97470b45f295fca6752b3caf642344f2dcf7c3aecfe8e85583a30ca/6588255a-3575-473b-9dea-b22efa230165_rw_3840.jpg" />Visit Website ↗ https://landscapes-of-fulfillment.org/Reverse-Logistics Wed, 07 Aug 2019 01:15:35 +0000 Landscapes of Fulfillment https://landscapes-of-fulfillment.org/Reverse-Logistics Interfaces ← &nbsp; Reverse Logistics <img width="1474" height="1066" width_o="1474" height_o="1066" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/970570f74849bf3ac65f5d9cf0e4f72991c8f9a76f2330bedef2a24852ec28ac/1_2B.jpg" data-mid="48114430" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/970570f74849bf3ac65f5d9cf0e4f72991c8f9a76f2330bedef2a24852ec28ac/1_2B.jpg" /> Erin Kim / 2019 Yale School of Architecture Landscapes of Fulfillment explores the mechanisms of logistics that enable entities, such as Amazon, to deliver a product in ways that were not possible only a decade ago. However, this project explores Amazon Return Services in an attempt to understand how a new kind of Reverse Logistics may be able to exploit errors in the system.Reverse Logistics started with return services, which is an important customer service that addresses problems and issues with delivered items. Reverse Logistics cannot happen without human intervention. There are numerous subjective reasons fo returning an item: Logistical error, subjective opinions, unethical intentions etc. The research will first illustrate the world of Amazon Return Services, then it will study the change in value at the hand of Reverse Logistics. Finally, it will conclude by testing the limits of the system by adding a human dimension. The Process <img width="996" height="373" width_o="996" height_o="373" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a36e8d24f33c20834433e30fe3972364683b30a5989e07f6104b33b3fc73b7a4/1_1B2.jpg" data-mid="48114431" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/996/i/a36e8d24f33c20834433e30fe3972364683b30a5989e07f6104b33b3fc73b7a4/1_1B2.jpg" /> Tradidtional methods of merchandise delivery transport items from the manufacturer to the consumer, occasionally with a supplier like Amazon or a retail store in between. <img width="1064" height="399" width_o="1064" height_o="399" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/303c99e5d113cd0789e1c19282279af24e56fdf706ce21c3fd5bc7583dc4056a/1_1B.jpg" data-mid="48114432" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/303c99e5d113cd0789e1c19282279af24e56fdf706ce21c3fd5bc7583dc4056a/1_1B.jpg" /> When items are returned, the manufacturer is not able to recieve the original item, which then allows it to enter into the reuse market. Returned items will either be sent to an overseas remarketer or trader or most often back to the supplier or original vendor. <img width="1728" height="515" width_o="1728" height_o="515" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7c765c518bfe203b0b837eba5073e086356c7a1c9ebe74e1a5f1eeeb136bdb40/1_8B.jpg" data-mid="48114424" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/7c765c518bfe203b0b837eba5073e086356c7a1c9ebe74e1a5f1eeeb136bdb40/1_8B.jpg" /> If an item cannot be resold in its original condition, it enters the liquidation market, where Amazon offloads returned items at a discounted rate regardless of condition. Case Studies 1. Frustration Consumers have many reasons for returning items, but most often the item is difficult to operate, or was damaged in the shipping process. <img width="1591" height="1002" width_o="1591" height_o="1002" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7e5d2efac0ffb06596f6a783299341871f2e32ab0e67e77ff89bd0e4a0d70750/1_3B2.jpg" data-mid="48114428" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/7e5d2efac0ffb06596f6a783299341871f2e32ab0e67e77ff89bd0e4a0d70750/1_3B2.jpg" /> <img width="1630" height="1007" width_o="1630" height_o="1007" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d033e5d469a49de35200ba0876473682d34151a6d1c3dca6e2c8abfceab5bcb0/1_4B.jpg" data-mid="48114427" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/d033e5d469a49de35200ba0876473682d34151a6d1c3dca6e2c8abfceab5bcb0/1_4B.jpg" /> 2. Taking Advantage <img width="1441" height="1337" width_o="1441" height_o="1337" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d28a2ccd3f06ba8694ebc7a38671cc6c786ac56e3c5acf4a533dc9d4aa239d32/1_7B.jpg" data-mid="48114425" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/d28a2ccd3f06ba8694ebc7a38671cc6c786ac56e3c5acf4a533dc9d4aa239d32/1_7B.jpg" /> <img width="1670" height="522" width_o="1670" height_o="522" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/59a7c52087ae93902dac94da31f160477d5e0d925de720e85f19b7b7dedf599f/1_6B.jpg" data-mid="48114426" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/59a7c52087ae93902dac94da31f160477d5e0d925de720e85f19b7b7dedf599f/1_6B.jpg" /> Occasionally, consumers will take advantage of the returns process to “rent” their items for a short period of time, then purposly damage the items in order to return them for a refund. Searching for Value The Reverse Logistics process may open new possibilities for value in damaged or unique items. <img width="1402" height="1749" width_o="1402" height_o="1749" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c43c55d98422a631d643fad68cf4108d317b654a1353c4cdb350789e67faec36/2_3.jpg" data-mid="48114421" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/c43c55d98422a631d643fad68cf4108d317b654a1353c4cdb350789e67faec36/2_3.jpg" /> <img width="997" height="846" width_o="997" height_o="846" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/1df14f27fad7918b3d6e6eb35ef74f62b223c5ef51dd0a9218cd2dbcd91871ee/2_4.jpg" data-mid="48114420" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/997/i/1df14f27fad7918b3d6e6eb35ef74f62b223c5ef51dd0a9218cd2dbcd91871ee/2_4.jpg" /> <img width="1954" height="1243" width_o="1954" height_o="1243" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/645d152c06eed4c7dc06a720515852444f206008556c7912acf1517098546393/2_1.jpg" data-mid="48114423" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/645d152c06eed4c7dc06a720515852444f206008556c7912acf1517098546393/2_1.jpg" /> Applying Reverse Logistics The research led me to apply the principles of Reverse logistics, using Amazon Return Services. I ordered a copy of the book, “Letters from a Nut” by Ted L. Nancy. <img width="1976" height="1471" width_o="1976" height_o="1471" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4935d6da6f50564fe966c67fc06fdf37911c6c4485d60d005ca5f39c07e5cf4e/3_9.jpg" data-mid="48114411" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/4935d6da6f50564fe966c67fc06fdf37911c6c4485d60d005ca5f39c07e5cf4e/3_9.jpg" /> I proceeded to print a copy of the return label and sent the book back to Amazon. <img width="1350" height="2075" width_o="1350" height_o="2075" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/70a43a8f7c03676fbe77ef0a05cdd674aa8b832eaaaaed9e701e958cbc564f8d/3_7.jpg" data-mid="48114413" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/70a43a8f7c03676fbe77ef0a05cdd674aa8b832eaaaaed9e701e958cbc564f8d/3_7.jpg" /> I recieved confirmation that Amazon had recieved my return (before it could have possibly had a chance to reach them), which prompted me to print another copy of the return label and sent them a treat. <img width="1956" height="1464" width_o="1956" height_o="1464" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/97918953b06a8c12cc27593a816df7486fbe29dcf46d2a1d7438a87799b5abc5/3_6.jpg" data-mid="48114414" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/97918953b06a8c12cc27593a816df7486fbe29dcf46d2a1d7438a87799b5abc5/3_6.jpg" /> <img width="1548" height="1937" width_o="1548" height_o="1937" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c7eb915fab8733d4f8e9e84e328241f5e321583f2bfad856970472e4188d8de1/3_5.jpg" data-mid="48114415" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/c7eb915fab8733d4f8e9e84e328241f5e321583f2bfad856970472e4188d8de1/3_5.jpg" /> https://landscapes-of-fulfillment.org/The-New-American-Company-Town Sun, 04 Aug 2019 15:52:24 +0000 Landscapes of Fulfillment https://landscapes-of-fulfillment.org/The-New-American-Company-Town Territories ← The New American Company Town <img width="750" height="773" width_o="750" height_o="773" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/fab3c5557ba3cdec83f8f65e2dfa07570a8fd7acfd5af2cafe516d504dca20b9/The-New-American-Company-Town-1.jpg" data-mid="47946455" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/750/i/fab3c5557ba3cdec83f8f65e2dfa07570a8fd7acfd5af2cafe516d504dca20b9/The-New-American-Company-Town-1.jpg" /> Sam Zeif / 2018 Yale School of Architecture “You load sixteen tons, what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt. Saint Peter don’t you call me ‘cause I can’t go I owe my soul to the company store.” Tennessee Ernie FordIn 2025, when Facebook completes its latest corporate campus extension in Menlo Park, CA, it’s workforce of 35,000 will equal the city’s population [1]. Less than four miles south on Highway 101, Google has reached an agreement with the city of Mountain View to develop nearly 10,000 homes and 3.6 million square feet of office space, parks, and retail [2]. In a few short months, one of twenty cities in a nationwide sweepstakes will secure the 50,000 jobs promised by Amazon’s second headquarters, and relinquish billions in tax incentives and development perks as the cost of doing business [3].As technology giants have grown, accumulating capital that dwarfs nationstates, they have run headlong into a conclusion reached by capitalists of a past gilded age: When the city can no longer organize the vast quantities of labor necessary, redesign the city. Today, more than a century after the last wave of company town development, the basic desire to retain labor within an infrastructure that returns the highest value to the corporation remains unchanged. The New American Company Town, currently under construction in pockets of exorbitant corporate wealth and influence nationwide, is steeped in strong precedents, drawing on a logic that is as old as the Virginia Company itself. Serving the new knowledge worker and operating within a heavily privatized political environment that is conducive to its basic desires, the new company town is set to fundamentally rewrite the relationship between the city and private interest.The company town is both a quintessentially American entity—a symbol of paternal corporate power— and a representation of anti-American heretics—a place where a larger social agenda commands the workers very existence. At their peak in the early twentieth century, roughly 2,500 company towns were operational in the United States, housing roughly three percent of the population [4]. In the middle of the 20th century, this number dropped precipitously, and it is only recently, with the rampant growth of major technology companies, that the US is set for another wave of adoption. Although the New American Company Town shrouds itself in twenty-first century techno-utopianism, referring to the city as the “ultimate full-stack startup,” [5] its instigators must contend with a long legacy of corporate city-making that cuts today’s exploits down to size.The company town must be understood as an ideology, not a rigid typology. Its form is mutable, although it frequently repeats itself. The labor it serves changes radically and its relationship to city politics is multi-varied. Its staying power, though, can be attributed to this organizational looseness, which is always accompanied by a persistent conviction: that corporations are equipped to responsibly provide for the entire life of the worker, and in turn, the life of the city. Entrapped in this logic is the inescapable truth that corporations are, as Patti Fry, chairwoman of the Menlo Park City Planning Commission admits, “in business to be in business.” [6]For the past two decades, today’s technology juggernauts have been in business providing intangible service, “making the world more open and connected,” [7] or providing “the place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online.” [8] These places—cemented so firmly in our daily routine so as to become localities themselves—are providing the blueprint for the tangible production of the city. The most strident evangelists of corporation-led urbanity reference this digital track-record as a means of substantiating claims in the builtenvironment. Having first proved the merits of lean development, fast iteration, incessant metric-taking, and automation online, players like Google, Facebook, and Amazon hope to reproduce their success in the city. In this sense, the New American Company Town may simply be moving domains, from a virtual to a physical presence.To understand what separates today’s technology company town from its lineage of predecessors at the turn of the twentieth-century, it is useful to compare them along similar lines:For whom are they built? By whom are they built? What form, tangible and symbolic, do they take? Through what means, political and economic, are they realized? Finally, what goals, stated and concealed, are they formed to accomplish? <img width="748" height="1125" width_o="748" height_o="1125" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/3aaf28f9812732a27b15f569a66027850e05f33402bcbb477f0c29a11013a673/The-New-American-Company-Town-2.jpg" data-mid="47946456" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/748/i/3aaf28f9812732a27b15f569a66027850e05f33402bcbb477f0c29a11013a673/The-New-American-Company-Town-2.jpg" />In the late 1800s, working-class labor