Working the digital silk road : Alibaba's digital free trade zone in Malaysia

Research output: Chapter in Book / Conference PaperChapter

Abstract

A warehouse is a lot like a computer, according to Zhu Lijun, leader of the algorithm team at Cainiao network, the logistics arm of China’s e-commerce giant the Alibaba Group. The “common reliance on storage, extraction, and processing lends the two some striking operational and structural parallels,” the engineer told an audience at the 2018 Global Smart Logistics Summit in Hangzhou (Alibaba Tech 2018). What are we to make of this comparison, given the increased presence of automated technologies in warehouses and the debate concerning their implications for workers (Delfanti and Frey 2020; Beverungen 2021)? To understand the warehouse as a computer with the spatial qualities of an industrial facility is to bring the question of digital work into settings that are at once technical and physical, software-driven, and primed for hard labor.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationDigital Work in the Planetary Market
EditorsMark Graham, Fabian Ferrari
Place of PublicationU.K.
PublisherMIT Press
Pages117-136
Number of pages20
ISBN (Print)9780262543767
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2022

Open Access - Access Right Statement

This work is subject to a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY 4.0) International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Subject to such license, all rights are reserved.

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Working the digital silk road : Alibaba's digital free trade zone in Malaysia'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this