Between China and the Arabian peninsula, a “maritime silk road” powers global capitalism – even in the age of the cloud. LALEH KHALILI explains. "The city center is much wealthier now, too. The new gentry does not want to see bar fights; they want to see monolithic vessels glide in and disappear from view as though unmanned. This false division of where the people are and where the stuff is is similar to the vocabulary of the cloud. That unmanned cargo ship has to do with the perception of digital commerce and the feeling that the products we order online just manifest in front of the doorstep with the hands-off perception of digitized commerce. Of course, there are laborers, bodies, involved at every stage of the process. One quick statistic that also gets at exactly what you’re talking about: In 40 of the 50 states in the US, the number one occupation is now “logistics driver”. The way we think about digital delivery, or about e-commerce – which is enormously important now to the global economy – ignores the fact that being a delivery driver is the number one occupation. Whenever people talk about the virtual world and imagine it to all happen in the cloud, they literally think of fluffy clouds up there, a virtual or ephemeral thing, whereas the cloud is an enormous warehouse full of servers, in a data center that consumes enormous amounts of electricity and water, produces enormous amounts of waste, and is connected to the rest of the world through extremely expensively laid cables, often underwater. Trying to hide or to shield the human from this, to make it seem like everything is hygienic and automatic, works to the benefit of a logistics company like Amazon, who would like all of us to think that all of this happens in a clean and non-human way."

Khalili, professor of international politics at Queen Mary University of London and author of Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine: The Politics of National Commemoration and Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies, spoke to 032c executive editor Victoria Camblin as the global shipping industry continued to grapple with constraints brought about by the world-wide pandemic, impacting supply chains in ways that revealed entangled networks of trade not previously considered by most international consumers. While the “maritime Silk Road” Khalili describes in her recent work may be increasingly visible, it is by no means new, its nature and function by no means merely logistical, its motives and impact far from purely economic. Kept alive through this central capitalist artery are colonial regimes, labor hierarchies, and models of production, profit, and law that continue shape how we live, in society and on the planet.

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