was reeling from profound mistreatment in over-crowded, disease-ridden centercities. Writing in How the Other Half Lives in 1890, Jacob Riis described the conditions of this lifestyle, where “[The worker] will never come out alive. There is no waste in these tenements. Lives, like clothes, are worn through and out before put aside.” [9] The work—although often inhumane and dangerous—was accessible to most able-bodies. Further, assembly-line technology required high quantities of de-skilled workers, practiced in a particular niche of the supply chain. In this context, the proposition of the company town ameliorated the intractable issues of the worker’s home life by applying the same scientific method used to devise the factory to the design of an infrastructure for living. The company town was an inevitable conclusion of the industrialists logic; a means of effectively storing content, healthy labor.The company town was also actively refined by the demands of the workers themselves, who were buoyed by the increasing strength of labor unions. Access to fair housing became a primary recruiting tool for the benevolent industrialist, who recognized the profound returns, both economic and psychological, of providing housing for working families. In Good Homes Make Contented Workers published by the planning firm Industrial Housing Associates in 1919, this claim is made unabashedly clear: “The man owns his home but in a sense his home owns him… Get them to invest their savings in homes and own them. Then they won’t leave and they won’t strike. It ties them down so they have a stake in our prosperity.” [10] <img width="1500" height="1125" width_o="1500" height_o="1125" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/5f92f429eb8f31590be94be6a156dad3b49955c748f590612f4153e5b135edc4/The-New-American-Company-Town-3.jpg" data-mid="47946317" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/5f92f429eb8f31590be94be6a156dad3b49955c748f590612f4153e5b135edc4/The-New-American-Company-Town-3.jpg" /> Today, automation and machine learning has replaced low-skill laborer and compounded the success of a small group of knowledge-workers, [11] retooling the company town in the process. Instead of extending a basic promise of fair housing to laborers, the company town is now the ultimate perk for a population of workers used to the finest treatment. At Facebook in Menlo Park, employees eat for free at more than 24 restaurants, receive free massages, haircuts, pet-sitting, daycare, and transportation. [12] Still, in a county where the average home price recently hit $1.05 M, this treatment may not be able to compete with an outright housing shortage. [13] Between 2010 and 2015, the region created 367,000 jobs while building just 57,000 new homes. [14] Real estate in other american cities known for innovation is similarly skyrocketing, in places like Boston, New York, Austin, and Seattle. The new company town is the direct product of this context, positioned to capture the unique plight of the highlycompensated millennial tech worker. <img width="1500" height="1125" width_o="1500" height_o="1125" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/6ee8026c29775473ad9c99ace06079527ef9a2a9332d393e6b072a2e0ea2fea8/The-New-American-Company-Town-4.jpg" data-mid="47946316" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/6ee8026c29775473ad9c99ace06079527ef9a2a9332d393e6b072a2e0ea2fea8/The-New-American-Company-Town-4.jpg" /> Although the labor-subject has changed dramatically, the tactic of creating social structures within which patterns of corporate devotion are encouraged has not. High-wage technology workers do not struggle with access to basic housing, but multiple hour commutes, high costs of living, and a lack of easy socialization has created a context in which company housing is inevitable. If your employer is already washing your underwear, cutting your hair, walking your dog, and making you lunch, it is not a stretch to imagine them providing the town in which you live. <img width="748" height="1125" width_o="748" height_o="1125" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/929240590fd92d78ea95fdef4cc99696da6c9bc999d40ad4831ed0bedf76ad78/The-New-American-Company-Town-7.jpg" data-mid="47946457" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/748/i/929240590fd92d78ea95fdef4cc99696da6c9bc999d40ad4831ed0bedf76ad78/The-New-American-Company-Town-7.jpg" /> Writing for Harper’s Weekly in 1885, economist and author Richard T. Ely critiqued the utopian settlement of Pullman, Chicago, named for George Pullman’s Palace Car Company. “In looking over all the facts of the case the conclusion is unavoidable that the idea of Pullman is un-American. It is a nearer approach than anything the writer has seen to what appears to be the ideal of the great German Chancellor. It is not the American ideal. It is benevolent, well wishing feudalism, which desires the happiness of the people, but in such way as shall please the authorities.” [15]Pullman is emblematic of the sort of paternal hubris that the company town has always exhibited. Reacting to worker unrest and social disorder in the city, Mr. Pullman initially appealed to workers by providing basic necessities that both the municipality and previous employers had proved incapable of providing. He defined his town in terms of the sin he had expelled, writing in a pamphlet at the 1892 World’s Columbian Exhibition that all should “visit the town… where all that is ugly and discordant and demoralizing is eliminated, and all that inspires to self respect, to thrift and to cleanliness of thought is generously provided.” [16]As in other company towns at the time, such as Hershey, PA, and Kohler, WI, the reach of the benevolent dictatorship was omnipresent. In place of elected officials, the corporation was de facto the municipality. Without homeownership, the corporation was every workers landlord, owning the mechanism by which the worker might leave an atwill contract. [17] In lieu of police forces, company towns like Pullman had paid “inspectors,” charged with reporting any resident deemed to have undesirable attitudes or habits. [18] Occupying a space between corporate boss, political leader, and morale guide, industrialists like Pullman, Hershey, and Kohler’s outsized personalities ultimately led to the precipitous failure of their settlements.The fortunes of these early industrialists pales in comparison to the wealth possessed by today’s richest technology CEOs. Rather than seek devotion through a cult-of-personality, though, figures like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos push their paternal influence downstream, to the body of the corporation. If the capitalists behind the first industrial revolution company towns were acknowledged father-figures, today’s leaders might better be described as the “fun uncle” with deep coffers.This indifference to setting a strict collective agenda is more escapist than tolerant. It is in this context that a highly progressive office culture at Facebook— replete with 4 months maternity leave [19] and draft beer on tap—can permit the mining of 87 million unwitting users’ personal data. [20] At Google, where the agenda of its parent company Alphabet is so all-encompassing that its actual corporate motto is “Do the Right Thing,” [21] the specifics of this morality are impossible to pin down, and include listening in unannounced on your every conversation. [22] These transgressions may come from simple economic greed, or, they may come from the same holierthan-thou underpinnings of yesterday’s industrialists—a belief that they know, better than you, what will make your world a better place. As purveyors of the next generation of company towns, today’s technology leadership may be more dangerous than benevolent dictatorship, trending instead towards indifferent self-obsession. <img width="748" height="1125" width_o="748" height_o="1125" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/6c80b78480e3b097a621d4cd8455edf9b8e9a573b3e1b3407dbf3cef19f09641/The-New-American-Company-Town-9.jpg" data-mid="47946458" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/748/i/6c80b78480e3b097a621d4cd8455edf9b8e9a573b3e1b3407dbf3cef19f09641/The-New-American-Company-Town-9.jpg" /> In 1859, Jean-Baptiste Andre Godin began the construction of the Familistere in Guise, a model society for the employees of his iron stove factory modelled on the work of utopian socialist Charles Fourier. Fourier and Godin imagined an organization of a phalanx, or 1500 individuals, working together to sustain and operate spacious housing, free education, healthcare, and leisure facilities. Each member worked for a share in the company town and participated in a governing system of direct-democracy. [23]The architecture of the Familistere is a spatial inscription of this social agenda; in Godin’s words, a “temple for the religion of life and work.” [24] Family units surround a central interior courtyard, left empty, to be negotiated by all surrounding units. Access to amenities, such as a a public school, theater, bathing complex, and gardens, is available to all, but pushed away from this central gathering space. A short walk across a narrow body of water, the factory itself formed a separate complex. [25]The Familistere is a highly hierarchical space, prioritizing the negotiation of a shared space. Pivotally, though, this space is lacking any amenity whatsoever. It is an empty room, to which you would only go to enjoy the company—and inevitable surveillance—of your peers. It is a space of pure, uninflected socialization. In today’s city, urban open-space such as this, without commercial amenity or political posturing, is non-existent. <img width="1500" height="1125" width_o="1500" height_o="1125" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/cd2b6b649a544539f422c1c520b2c5f78b07883dba6b9525617b4629bc4f27be/The-New-American-Company-Town-11.jpg" data-mid="47946309" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/cd2b6b649a544539f422c1c520b2c5f78b07883dba6b9525617b4629bc4f27be/The-New-American-Company-Town-11.jpg" /> In 2013, Facebook submitted plans for a recently realized $120 M, 394 unit housing community within walking distance of its Menlo Park offices. [26] Called Anton Menlo, the 630,000 square foot rental property borrows, and ultimately undermines, many of the same formal logics of the Familistere. Similarly hierarchical, Anton Menlo organizes all 394 units within an outer perimeter of parking and around a central gathering place. Far from a non-descript void, though, this center is full of amenities, including a pool, spa, restaurant and sports bar, doggy-day care, bocce ball court, fitness studio, and rooftop “sky lounge.” [27] On its Facebook page, Anton Menlo advertises itself as “the perfect abode for the tech savvy worker who is accustomed to all-inclusive luxuries.” [28] If the Familistere was designed to encourage the production of the socialist subject and cooperative worker, Anton Menlo has been configured to produce the knowledgeworker that lacks any responsibility to others and is saddled by a dependency on the “all-inclusive luxuries” Facebook provides. The company town has routinely been able to make this dependency a spatial phenomenon, repackaging isolation as retreat and segregation from the city as a bucolic ideal. Examples like the Familistere, Pullman, Chicago, and New Harmony, Indiana all recreate the imagery of pastoral beauty while manufacturing an urban center. Similarly, Google’s planned development in Mountain View, CA, emphasizes easy access to miles of nature trails, and Facebook’s planned Willow Village is rendered as a lush play-space, hyper-green and decidedly suburban. This abdication from the surrounding city is made more evident by the terms with which Anton Menlo defines itself. To enjoy flowering trees, fountains, and lawn chairs, tenants visit “The Quad.” To play bocce ball, pool, or use the BBQ pits, residents flock to “the backyard.” [29] Within the six foot lot wall of Facebook’s compound, Anton Menlo creates specific references to suburban domesticity, leveraging a prior conception of the American worker’s dream to substantiate their own. By removing itself from the context of the city, if only symbolically, the company town is able to define itself on its own terms: a prosperous oasis washed of the complexities of the city. <img width="1500" height="1125" width_o="1500" height_o="1125" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f2c1573d652b587da48a961506b12ad3c7b6a8cf98222f5f4af418397a67cace/The-New-American-Company-Town-6.jpg" data-mid="47946314" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/f2c1573d652b587da48a961506b12ad3c7b6a8cf98222f5f4af418397a67cace/The-New-American-Company-Town-6.jpg" /> If today’s company towns are in fact evidence of a higher quality of life, as they profess to be, the uninformed visitor might never know. From the outside, these compounds—some built and others only planned—adopt the same California brand of developer-banal, stucco and terra-cotta faced low-rise construction. Material, texture, and scale are casualties of form-based code that stipulates a particular “human scale.” Equally as hermetic as their predecessors, the contemporary company town lacks any grandiose overtures or architectural freedoms. The Familistere was a fantastical coupling of the monastery and Versailles—a bonafide “People’s Palace.” [30] Pullman, Chicago, leveraged the social stature of the Victorian aesthetic to underscore its claims to a higher moral order. The contemporary company town seems unwilling to claim an aesthetic agenda—an entirely fitting conclusion, given that today’s companies, in contrast to the industrialists before them, have lost the desire to coax workers towards an image of an ideal citizen.