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

Brett Neilson

doi:10.7551/mitpress/13835.003.0011

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

Brett Neilson

Western Sydney University

Research output: Chapter in Book / Conference Paper › Chapter

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 language	English
Title of host publication	Digital Work in the Planetary Market
Editors	Mark Graham, Fabian Ferrari
Place of Publication	U.K.
Publisher	MIT Press
Pages	117-136
Number of pages	20
ISBN (Print)	9780262543767
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/13835.003.0011
Publication status	Published - 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.

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10.7551/mitpress/13835.003.0011

Cite this

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title = "Working the digital silk road : Alibaba's digital free trade zone in Malaysia",

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{\textquoteright}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.",

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A2 - Ferrari, Fabian

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CY - U.K.

ER -

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

Abstract

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UN SDGs

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