Digital twins and logistical labour: models, plans and the inversion of the ‘real’

This article argues that digital twins constitute new computational techniques for the mobilisation and intensification of enduring logics and operations in the management of contemporary logistical labour. To demonstrate this, the article traces conceptual and material histories of the digital twin through industrial planning and associated practices of modelling, simulation, and scenario planning, before turning to the analysis of an initiative of the British Columbia Maritime Employers Association to predictively manage longshore labour dispatch. At stake in the digital twin, the article argues, is an inversion of power between the real and the simulation in planning, labour and logistics management.