&nbsp; <img width="1500" height="1125" width_o="1500" height_o="1125" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0f32ca4217dd00bf6806aee7914df90a1b80522f7a4b5a00d9a5537e93931511/The-New-American-Company-Town-5.jpg" data-mid="47946315" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/0f32ca4217dd00bf6806aee7914df90a1b80522f7a4b5a00d9a5537e93931511/The-New-American-Company-Town-5.jpg" /> If there is any vestige of the architectural agenda present in early company towns, it has been transplanted to the contemporary office. What was once a glorified domestic sphere, as in the central void of the Familistere, has transitioned to the soaring ceilings and grand open floor plans of the office space. While at work, a Facebook, Google, or Amazon employee might cycle, knit, meditate, play pool, watch TV, or fall asleep. An acceptable branding image of the “startup office” (a misnomer for all of these tech giants) might include anything, as long as it doesn’t look like work. The contemporary company town has swapped the grandeur of the carefully designed home life and banal factory floor for the Frank Gehry designed office-play-space and cookiecutter condominiums. Buoyed by the easy transgression of the internet on all forms of private, technology-free life, the company town has entirely blurred the lines of working from home and being at blissfully at home at work. <img width="749" height="1125" width_o="749" height_o="1125" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/6031b22d02f1da5699a7d783277a6a6a25bbac03238e06cf23eff5ae686ff9bc/The-New-American-Company-Town-14.jpg" data-mid="47946459" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/749/i/6031b22d02f1da5699a7d783277a6a6a25bbac03238e06cf23eff5ae686ff9bc/The-New-American-Company-Town-14.jpg" />In establishing the communitarian society of New Harmony, Indiana, the Scottish industrialist Robert Owen purchased an existing religious community, called “The Harmony Society,” from the one-thousand German immigrants who formed it. [31] Owen routinely traveled to New York, Boston, and Washington D.C., speaking twice in the Hall of Representatives to espouse his critical view of revealed religion, marriage and the traditional family, and private property. Owen never required the intervention of existing public entities, and instead leveraged them only to display his particular vision, going so far as to leave the models and drawings for the uncompleted construction of New Harmony on display at the White House.In the Silicon Valley today, both Facebook and Google are transitioning from comfortable isolation to bloated entities that must negotiate with public institutions. The new company town requires high-value labor that tends to attract itself: the area has become more innovation-dense, spawning institutions and offshoot companies that compound the labor-value of the existing city. In order to capitalize and recruit this labor, the company town must ingratiate itself by building housing and infrastructure. <img width="1500" height="1125" width_o="1500" height_o="1125" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/5c318e3c9127d417b973813b5617686fdd42a8aa49471a39b73153c6b0fc2e00/The-New-American-Company-Town-15.jpg" data-mid="47946307" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/5c318e3c9127d417b973813b5617686fdd42a8aa49471a39b73153c6b0fc2e00/The-New-American-Company-Town-15.jpg" /> Facebook’s 56-acre project in Menlo Park (referred to locally as Zucktown or Facebookville), will provide 1,500 units, 225 at below-market rate. [32] Facebook admits that the vast majority of the housing will be occupied by Facebook employees, who will enjoy a five-figure bonus if they elect to live near the office. [33] The social network has portrayed the 10-year project as a gift to Menlo Park, with whom they have a “long-term commitment” and want to partner with in order to provide a “safe and inclusive environment for the people who call this city home.” [34] Residents of neighboring East Palo Alto, where the median income is $55,000 compared to $126,000 in Menlo Park, are not convinced. [35] <img width="1500" height="1125" width_o="1500" height_o="1125" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/90daf305790f784b5c0837cbc418d796ed5119da50637a942f87f06fa0569dfe/The-New-American-Company-Town-16.jpg" data-mid="47946305" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/90daf305790f784b5c0837cbc418d796ed5119da50637a942f87f06fa0569dfe/The-New-American-Company-Town-16.jpg" /> In 2017, Menlo Park agreed to allow Facebook to pay for an additional police station to patrol the Facebook campus and surrounding area. During deliberations at City Hall, East Palo Alto activist JT Faraji stated the obvious: “Instead of being beholden to the public, public servants will now be beholden to a private company.” [36] While East Palo Alto continues to rapidly gentrify, Facebook has extended several peace offerings, including a $75,000 grant to Belle Haven Action in January 2018, an East Palo Alto community advocacy group that is actively working to bring attention to Facebook’s negative impact on the area. [37] In the muddied political waters of Menlo Park, this philanthropy is overt corporate lobbying. Facebook’s “good-will” is already converting to political might, an easy feat in a municipality where a few hundred votes alters the composition of the city council. <img width="1500" height="1125" width_o="1500" height_o="1125" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7dddaa9228c1b85dbf1ed40e1a17f014672608e932bc37e095a49300cf843faa/The-New-American-Company-Town-17.jpg" data-mid="47946303" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/7dddaa9228c1b85dbf1ed40e1a17f014672608e932bc37e095a49300cf843faa/The-New-American-Company-Town-17.jpg" /> In Menlo Park, Palo Alto, Seattle, Boston, and other technology hotbeds, a mantra of “working with the community” has translated to hostile takeovers, where the wealth-resources of the city are commandeered at the expense of all workers outside of Big Tech. In the aftermath of Milton Friedman’s claim that “the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits,” [38] the half-hearted benevolence of today’s technology giants in the twentieth century is particularly poignant. The Silicon Valley is learning that “corporate responsibility” is a contradiction in terms, and the new company towns may be primed to simply expand further. <img width="750" height="1125" width_o="750" height_o="1125" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9a3223c22f9ab57588336243fc03e4b552cb9526c1edc3b903d7c73c0616a66f/The-New-American-Company-Town-18.jpg" data-mid="47946460" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/750/i/9a3223c22f9ab57588336243fc03e4b552cb9526c1edc3b903d7c73c0616a66f/The-New-American-Company-Town-18.jpg" />At the 2018 Consumer Electronics Show, more vendors were selling products for the “Smart City” than gaming products or drones. [39] In the words of Dan Doctoroff, CEO of Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs, “[The] hypothesis is that a combination of technologies... can fundamentally alter nearly every dimension of quality of life in an urban environment.” [40] Technology start-ups have trained their efforts on everything from applying artificial intelligence to optimize city operations [41] to developing 3D models of buildings from amateur photography. [42] It is an uncommon story—a sort of digital manifest destiny—that has carried the Silicon Valley from its naval-gasing roots to the self-proclaimed position of urban visionary.As the history of the company town evidences, the profound optimism implicit in developments like Sidewalk Lab’s 12-acre Quayside project in Toronto is not unprecedented. What is uncommon, though, is the implication that past digital success can be parlayed to the built environment. More disconcerting still, is the fact that Google’s online presence— and intended modus operandi in Toronto—leverages a free SaaS (Software as a Service) model, where the cost of participating in the digitized urban sphere will be difficult to parse, but undoubtedly present.The new company town may have successfully eradicated its need to satisfy the everyday laborer, moving instead towards the pursuit of the high-value knowledge worker. It has, though, found a means of recuperating the lost value that access to the common-man once provided. The “Smart City,” foreshadowed by Toronto’s Quayside development, is a newfound means for the company town to put the average citizen to work, acquiring vast amounts of data from everyday experience that ultimately funnels value back to the corporation. <img width="1500" height="1125" width_o="1500" height_o="1125" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/33da9573c20b410f6dd6efac7cd949d25b6be37f17b84f9c9807a1eeb0387e92/The-New-American-Company-Town-20.jpg" data-mid="47946301" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/33da9573c20b410f6dd6efac7cd949d25b6be37f17b84f9c9807a1eeb0387e92/The-New-American-Company-Town-20.jpg" /> This is not the intended public perspective. Data, in the eyes of Google and other technology giants, is the new “commons,” a wealth of value that must be shared. If the utopian socialist company towns of New Harmony and the Familistere legislated the sharing of property, domestic labor, and economic production, the new company town would like to impose the universal sharing of information. Immediately, the&nbsp;intangibility of this proposition poses societal risk: information is slippery, imperceptible, and scales geometrically. Property, buildings, and even physical labor are fungible, dumb, but secure. The move towards a digital commons has largely been pushed by technology corporations, who have introduced products that have gradually increased our tolerance to divulge information while breaking consumer trust on the back-end.Of course, the world looks a little different when you have 3.5 billion daily customers. [43] And while it is difficult to know the precise ambition of the technology bronze who are leading the current march into the design of the built environment, it is an almost certainty that it parrots the desires of past industrialists, who through some mixture of financial greed and self-righteousness produced tenets of the company town that we are still unable to escape. <img width="1500" height="1125" width_o="1500" height_o="1125" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ca4402518dfd0adf5ba0f3d6e4b14314cf2f9969e0ebd30c337c294f4ed01f0f/The-New-American-Company-Town-21.jpg" data-mid="47946300" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/ca4402518dfd0adf5ba0f3d6e4b14314cf2f9969e0ebd30c337c294f4ed01f0f/The-New-American-Company-Town-21.jpg" /> The new company town will be made for the knowledge-worker but it will profit from the labor of every citizen. It will be manufactured by today’s visionary technology juggernauts and will take the form of compounds that attach to cities that struggle under their might. It will be achieved through commandeering political clout in local politics while obfuscating the demands of existing communities. Ultimately, the new company town will be installed in order to transfer digital success to the built environment. It will be a new home for an old Silicon Valley adage: “If you are not paying for it, you are not the customer; you are the product being sold.” [44] The new company town will be this space for our own production. 1. Kevin Kelly, “Menlo Park: Facebook’s workforce will equal city’s population,” The San Jose Mercury News, March 1, 2018.2. Louis Hansen, “Google’s massive housing and office plan wins approval,” The San Jose Mercury News, December 12, 2017.3. Nick Wingfield and Patricia Cohen, “Amazon Plans Second Headquarters, Opening a Bidding War Among Cities,” The New York Times, September 7, 2017. 4. Michele Lent Hirsch, “America’s Company Towns, Then and Now,” Smithsonian Magazine. September 4, 2015.5. Adora Cheung, “New Cities,” Y Combinator Blog, June 27, 2016. 6. David Streitfeld, “Welcome to Zucktown. Where Everything is Just Zucky.” The New York Times, March 21, 2018.7. Facebook, Inc. “Form S-1 Registration Statement,” United States Securities and Exchange Commission, Washington D.C., February 1, 2012. 8. Amazon.com, Inc. “Form 10- K,” The United States Securities and Exchange Commission, Washington D.C., December 31, 2002. 9. Jacob A. Riis, How the Other Half Lives (New York: Garrett Press, 1970), 144. 10. Dolores Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1981), 284.11. Eric Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age (New York: W. W. Norton &amp; Company, 2014).12. Luke Stangel, “Google and Facebook are building the ultimate perk: housing,” Medium, November 14, 2017. 13. Hansen, “Google’s massive housing and office plan wins approval.” 14. Ibid. 15. Richard T. Ely, “Pullman: A Social Study.” Harper’s Magazine 70 (February 1885): 452-466. 16. Jane Eva Baxter, “The Paradox of a Capitalist Utopia: Visionary Ideals and Lived Experience in the Pullman Community 1880- 1900,” International Journal of Historical Archaeology, Vol. 16, No. 4, December 2012, 651-665. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid. 19. “Facebook,” Glassdoor.com, April 2017. 20. Cecilia Kang and Sheera Frenkel, “Facebook Says Cambridge Analytica Harvested Data of Up to 87 Million Users,” The New York Times, April 4, 2018. 21. Justin Wm. Moyer, “Alphabet, now Google’s overlord, ditches ‘Don’t be evil’ for ‘do the right thing,’” The Washington Post, October 5, 2015. 22. Sapna Maheshwari, “Hey, Alexa, What Can you Hear? And What Will You Do With It?” The New York Times, March 31, 2018. 23. Charles Fourier, “Selections Describing the Phalanstery” in The Utopia Reader, ed. Gregory Claeys and Lyman Tower Sargent (New York: NYU Press, 1999), 193. 24. M.B., “Should we retain the right to feel unhappy at work?” The Economist, May 25, 2016. 25. “The Familistere at Guise, France,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, Volume 71, November 1885.26. City of Menlo Park, “Study Session for Compliance Review/St. Anton Partners/3605-3639 Haven Avenue,” October 7, 2013. 27. Anton Menlo, “Amenities,” https:// www.antonmenlo. com/amenities/.28. “Anton Menlo Apartments,” Facebook Group, Accessed May 11, 2018. 29. City of Menlo Park, “Study Session for Compliance Review, St. Anton Partners.” 30. “The Familistere at Guise, France,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, Volume 71, November 1885.31. Donald F. Carmony and Josephine M. Elliott, “New Harmony, Indiana: Robert Owen’s Seedbed for Utopia,” Indiana Magazine of History, Vol. 76, No. 3, Septmeber 1980, 161-261. 32. City of Menlo Park, “Facebook Willow Village Master Plan,” July 6, 2017. 33. Streitfeld, “Welcome to Zucktown. Where Everything is Just Zucky.” 34. Queenie Wong, “Menlo Park, East Palo Alto residents rally against Facebook, Amazon amid gentrification concerns,” The San Jose Mercury News, April 6, 2017.35. DataUSA.io, “East Palo Alto,” and “Menlo Park.” 36. Kate Bradshaw, “Menlo Park council supports Facebookfunded police unit,” The Almanac, May 3, 2017. 37. Streitfeld, “Welcome to Zucktown. Where Everything is Just Zucky.” 38. Milton Friedman, “A Friednzan Doctrine,” The New York Times, September 13, 1970. 39. Laura Bliss, “When a Tech Giant Plays Waterfront Developer,” CityLab, January 9, 2018. 40. Dan Doctoroff, “Dan Doctoroff on how we’ll realize the promise of urban innovation,” McKinsey &amp; Comapny, January 2018. 41. “Qucit: About Us,” qucit.com. 42. “About: Hosta Labs,” hostalabs.com. 43. “Google Search Statistics,” internetlivestats. com.44. Andrew Lewis, “@Andlewis,” Twitter, September 13, 2010 https://landscapes-of-fulfillment.org/Rural-Imaginary-Bibliography Mon, 21 Oct 2019 15:41:20 +0000 Landscapes of Fulfillment https://landscapes-of-fulfillment.org/Rural-Imaginary-Bibliography Territories ← Rural Imaginary: Data and ‘Precision Ag’ Bibliography Books + Journals Redman, Charles L., and David R. Foster. Agrarian Landscapes in Transition: Comparisons of LongTerm Ecological and Cultural Change. Oxford University Press, 2008. Gabe, Todd M., and Jaison R. Abel. “The New Rural Economy: Deployment of Advanced Telecommunications Infrastructure in Rural America: Measuring the Digital Divide.”American Journal of Agricultural Economics, vol. 84, no. 5, 2002, pp. 1246–1252., doi:10.1111/1467-8276.00385. Sonka, Steven T., and Karen F. Coaldrake. “Cyberfarm: What Does It Look like? What Does It Mean?” American Journal of Agricultural Economics, vol. 78, no. 5, 1996, p. 1263., doi:10.2307/1243504. Batte, Marvin T. Precision Agriculture in the 21st Century: Geospatial and Information Technologies in Crop Management. National Academy Press, 1997. Popat, Bharat, Macauley, James, Menendez-Bernales, Gustavo, Connected Agriculture, Developing Smart, Connected Rural Communities, CISCO. Cisco Internet Business Solutions Group, July 2009 Web-Based https://www.theverge.com/2016/2/8/10937076/tesla-gigafactory-battery-factory-nevada-tax-dealelon-musk https://agfundernews.com/what-is-precision-agriculture.html https://www.geospatialworld.net/news/niti-aayog-and-ibm-signed-soi-to-develop-precision-agricultureover-artificial-intelligence/ http://yallpolitics.com/2018/04/25/wicker-klobuchar-bill-to-promote-precision-agriculture-ruralbroadband-passes-committee/ https://foodtank.com/news/2018/05/yeild-lab-agri-tech-accelerator/ https://www.satimagingcorp.com/applications/natural-resources/agriculture/ https://www.npr.org/2014/10/21/357723069/millennials-continue-urbanization-of-america-leavingsmall-towns Figures 1. Population change over 1980-2010, U.S. Census, 2010 2. Product Visualization, Xsens, MTi 1-series, 3D motion tracking application 1-5 cm of accuracy in agricultural applications 3. Acres of Land in Farms as Percent of Land Area in Acres, USDA, 2007 Loose Alignment of Agriculture Land to ‘Digital Divide’ 4. Residentail Fixed Internet Access Service Providers by Census Block, FCC, December 2016 Loose Alignment of Agriculture Land to ‘Digital Divide’ 5. Product Visualization, MTi 1-series, 3D motion tracking application “Drones // Another interesting field of interest are drones... Drones offer the possibility to fertilize the crops after examination of the individual plants. Color and size can be determined, so that the right amoutn of fertilizer can be applied... At a height of 10 meters, an error of 5 deg results in a 90cm error. This can be the difference between the different rows.” - www.xsens.com/tags/precision-agriculture/ 6. Product Visualization, Xsens, MTi 1-series, 3D motion tracking application 1-5 cm of accuracy in agricultural applications 7. Trimble’s Soil Information Systems (SIS) use advanced, above and below ground, sensors combined with GPS, along with intelligent targeting and geo-processing algorithms to roduce high resolution, accurate soil and topographic information of the top four feet of the earth’s surface. - https://www.geospatialworld.net/article/transforming-the-farm-with-precision-technology/ 8. Diagram of Precision Ag Communication By Author 9. Jeffersonian Grid, Somewhere over Iowa, 2016 Infinite Expansion of the Square Grid Google Images 10. 1814 Plan of Boston, Cowpaths and Topography 11. ‘The Old Farmer’s Almanac, 2016’ 12. Crowd sourced Photo, Farm Aid 2013 13. John Deere Promotional Diagram, ‘Connected Crop Protection’ 14. Gold Medal Winner, Hanover Agricultural Fair, 2017 John Deere + IBM, ‘Industrie 4.0’ 15.&nbsp; John Deere, Precision ‘Ag’ website, Accessed 05/10/2018 16. John Deere 9RX “The New 9RX comes with integrated AutoTrac™* guidance and JDLink™ Connect information management. With AutoTrac on your integrated 10-inch CommandCenter™** Display, you can begin to increase field efficiencies and reduce inputs by 10%. And with JDLink Connect you can take your operation to the next level of productivity and efficiency without leaving the office. Manage your operation in real-time without being in the cab. Better still, it’s all supported by your John Deere dealer.” - https://www.deere.com/en/tractors/4wd-track-tractors/ 17. Product Visualization, MTi 1-series, 3D motion tracking application “Drones // Another interesting field of interest are drones... Drones offer the possibility to fertilize the crops after examination of the individual plants. Color and size can be determined, so that the right amoutn of fertilizer can be applied... At a height of 10 meters, an error of 5 deg results in a 90cm error. This can be the difference between the different rows.” - www.xsens.com/tags/precision-agriculture/ 18.&nbsp; ‘Super Harvest’, Dowson’s Farm, near Divernon, IL, 2011 https://landscapes-of-fulfillment.org/Scenario-Space Tue, 30 Jul 2019 03:13:17 +0000 Landscapes of Fulfillment https://landscapes-of-fulfillment.org/Scenario-Space ← Frontiers Scenario Space <img width="1126" height="976" width_o="1126" height_o="976" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/3a42f5a3a0e77c97401d462d3da234f80ebe9032fed8c708755f9e81fa82755e/Screen-Shot-2019-10-14-at-11.58.01-PM.png" data-mid="52682661" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/3a42f5a3a0e77c97401d462d3da234f80ebe9032fed8c708755f9e81fa82755e/Screen-Shot-2019-10-14-at-11.58.01-PM.png" /> Matthew Wagstaffe / 2018 Yale School of Architecture Towards the end of James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity—a 1943 noir mystery with an insurance claims manager in the role of detective—Barton Keyes, our insurance agent hero, seeks to prove the fraudulence of a supposed suicide. Lacking any substantive evidence, Keyes instead turns to the actuarial tables for proof:I was studying these tables. Take a look at them. Here’s suicide by race, by color, by occupation, by sex, by locality, be seasons of the year, by time of day when committed. Here’s suicide by method of accomplishment. Here’s method of accomplishment subdivided by poisons, by firearms, by drowning, by leaps … [Here] are leaps subdivided by leaps from high places, under wheels of moving trains, under wheels of trucks, under the feet of horses, from steamboats. But there’s not one case here out of all these millions of cases of a leap from the rear of a moving train. That’s just one way they don’t do it.[1]His speech, breathless and list-like, rhetorically performs a comprehensibility. One is given the sense that his actuarial tables are potentially all-encompassing—with more and more “here’s’ ” Keyes could effectively elaborate the sum total of suicide possibilities. Significantly, this list of statistically allowable categories is granted enormous predictive powers: that which is “not classifiable” according to the probabilistic logics of actuarial science, Keyes implies, is effectively “an ontological impossibility.” If some future circumstance cannot be inferred from the probabilities [2] suggested by the data available in the present, it may as well not exist.Years later, at the height of Cold War hysteria, Herman Kahn of the RAND Corporation was putting forward the opposite worldview: that which is statistically unfathomable (in this historical circumstance, Nuclear War or another atomic disaster), he argued, is precisely what one cannot disregard. The probabilistic logics that dominated future-forecasting in days past, Kahn contended, were unsuitable for dealing with unprecedented events about which there is a “paucity of actual examples.” In this situation of uncertainty, Kahn proposed a new method of [3] speculation which he called “scenario planning.” Defined as an “attempt to describe in more or less detail some hypothetical sequence of events” scenarios take the form of [4] imagined narratives that “dramatize and illustrate” the “larger range of possibilities that must be considered in the analysis of the future,” thereby ensuring that the futurist “deal[s] with details and dynamics that he might easily avoid treating if he restricted himself to abstract considerations.” Thus, here the abstractions of statistics [5] are viewed with suspicion and the unpredictable is not written off as an “ontological impossibility,” but is instead granted an ontological reality; that is, through a speculative narrative the unknowable is made to seem real.This method of giving narrative life to alternative futures far outlived its Cold War origins. In 1961 Kahn left RAND to form the Hudson Institute, his own think tank/consultancy where, amongst other futurological activities, he created the “Corporate Environment Study,” a seminar designed to teach “the secrets of scenario” planning to corporate planners across the globe. His most notable pupil was Pierre [6] Wack, a planner at Shell Oil who would go on to use and adapt Kahn’s scenario methods to analyze the possible changes in the supply and demand of oil. Wack outlined a number of potential scenarios including a “crisis scenario,” in which he imagined Middle Eastern countries limiting oil production for political reasons. This scenario, which bore great resemblance to the OPEC crisis of 1973, helped Shell Oil to weather that embargo with comparatively little losses, a success story that served as an advertisement for the values of the scenario planing to corporations everywhere.[7] Scenario planning, along with business continuity planning and other practices oriented towards managing more micro-level uncertainties, are now mainstays of management culture.I am curious about the rise of this second form of future management and what it might say about the contemporary logistics-oriented business world that now employs it. Might the turn to a future-strategy as speculative and pluralizing as [8] scenario planning reveal something about the logistical mindset? I hope to show that some of the conceptual ideas underlying Kahn’s embrace of scenario planning— specifically, a chaos-theory inflected view (which I will explain explain below) that sees the components of the physical world as so interrelated that even minor actions produce major effects—have an elective affinity with some of the realities of the contemporary supply chain, that is, a system in which each part is intricately dependent upon the other. Additionally, I will argue that scenario planning’s strategy for dealing with the uncertainties that result from an overly complex world—the creation of multiple possible futures—bears great similarity to the endless disaster recovery and business continuity plans that are required for the functioning of the logistical operation. Finally, through an analysis of some actors in the Business Continuity Industry I will attempt to show that the spatial logics of accounting for a variety of potential disasters are very different from the spatial logics of an insurantial system, which deals less with risk-mitigation and more with the financial spreading of risks whose likelihoods it knows well in advance. Risk mitigation produces distributed sites with no center, or, at the very least, auxiliary sites for each major operation. But, before undertaking an analysis of Scenario Planning and its relationship to logistics, it will be necessary to examine in greater detail the insurantial and probabilistic logics against which Scenario Planning defines itself.The philosopher of science Ian Hacking dates the rise of probability to the midnineteenth century, a time that produced an “avalanche of printed numbers.” Hacking [9] attributes this increase in numerical data principally to the new Industrial era. The rise of numerical records, he writes, is “embedded in the grander topics of the Industrial Revolution. The acquisition of numbers by the populace, and the professional lust for precision in measurement, were driven by familiar themes of manufacture, mining, trade, … railways.” From this industrial data emerged a new worldview: in contrast to [10] notions of causality and inexorable human natures, mathematicians discovered, in the 19th century’s vast numbers, the laws of probability and statistics. In so doing, the “idea of human nature was displaced by a model of normal people with laws of dispersion.” [11]Through these new sciences emerged the enterprise of insurance, and with it, the notion of risk, which Francois Ewald argues “has no precise meaning other than as a category of [insurance] technology.” Ewald describes risk as the statistical likelihood of an event occurring that will have a negative effect on “values or capitals possessed or represented by a collectivity of individuals.” The notion of collectivity here is key: the [12] science of probability only works when one has large enough numbers of people engaged in the same behavior over a long enough period of time—this way, one has enough data from which to draw statistical inferences. Risk, in fact, only becomes calculable “when it is spread over a population. The work of the insurer is, precisely to constitute that population by selecting and dividing risks. Insurance can only cover groups; it works by socializing risks. It makes each person a part of the whole.” There [13] is no possible way to determine the likelihood of a specific individual enduring an accident. But if that person is considered as part of a community of, say, miners, there are enough statistics on mining accidents over the years to precisely calculate his risk of injury. Ewald himself points to mining (and industrial workplace accident insurance in mid-nineteenth century in general) as being a prototypical example of a wellfunctioning insurance market. Years upon years of repeating the same activity in countless similar mine sites produces a highly robust set of statistics from which can be extracted accurate probabilities of an accident occurring. Moreover, any disasters that occurred at a mine would be limited to that site—only the miners would be affected by a cave-in—so it is very easy to to determine who is bearing the risk. Indeed, Ewald sees this industrial-era insurance as so well-functioning that he posits it as central to the world order of the time:The technology of risk, in its different epistemological, economic, moral, juridical and political dimensions becomes the principle of a new political and social economy … Insurance at the end of the nineteenth century signifies at once an ensemble of institutions and the diagram which which industrial societies conceive their principle of organization, functioning and regulation. Societies envisage themselves as a vast system of insurance.[14]How then did we pass from such a situation—in which probabilistic thought was arguably a central pillar of social cohesion—to a world highly influenced by scenario planning, a field that “reject[s] claims about a turbulent future in probability terms” as “irrelevant” and “meaningless”? One hypothesis for our shift into [15] alternative means of monitoring the future is offered by Ulrich Beck and his theory of the “risk society.” In our era of advanced, techno-scientific industry (Beck’s Risk Society was released in 1986, coincident with the Chernobyl disaster, the exact kind of situation that one of Kahn’s apocalyptic scenario-planning mind would have salivated over), Beck argues, we face potential catastrophes of a “different quality” than the previous industrial era. Beck has in mind here vast environmental degradation, radioactive decay, nuclear disasters, and the presence of toil chemicals in our air and foodstuffs. These potential disasters are of a size, timeframe and irregularity that is unprecedented. Whereas the effects of previous accidents rarely extended beyond their immediate site—say, the industrial mine—chemical or nuclear accidents potentially affect the entire globe. These effects are likewise extended in time, oftentimes “outlast[ing] generations.” These factors, Beck argues, have resulted in a world [16] system that is “beyond the insurance limit.” That is, because these disasters are [17] exceptional, there is not enough data to determine their probability, and because these potential catastrophes are so extensive, we are no longer able to effectively separate people into the populations that allow us to determine risk. Statistics and probability no longer hold.When a potential event passes beyond the threshold of these calculative logics, it ceases, definitionally, to be a risk. Instead, Ewald argues, it becomes an “uncertainty,” which he defines as something that one can “apprehend” (one knows, for example, that a nuclear disaster is possible) “without being able to assess” (there is no way to calculate the statistical likelihood of nuclear attack occurring). This eclipse [18] of insurantial reason via the dangers of advanced industry sets the stage for Kahn’s scenario planning methods. Without statistics, there is “a sort of hiatus and time-shift between the requirements of action and the certainty of knowledge.” In such a situation, Ewald argues, it “will be necessary to take into account what one can only imagine, suspect, presume, or fear.” Hence Kahn’s narrative speculations.This awareness of the geographically extensive and unknowable dangers posed by technoscientifically advanced industries—of which nuclear war is the ultimate representation—however, was not the only force contributing to the rise of scenario planning. There were, in the 1960s, developments in mathematics that called into [20] question the notion that calculative logics are able to predict the future with any certainty at all. In 1961, MIT meteorology professor Edward Lorenz was running highly advanced (for the time) weather simulations, when he left his office to get a cup of coffee. Prior to running his simulations he’d rounded down a data entry three decimal points (from .506127 to .506). Lorenz returned from his break to find that the minor alteration had “drastically transformed” the entire pattern of the results of his weather model, showing that “small changes can have large consequence” and that, therefore, “forecasting the future can be nearly impossible.” R. John Williams, in his account of [21] these events, argues that this discovery (which formed the backbone of chaos theory and has since become know colloquially as the “butterfly effect”) showed that “the increasingly dazzling powers of mechanized computation, rather than fulfilling the Laplacian promise of total prediction and futurological singularity, led instead to a radically proliferating system of bifurcations and chaotic plurality.” It is with this [22] radical discovery as a backdrop, Williams argues, that we can make sense of Herman Kahn’s embrace of scenario planning over more statistically-inclined studies that use “high-speed computer[s]” in an “attempt to “find the ‘optimum’ system, given some reasonably definite set of circumstances, objectives, and criteria.”[23]Thus we see that scenario planning represents a massive shift in terms of how knowledge about the future and potential threats is conceived—and really, it constitutes a major shift in the conceptualization of the interrelation of society’s members. If insurantial logic is predicated upon the carving up of the social body into clearly demarcated groups of populations, each with its own independent risk profile that is not affected by the risks of other segments of the population, the logics undergirding scenario planning could not be more different: here potential negative effects are completely extensive; through the influence of chaos theory, all parts of the social whole are seen to be intricately related, such that a small change in one area can have affects throughout the entire system. It is here, in its conception of the complete inter-connectivity of all parts of the social world, that I believe scenario planning most dovetails with the logics of logistics. <img width="692" height="654" width_o="692" height_o="654" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/09fb3cd4d68252362c7b8c76659f323c9c8dc3a7b6a3e6cbec103259c733816d/Screen-Shot-2019-10-14-at-11.55.32-PM.png" data-mid="52682649" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/692/i/09fb3cd4d68252362c7b8c76659f323c9c8dc3a7b6a3e6cbec103259c733816d/Screen-Shot-2019-10-14-at-11.55.32-PM.png" /> Fig. 1 <img width="648" height="662" width_o="648" height_o="662" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d0b680d9d16c1b26cb4bfbd8168385f7fe082b6c9eb219a876a2489e8df52c9d/Screen-Shot-2019-10-14-at-11.55.40-PM.png" data-mid="52682650" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/648/i/d0b680d9d16c1b26cb4bfbd8168385f7fe082b6c9eb219a876a2489e8df52c9d/Screen-Shot-2019-10-14-at-11.55.40-PM.png" /> Fig. 2 For the science of logistics is likewise predicated upon the notion that all parts of an operation must be seen in relation to one another. In his essay “The Logistics Revolution and Transportation” W. Bruce Allen describes logistics as exactly such an inter-connected system. Allen contrasts the frame of mind of a “typical” corporate actor with that of a logistician. The traditionalist, he writes, takes as a given that “x tons of widgets must be shipped from A to B” and then asks herself “what is the cheapest fulldistribution cost mode to ship by?” The logistically-oriented, in contrast, “ask[s] questions of whether x was the best amount to ship and whether to ship from point A to point B was the proper origin-destination pair.” In logistics, then, no variables are pre-determined, and, in a true Lorenzian manner, no variable can be written off as insignificant; any alteration could affect the functioning of the logistical operation and so should be considered in the final layout of affairs. Furthermore, just as the highcomputational powers of Lorenz’s modeling system revealed greater chaos and plurality, so too does the logistical operation begin to look more and more everchanging and unpredictable as it expands its processing power. And so we see, in Peter Klaus and Stefanie Müller’s survey of logistical thought, that as logistics adds to its equation not just “traditional intra-organizational and cross-organizational supply chain” issues but also factors at the scale of “national and international cooperation” the result is not a increasingly optimal and precise operation. Instead, as logistics is able to cogitate more and more variables—from “macro-flows of goods, money, and people” to soon-to-be-scare resources such as “crude oil and water” to the shifting “comparative advantages between nations”—it has to imagine a new “type of network structure” that is able to take into account “conditions of ever more turbulent, volatile natural, economic, and political environments.” The future looks more uncertain, and [25] logistics must become, by consequence, preemptive and reactive. <img width="688" height="990" width_o="688" height_o="990" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b42d5ebc28054655cf74398f043287941cf4fa24cd006cc0a5d2267682a6d730/Screen-Shot-2019-10-14-at-11.55.51-PM.png" data-mid="52682651" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/688/i/b42d5ebc28054655cf74398f043287941cf4fa24cd006cc0a5d2267682a6d730/Screen-Shot-2019-10-14-at-11.55.51-PM.png" />Fig. 3 Aside from these theoretical accounts, one can see the scenario planning worldview in the actual self-accountings of logistical actors. For example, an advertisement for Sungard Availability Services, a company that specializes in business continuity and the recovery of data following a disaster, shows how thoroughly the scenario planning sense of the world has penetrated certain business fields: “Make the Everyday Happen in an Environment that is Anything But Normal,” the advertisement reads [Figure 3]. The everyday and the normal—the predictable, the statistically likely—is here presented as not given, as something that needs to be artificially instated through the help of a corporation trained to combat disruptions. The implication of this ad is that, contrary to the regularized world of actuarial science, turbulence and lack of continuity are now the standard states. Additionally, at the purely graphic level, scenario planning’s diagrams of splitting futures (see Pierre Wack’s continually multiplying arrow diagram for Shell Oil for a particularly illustrative example [Figure 4]) find their way into the business continuity’s representational language, which is replete with paths dividing in separate directions [Figure 5]. <img width="566" height="486" width_o="566" height_o="486" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/44bb2da65c4e68812ff6d33f3e0567a37868cc57502928c88bbbac921ef8202d/Screen-Shot-2019-10-14-at-11.56.04-PM.jpg" data-mid="52682665" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/566/i/44bb2da65c4e68812ff6d33f3e0567a37868cc57502928c88bbbac921ef8202d/Screen-Shot-2019-10-14-at-11.56.04-PM.jpg" />Fig. 4 <img width="544" height="374" width_o="544" height_o="374" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/320234a034b20972ec54e182abad9c3944d2c0d4fc9ff4aa05283b7a940f64fa/Screen-Shot-2019-10-14-at-11.56.37-PM.png" data-mid="52682654" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/544/i/320234a034b20972ec54e182abad9c3944d2c0d4fc9ff4aa05283b7a940f64fa/Screen-Shot-2019-10-14-at-11.56.37-PM.png" /> Fig. 5 It is important here to state that the logistical enterprise, and business continuity companies in particular, do not just share the scenario planning mindset— many of the agencies that specialize in business continuity explicitly use scenario planning methods to speculate on and preemptively manage future disasters. FEMA’s Emergency Planning Exercises page,which is oriented towards helping the private sector “identify innovative, atypical solutions to an unprecedented catastrophic event,” tellingly does not offer a set of protocols or a table of probability statistics but [26] instead puts forward a series of disaster scenarios for corporations to play through. These disaster training regimens—which cover everything from a chemical accident to a cyber attack—take the form of elaborate fictions, complete with fake news broadcasts [Figure 6] and scripts [Figure 7]. Rather than manage future risks through insurance, these videos manage future uncertainties through the creation of realistic fictions. One manages uncertainty by turning it into actuality—only by granting the uncertain a reality is one able to produce a response. <img width="666" height="500" width_o="666" height_o="500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7ac361941e935508956357a0e15b9ee1a3a695de741113504078ae12e7a2d647/Screen-Shot-2019-10-14-at-11.56.47-PM.png" data-mid="52682655" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/666/i/7ac361941e935508956357a0e15b9ee1a3a695de741113504078ae12e7a2d647/Screen-Shot-2019-10-14-at-11.56.47-PM.png" /> Fig. 6 <img width="578" height="732" width_o="578" height_o="732" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/93d323a8e290d8c9a061c05f1eef0a7982554a50df75470bb3429e60439c7fd1/Screen-Shot-2019-10-14-at-11.56.59-PM.png" data-mid="52682656" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/578/i/93d323a8e290d8c9a061c05f1eef0a7982554a50df75470bb3429e60439c7fd1/Screen-Shot-2019-10-14-at-11.56.59-PM.png" /> Fig. 7 However, as FEMA’s multiple disaster scenarios shows, not one future reality is conjured, but many. It is here, in the need to account for multiple potential futures, that the spatial implications of a scenario planning logic come into play. Not only are these various scenarios key elements of citing a business [Figure 8], but more importantly, the fact that all potential futures are in play means that no site, ultimately, is to be considered beyond the pale of potential catastrophe. Every business, in the eyes of the scenario-inflected continuity industry, requires not just one space but an auxiliary space to mitigate against future disruptions. And so, you get entire companies that are dedicated to providing these auxiliary, only-when-needed space. Of course, since they too are prone to the uncertain future, these extra spaces need to be distributed across the globe so as to avoid a potential catastrophe [Figure 9]. Oftentimes these extra office spaces are otherwise used as co-working spaces, showing that in a world of uncertain futures, space becomes flexible. <img width="1060" height="792" width_o="1060" height_o="792" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/faef9968c75c1d4866af4341a83b44af3edb2fa287ee92007168e66981391fee/Screen-Shot-2019-10-14-at-11.57.21-PM.png" data-mid="52682657" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/faef9968c75c1d4866af4341a83b44af3edb2fa287ee92007168e66981391fee/Screen-Shot-2019-10-14-at-11.57.21-PM.png" />Fig. 8 <img width="1068" height="504" width_o="1068" height_o="504" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b840b98f512d87e4f698d9d10db25dbf7c71192c62d38ca01f6ea0c222368c41/Screen-Shot-2019-10-14-at-11.57.45-PM.png" data-mid="52682659" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/b840b98f512d87e4f698d9d10db25dbf7c71192c62d38ca01f6ea0c222368c41/Screen-Shot-2019-10-14-at-11.57.45-PM.png" />Fig. 9 Sometimes aggressively so: the continuity services company Rentsys not only provides permanent office space, they also provide mobile recovery office spaces [Figure 10]. Such a situation could not be more different from an insurantial order. Where space was once permanently sited and permanently calculable it is now conditioned by uncertainty and always on the move. <img width="1152" height="998" width_o="1152" height_o="998" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d6c1b79ea8e14a4a9d537ccfd63341237e77287e61347d8f4759f60f2f69328c/Screen-Shot-2019-10-14-at-11.57.34-PM.png" data-mid="52682658" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/d6c1b79ea8e14a4a9d537ccfd63341237e77287e61347d8f4759f60f2f69328c/Screen-Shot-2019-10-14-at-11.57.34-PM.png" /> Fig. 10 1. James M. Cain, Double Indemnity (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 59-60. The novel was published in 1943, though serially syndicated years earlier in 1936. 2. Frederick Whiting, “Playing Against Type: Statistical Personhood, Depth Narrative, and the Business of Genre in James M. Cain’s ‘Double Indemnity,’” Journal of Narrative Theory 36, no. 2 (Summer 2006): 201. 3. Herman Kahn and Anthony J. Weiner, The Year 2000: A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years (New York: Macmillan, 1967), 263.4. Herman Kahn, Thinking about the Unthinkable (New York: Avon, 1962), 150.5. Kahn, The Year 2000, 263, as quoted in R. John Williams, “World Futures,” Critical Inquiry 42 (Spring 2016): 522.6. Williams, “World Futures,” 524. 7. Kees van der Heijden, Scenarios: The Art of Strategic Conversation (New York: John Wiley &amp; Sons, Inc., 1996), 17-19.8. It is important here to point out that although scenario planning presents a new method of addressing the future, it did not in any way wholly supplant probabilistic means. Traditional insurantial logics continue to hold in many areas, and, as Richard V. Ericson, Aaron Doyle and Dean Barry have argued, even situations that “defy insurance logic because they are surrounded by uncertainty” such as “natural disasters and technological catastrophes” continue to be covered by the industry. “The [insurance industry],” they write, “… will insure just about anything. Insurers gamble, trying to manage any fallout through a variety of pricing, claims control, financial risk redistribution, and investment strategies” Richard V. Ericson, Aaron Doyle and Dean Barry, Insurance as Governance (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 9.9. Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1990), xiii. 10. Ibid., 5. 11. Ibid., xiii. 12. Francois Ewald, “Insurance and Risk,” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1911), 198-199. 13. Ibid., 203. 14. Ibid., 210. 15. Kees van der Heijden et al., “Turbulence, Business Planning and the Unfolding Financial Crisis,” in Business Planning for Turbulent Times: New Methods for Applying Scenarios, ed. Rafael Ramirez et al. (London: Earthscan Ltd, 2010), 270. 16. Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London, UK: Sage Publications, 1992), 16 22. 17. Ulrich Beck, “Risk Society and the Provident State,” in Risk, Environment and Modernity: Towards a New Ecology, ed. Scott Lash, Bronislaw Szeszynski and Brian Wynne (London, UK: Sage Publications, 1996), 31. 18. Francois Ewald, “The Return of Descartes’s Malicious Demon: An Outline of a Philosophy of Precaution,” in Embracing Risk: The Changing Culture of Insurance and Responsibility, ed. Tom Baker and Jonathan Simon (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 286. 19. Ibid., 294. 20. Since I am arguing that the rise of Beck’s “risk society” contributed to Kahn’s scenario planning worldview it is important to note that although Risk Society was not published until 1986, Beck sees “risk society” as beginning much earlier. In fact, he dates the “discovery of the incalculability of risk” all the way back to a publication by Keynes on “uncertain knowledge” in 1937, even before Kahn’s time. Ulrich Beck, “Living in the world risk society,” Economy and Society vol. 35 no. 3 (August 2006): 334.21. Peter Dizikes, “When the Butterfly Effect Took Flight,” MIT Technology Review, February 22, 2011, https://www.technologyreview.com/s/422809/when-the-butterfly-effect-took-flight/. 22. Williams, “World Futures,” 482. 23. These descriptions of the optimizing logics of “high-speed computers” come from Herman Kahn’s On Thermonuclear War, wherein he first outlined his scenario planning method. In that text, Kahn rhetorically asks himself, “‘Do you want to argue with an electronic machine backed up by all the resources of modern science?’” The “only possible answer to that question,” he replies, “is ‘Yes.’” Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), 119. As quoted in Williams, “World Futures,” 482. 24 W. Bruce Allen, “The Logistics Revolution and Transportation,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 554 (September 1997): 114. 25 Peter Klaus and Stefanie Müller, “Towards a Science of Logistics: Milestones along Converging Paths,” in The Roots of Logistics: A Reader of Classical Contributions to the History and Conceptual Foundations of the Science of Logistics, ed. Peter Klaus and Stefanie Müller (Heidelberg: Springer, 2012), 20. Given their analysis—where the culmination point of logistics’s expanding purview is the need to design for the inevitable turbulence of our complex world—the similarity between Lorenz’s chaos theory diagrams [Figure 1] and the overlapping lines of shipping routes by which the logistical operation is frequently represented [Figure 2] feels like more than a coincidence. 26. https://www.fema.gov/emergency-planning-exercises https://landscapes-of-fulfillment.org/Amazon-City Wed, 24 Jul 2019 16:52:37 +0000 Landscapes of Fulfillment https://landscapes-of-fulfillment.org/Amazon-City Territories ← Amazon City <img width="2248" height="1589" width_o="2248" height_o="1589" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/64defaec9b8e751a9c41cd6689437b2e3f7822d33096ca8bb6907523e4554f79/Cover-Final_N.jpg" data-mid="47458900" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/64defaec9b8e751a9c41cd6689437b2e3f7822d33096ca8bb6907523e4554f79/Cover-Final_N.jpg" /> Baolin Shen / 2019 Yale School of Architecture &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; The influence of Amazon’s online retail platform has reformed the way that retail works. The company has, in the recent years, given significant attention to develop its own logistical systems. In order to improve the efficiency of its product delivery network, Amazon has sought to streamline its logistical process. Apart from building up an extensive network of storage, the company has also invested in technologies to speed up its last-mile deliveries. The promise of a shorter delivery time comes with the incursion of Amazon further into cities, and closer to consumers than ever before. <img width="1200" height="866" width_o="1200" height_o="866" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f6b7e16f8649af3cc94b347237f73fb9529cdc16684cc63b51c3f406abd0398b/Baolin1_N.gif" data-mid="47459315" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/f6b7e16f8649af3cc94b347237f73fb9529cdc16684cc63b51c3f406abd0398b/Baolin1_N.gif" /> Globally, the phenomenal rate at which e-commerce is explanding has radically changed the logistics of retail delivery. Traditionally large shipments of goods have been taken over by millions of deliveries of small personal packages at increased frequencies. Amazon alone accounts for 49.1% of US’s total e-commerce sales which is roughly equivalent to 5% of the country’s total retail sales, and ships more than 1.6 million packages per day. The map above shows the growth of fulfillent centers, sortation centers, grocery facilities and Prime Now hubs in the United States over two decades. <img width="3311" height="2559" width_o="3311" height_o="2559" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/43b33fdb82ebb2e7e0dd2b5cb25f8916fc6ecebcea77c68a7ed11b7be84902ac/Fulfillment-Presentation-Baolin_Page_10N.jpg" data-mid="47459448" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/43b33fdb82ebb2e7e0dd2b5cb25f8916fc6ecebcea77c68a7ed11b7be84902ac/Fulfillment-Presentation-Baolin_Page_10N.jpg" />Through the investigation of Amazon patents and delivery strategies, this research examines the methods that the company uses to appropriate urban space for its own logistical space. The project is presented in the format of guidebook that seeks to capture the relationship amongst different logistical components. The guidebook asks: are extant delivery infrastructures, like roads, bike lanes, and public transporation, adapting to keep up with the pace set by Amazon, and if so, how? <img width="3311" height="2550" width_o="3311" height_o="2550" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/21fb84dd5edbfbeeeff86eaa1da8620bdd6dbda56201d8c33c1f116a0285a952/Fulfillment-Presentation-Baolin_Page_11N.jpg" data-mid="47459449" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/21fb84dd5edbfbeeeff86eaa1da8620bdd6dbda56201d8c33c1f116a0285a952/Fulfillment-Presentation-Baolin_Page_11N.jpg" />When placed on a graph that pairs package capacity with implimentation cost, it is clear that the traditional method of highway-based delivery services and even cutting-edge technologies, such as drone charging stations, lie at the lower end of the scale, while more fantastical patents and inventions dreamt up by Amazon exist at the upper end of both variables. <img width="2200" height="1700" width_o="2200" height_o="1700" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/560d695c68b698e582feef8d0e6054cfb026fbed75bfba0c6dd8da582c39d109/Fulfillment-Presentation-Baolin_Page_13N.jpg" data-mid="47459450" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/560d695c68b698e582feef8d0e6054cfb026fbed75bfba0c6dd8da582c39d109/Fulfillment-Presentation-Baolin_Page_13N.jpg" /> While there are nuances to each delivery system, they each exist as a kit of smaller parts, whether stored on a shelf in Whole Foods, a fulfillment center, or a drone hub. <img width="2200" height="1700" width_o="2200" height_o="1700" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/11763fb1f1b2c4e35c13213098549726078b8e400e9feec7a898ac7b80585f5c/Fulfillment-Presentation-Baolin_Page_14N.jpg" data-mid="47459451" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/11763fb1f1b2c4e35c13213098549726078b8e400e9feec7a898ac7b80585f5c/Fulfillment-Presentation-Baolin_Page_14N.jpg" /> Flying Fortress: The aerial fulfillment center that takes advantage of the available airspace above the city to position itself closer to the consumers. <img width="2200" height="1700" width_o="2200" height_o="1700" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/6caa2753d4a48814ec70ee8c885fc7b90f0609d6653680868070aa492bcf5ac5/Fulfillment-Presentation-Baolin_Page_15N.jpg" data-mid="47459452" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/6caa2753d4a48814ec70ee8c885fc7b90f0609d6653680868070aa492bcf5ac5/Fulfillment-Presentation-Baolin_Page_15N.jpg" /> Moving “Warehouse”: By adapting the functions of a fulfillment center to a modular container, existing networks of transportation, such as trucks and trains, can be utilized for delivery. <img width="2200" height="1700" width_o="2200" height_o="1700" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/8463fc60f60ac6b27001a9b0e5968a04f57825cd3491624077eb7cbee9ea803f/Fulfillment-Presentation-Baolin_Page_16N.jpg" data-mid="47459453" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/8463fc60f60ac6b27001a9b0e5968a04f57825cd3491624077eb7cbee9ea803f/Fulfillment-Presentation-Baolin_Page_16N.jpg" />Roadside Charger: Grafted onto existing lamp posts, it charges drones that have finished a delivery, but have insufficient power to return to base.Tag-along Locker: Smart lockers are installed or attached to public transport, turning them into modes of package delivery. <img width="2200" height="1700" width_o="2200" height_o="1700" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/90a8a98518527ffc544035f3128f71e6593eb32691f5eb09caf8a28ec1babe87/Fulfillment-Presentation-Baolin_Page_17N.jpg" data-mid="47459454" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/90a8a98518527ffc544035f3128f71e6593eb32691f5eb09caf8a28ec1babe87/Fulfillment-Presentation-Baolin_Page_17N.jpg" />Treasure Truck: A modile store that features last minute sales items. The vehicle also serves as a billboard with live advertisement.Underground Belt: The under ground conveyor system avoids the street level traffic, and is capable of transporting heavy and bulky items across the city. https://landscapes-of-fulfillment.org/Identity-Verification Fri, 26 Jul 2019 13:06:33 +0000 Landscapes of Fulfillment https://landscapes-of-fulfillment.org/Identity-Verification Interfaces ← Identity Verification <img width="616" height="347" width_o="616" height_o="347" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/2a5e35cecd0a34451a5a13fe0c3a5c1e8504472361f9a49b9fe355b900621ae7/google-invisible-recaptcha-1.jpg" data-mid="47430373" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/616/i/2a5e35cecd0a34451a5a13fe0c3a5c1e8504472361f9a49b9fe355b900621ae7/google-invisible-recaptcha-1.jpg" /> Valeria Flores / 2018 Yale School of Architecture On a daily basis we seem to lose track of how many times we have to prove who we are to others in order to define how we move through space to carry out our many chores. Our identity defines our spatial realm without us even realizing it, or maybe we have grown so accustomed to verifying who we are that we don’t register the series of boundaries we cross hour by hour in an abstract way. Here is where my interest sprung for this investigation, where I intend to analyze the impact of Big Data on our real life and online identities. Some of the questions this paper seeks to answer are those related to the history and need for an identity and how through time there has been an intensification to have to prove who we are to have access to many of the services we require from day to day. More importantly, the paper includes a number of case studies of companies who have taken over the responsibility of assuring the veracity of their customers’ identities through data decentralization and material development as a form of biometrics. The fissures in the process of identification are what that draw our attention to how anxious our lives in the digital age have become in an ever growing neurotic quest to build a level of trust around who we are. At the same time, they become the gateways that compromise the security of how we interact with others’ identities. As a preliminary exercise to the written version of this investigation, I underwent an identity use analysis on a common work day for me. The following is a graphic showing how many times throughout the day I had to make use of identity validation systems to carry forward basic, routine chores as a student at the Yale School of Architecture. <img width="1650" height="1276" width_o="1650" height_o="1276" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/23cd64cdda9ab76a82ade21aa04b79b7f622afef06d8b7877ea438c2e12b58c6/graphic2-01.jpg" data-mid="47428676" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/23cd64cdda9ab76a82ade21aa04b79b7f622afef06d8b7877ea438c2e12b58c6/graphic2-01.jpg" /> <img width="1650" height="1276" width_o="1650" height_o="1276" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/455b28ad1cc7f944b695556570553b97668c18f244fc02ad1aa42be7a28f1f4d/graphic-AM-vs-PM-01.jpg" data-mid="47428675" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/455b28ad1cc7f944b695556570553b97668c18f244fc02ad1aa42be7a28f1f4d/graphic-AM-vs-PM-01.jpg" /> These illustrations bring to light how ubiquitous it is for us to verify our identities on almost an hourly basis. Each and every single one of these annotations is an abstraction of the traces left as a recognizable individual in a determined space and time. What they become are symbols for “Individual X was at Y at time Z and made use of the service A/ purchased item B, etc”. Our physicality is transformed into data that can be easily compiled and traced. In the era of Big Data and constant surveillance this becomes a resourceful pool of information for governments, where they don’t really have to make an effort to control their population in motion, we on our own provide them with this information.They can also be thought of as a series of barriers that we are constantly crossing in order to get on with our lives and have access to the services we have grown used to. Another interpretation for which this type of graphic can be used for is to shed a light on our interaction or more even, dependency on our smartphones. When we put into numbers how many times we interact with our phones, it is eye-opening to see how much information about ourselves we’re currently feeding into these devices. This graphic record was carried out on a day after finals, where the turmoil of moving around the Architecture building was significantly less than usual and reflects on a lower use of login interfaces.Personally, one of the most prominent discoveries for me was how Face ID has increased the ease of interaction with my phone, to the point where I find myself checking it more times than usual. The downside of this? I’m feeding more and more information about my facial characteristics to a device that can eventually improve its accuracy for facial recognition technologies used by corporations and governments. Overall, it would be interesting to carry forward this record over a week and represent it almost like a map with the locations of each of these identity interactions pinpointed to see how our identity allows us to move through space.The concept of identity is already a slippery one without even taking Big Data into consideration. When we reflect upon how we even conceive the idea of identity, we realize that from the youngest of ages we always understand our identity as a game of representation and interpretation. Recognizing ourselves in the mirror is an interpretation of how we are represented by a reflective surface. There is no direct, empirical access to what our identity is, it is always conditioned through the medium of its representation: a photograph, a mirror, a passport, etc. Given the difficulty in defining identity truthfully, it is understandable why this becomes such a key element to our everyday lives. What does identity do for us? Why are we so concerned with guaranteeing its veracity and why do we have this constant need of distinguishing ourselves apart and then having to prove who we are to others?In order to address these questions, it becomes necessary to first understand how we have recorded our individuality through time. The history of identity provides us with an understanding of how the degree of neuroticism regarding who we are has evolved throughout time. More importantly, this graphic timeline shows the growing technologies that spring out of the need of more layers of veracity added to the representation of who we are to others. [1] <img width="650" height="2144" width_o="650" height_o="2144" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4b8efddd6e0f21f6cdd579860af1a2144715c0861355a0730a2e2ba892bd3497/ID_History.png" data-mid="47428679" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/650/i/4b8efddd6e0f21f6cdd579860af1a2144715c0861355a0730a2e2ba892bd3497/ID_History.png" /> First off, our identity exists within a paradox of freedom and control. Identity both provides us with the freedom to define who we are and how we want to be seen by others whilst simultaneously being a form of power and control for governments. Consequently, our identity establishes a trace thatconnects who we are and where we’re from. As a result we can say that it defines a spatial matrix of the places we’re allowed to move to and from. This increased mobility of individuals around the world required a new form of control: the passport. As Mark B. Salter describesit as: “The passport is key artifact in the global mobility assemblage, understood as the dispositif of a population in circulation.”[2] But more importantly to the purpose of this discussion is how he refers to it being an example of the paradox outlined before: “It is a technology of freedom as well as a technology of control: not only does it afford a kind of freedom to travel internationally, but also it effects a kind on individualization.”[3] Even as the passport is a standardized form of identity verification available, open and understood by all, it also works to separate individuals and classify them into discrete groups. Subsequently, this process of standardization has other series of ramifications, which contribute to intensify the degree of neurosis regarding our identities. In order to standardize ourindividual identities into a pool of similar characteristics that can be measured against other individuals’ characteristics, we are forced into adopting a new form of identity: one of neutrality. A passport photo never depicts an individual in its truest form. A passport photo has a series of guidelines that need to be met in order to classify as one and be a valid form of documentation. Salter describes this process of conforming to a “new you” as: “...the passport photograph creates a new ground for identification by the state: the presupposed isomorphism of the body to itself, the representation of the body to itself, the representation to the body, and the identity to both the body and the representation. It makes new kinds of authentication possible and creates the possibility that, for the first time, one cannot prove one’s own identity, because one’s body is not identical to its representations.”[4] As a result, this can be thought as one of the first fissures in the process of identity validation through passports. The neutrality that we are bound to embrace in order to enter this realm of standardized identification, creates in turn another series of conflicts regarding gender, race and socio-economic backgrounds. Who gets to determine that this standardized form of identification is the optimal means to tell people apart from each other? Or is it another form of disguising the creation of more political and power boundaries between nations? Salter addresses this through the following: “Further, the failure of biometrics to successfully classify, and in particular to be efficient and effective at authenticating, vulnerable or marginalized populations is not an accidental outcome of the system but an inherent part of the system. The failure of biometric technologies is aleatory: it circulates in ways that reproduce other structures of power.”[5]This problematic exists even without bringing the Internet of Things and Big Data into the conflict. When human passport controls are replaced by machines and their algorithms, these forms of standardization and neglect of certain populations are replicated at an exponential manner. An example of this would be the already implemented technology of AVATAR (Automated Virtual Assistant for Truth Assessments in Real Time). In spite of the fact that the use of this technology has allowed for a streamlining and ease of the passport control process, it hasn’t broken ground in expanding the horizons of identity validation beyond the neutrality of the passport photo. The unattainable image of the ideal citizen seems to prevail across gender, race and socio-political backgrounds, making it hard to truly revolutionize how we materialize our identity into a trustworthy representation. (“Biometric technologies ‘operate as systems for the discrimination of non-normative subjects, including people of colour, refugees and asylum seekers, transgender subjects, labourers and people with disabilities’.”[6]) This is clearly an issue in our current world with the growing refugee crisis and the increasing demand for global mobility and flexibility of labor as well as of goods and individuals.A secondary fissure in the system of passports as a form of identity validation lies at its most basic level: the fact that as a document it intends to materialize trust. Boris Groys in his “In the Flow” essay approaches this from a different perspective where he explains that when we transitioned from analog to digital production, the digital copy opened an ease of replication that devalued the truthfulness of the original. If we think of this in parallel to what happens in how we represent and materialize our identities, we understand the inherent vulnerability that comes along with that act. Once it becomes a physical artifact it opens the possibilities to reproduction, forgery and ultimately, identity theft (“But once you materialize trust, you open up the possibility for replication or imitation. The passport becomes a research frontier: an ongoing experiment in the materialization of trust set against a ‘technological race’ between issuers, regulators, and forgers.”[7]). This now moves the discussion forward to the case studies I have selected as examples of companies which work in the market of identity security. <img width="607" height="605" width_o="607" height_o="605" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/119659e3125bdcffabd65a792380eadccb52b062f6de35b81fdcc05e90151466/icon11.PNG" data-mid="47428678" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/607/i/119659e3125bdcffabd65a792380eadccb52b062f6de35b81fdcc05e90151466/icon11.PNG" /> [8] An unknown market to me before diving into this investigation, the world of biometrics is an up and coming source of innovation in the business world. A Google search for biometrics companies will yield hundreds of options of companies ranging in experience and size, reason why the ones I picked as particular case study examples are ones which deal with identity validation through different means. Initially the search was narrowed down to focusing on the companies bringing the most attention to the field as of last year. HYPR was named by Disruptor Daily amongst its top 10 Biometrics Companies to watch in 2017 [9]. HYPR is an example for decentralized authentication of identity, reliant on data encryption and almost a cloud software platform. On the other hand, Gemalto focuses on the material technology ofthe physical product they offer their customers. Both companies share an interesting marketing strategy to win over their customers’ trust through catchy slogans and the epitome of neutrality in their representation of individuals. Starting with HYPR, they sell themselves as being able to “TRUST ANYONE” and emphasizing the fact that “The Future is Decentralized.” <img width="1838" height="820" width_o="1838" height_o="820" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f75d12d2eab225e14f92fa9847fe54f5e0d60377aeefa39b40e622c3d8d27c34/HYPR.PNG" data-mid="47428677" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/f75d12d2eab225e14f92fa9847fe54f5e0d60377aeefa39b40e622c3d8d27c34/HYPR.PNG" />[10] The eeriness of this image comes from the neutrality and almost lack of emotion depicted in the woman used as a face for the company. Similar to the blankness of a passport image, the dry expression on the woman’s face allows for them to project almost an idea of false security, where they have access to all your identity data. The “Trust Anyone” catch phrase works in both ways, customers are also trusting this type of companies to safe guard their individual information, believing that in no way these companies could possibly be also profiting from some kind of partnership with the government to provide them with more detailed information of their population. The key marketing factor this particular enterprise focuses on is mitigating the risk of identity theft by storing the individual’s information in a variety of places instead of one single location that can be more vulnerable to an attack (see diagrams below [11]). <img width="1276" height="613" width_o="1276" height_o="613" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/fd5f4363be74223ea44557072122407c94013c8971e55682621312fcb00e313f/Capture.PNG" data-mid="53124250" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/fd5f4363be74223ea44557072122407c94013c8971e55682621312fcb00e313f/Capture.PNG" /> Contrary to the premise of HYPR which operates majorly on synched data resources, Gemalto is an advocate for the physicality of the identity document and even the hardware used to validate a user’s ID. They market themselves as “Security to be free”, which immediately resonates with what was discussed earlier in the passport section with these documents being both a form of freedom and control. Moreover, upon closer inspection of their presentation, a phrase that caught my attention is the following becoming from one of its board members [12]: <img width="792" height="281" width_o="792" height_o="281" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e24e6f7b7760d67c59104f400dd89f5c143643eb5536031f5c0cd6ec95c842d7/Gemalto-CEO.PNG" data-mid="47428674" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/792/i/e24e6f7b7760d67c59104f400dd89f5c143643eb5536031f5c0cd6ec95c842d7/Gemalto-CEO.PNG" /> What determines the strength of our identities? Our passport which establishes our citizenship and therefore rules out the places where we are allowed to go and not? Is it our racial background, socio-economic condition? I’d like to believe that this type of statement is geared more towards strengtheningthe validity of our identities through the technologies used to represent them instead of any of the options previously outlined. Gemalto has a different workflow to the data heavy one of HYPR, where their process goes back and forth between physical identification and the use of data as a means of verifying that physical document [13]: <img width="719" height="161" width_o="719" height_o="161" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/3072c4ad28e3160d050e3850865881961f082bbffc8f21d7b5d3fa28dd3567e9/diagramgemalto.PNG" data-mid="47428673" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/719/i/3072c4ad28e3160d050e3850865881961f082bbffc8f21d7b5d3fa28dd3567e9/diagramgemalto.PNG" /> As much as Gemalto is trying to push forward the materialization of trust through their printing technologies and various layers of identity verification to deter fraud, they’re essentially not pushing the bar any higher in terms of truly innovating what we use to verify our identities. The clearest evidence for this is in the way they market their own products, which continue to establish a close connection to the neutral representation imposed by passports. <img width="660" height="230" width_o="660" height_o="230" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7420b36d58abe5265bde9277a46febb0f212533d9e4f15f75ee7c440ac5cb455/051118_FloresValeria_Final-paper.jpg" data-mid="53123973" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/660/i/7420b36d58abe5265bde9277a46febb0f212533d9e4f15f75ee7c440ac5cb455/051118_FloresValeria_Final-paper.jpg" /> [14]The image above in particular is loaded with the influence of the passport’s influence on the idea of an “ideal citizen”. It is understandable that they don’t show precisely what a particular country’s ID card would look like due to security reasons in order to avoid possible replication of the document, but their choice of location already conveys a sense of disruption between who we are and how we are portrayed in our identity documents. “Republic of Utopia” not only has a funny undertone to it, but itfurther emphasizes the idea that for us to reach the levels of identity standardization set up to guarantee a successful validation platform, we must become almost a false representation of ourselves.Perhaps, through the accuracy of 3D scanning we will be able to overcome the neurosis of the passport/ ID document photo matching the individual in real life. As architects we understand better than anyone the implications of collapsing three dimensions onto a planar representation, reason why it is comprehensible to see why a number of standards need to be established in the image used to represent a person’s facial features.The intensification of our identity’s validation along with the neurosis that tags along with it, doesn’t seem to be nearing a stop in the near future. In fact, we are indeed living and moving towards an even more interconnected world, where we are the ones willing to provide this type of information without any prior request. The iPhone X’s Face ID is the first attempt at disguising this form of control through our dependency on smartphones and increasing need to interact with them in a faster, repeated and streamlined manner. On a skeptical reading of this technology, it is even interesting to see how Apple adds on the feature of Animoji as a fun, unsuspecting way of scanning our facial features and projecting them onto another character. We are closer than we may think to carry within our wallets a 3D scan of our faces that will serve as the ultimate key to unlock the physical barriers imposed to our movement through space and time controlled by nations. Bibliography&nbsp;↗ 1. Graphic representation found at “Innovation in Identity”, Trulioo, accessed April 26th 2018, https://www.trulioo.com/blog/infographic-the-history-of-id-verification/ 2.&nbsp;Mark B. Salter, Making Things International 1 Circuits and Motion, (University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 18. 3.&nbsp;Mark B. Salter, Making Things International 1 Circuits and Motion, (University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 14. 4.&nbsp;Mark B. Salter, Making Things International 1 Circuits and Motion, (University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 22. 5.&nbsp;Mark B. Salter, Making Things International 1 Circuits and Motion, (University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 30.6. Mark B. Salter, Making Things International 1 Circuits and Motion, (University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 54. 7. Mark B. Salter, Making Things International 1 Circuits and Motion, (University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 14. 8.&nbsp;Graphic created by Vectorpocket at Freepik.com, accessed April 26th 2018, https://www.freepik.com/free-vector/set-of-vector-isometric-hacker-icons_1215904.htm#term=data%20security&amp;page=1&amp;position=22 9.&nbsp;Disruptor Daily website, Top 10 Biometrics Companies to Watch in 2017, accessed April 25th 2018, https://www.disruptordaily.com/top-10-biometrics-companies-2017/ 10.&nbsp;HYPR website, accessed April 26th 2018, https://www.hypr.com/ 11. Graphics taken from the downloadable brochure from HYPR website, accessed April 26th 2018, https://www.hypr.com/ 12.&nbsp;Graphics taken from Gemalto website, accessed April 26th 2018, https://www.gemalto.com/companyinfo 13.&nbsp;Graphics taken from Gemalto Identity Programs downloadable brochure, accessed April 26th 2018, https://www.gemalto.com/govt/identity 14.&nbsp;Graphics taken from Gemalto Identity Programs downloadable brochure, accessed April 26th 2018, https://www.gemalto.com/govt/identity &nbsp; &nbsp; https://landscapes-of-fulfillment.org/Identity-Verification-Bibliography Mon, 21 Oct 2019 20:45:34 +0000 Landscapes of Fulfillment https://landscapes-of-fulfillment.org/Identity-Verification-Bibliography Interfaces ← Identity Verification Bibliography Disruptor Daily. “Top 10 Biometrics Companies to Watch in 2017”. Accessed April 25th, 2018. https://www.disruptordaily.com/top-10-biometrics-companies-2017/ Gemalto. “Identity Programs.” Accessed April 26th, 2018. https://www.gemalto.com/govt/identity Groys, Boris. In The Flow. Verso, 2016. HYPR. “TRUST ANYONE.” Accessed April 26th, 2018. https://www.hypr.com/ Salter, Mark B. Making Things International 1 Circuits and Motion. University of Minnesota Press, 2015. Trulioo. “[INFOGRAPHIC] The History of ID Verification”. Accessed April 26th, 2018. https://www.trulioo.com/blog/infographic-the-history-of-id-verification/&nbsp; &nbsp;