Depicting logistics infrastructure is no longer inherently critical because audiences already know it

Evidence

There is a tendency in contemporary media theory to suggest that the mere depiction of contemporary infrastructures of capital—server farms, shipping containers, cables and wires—performs a critical function that unmasks a hidden materiality of media, labor, and infrastructure obscured by the digital. “Amid the complexity and, for the most part, illegibility of global finance, the infrastructure and economy of logistics serve as diagnostic devices,” says Ned Rossiter. Foregrounding processes of shipping and logistics management are essential to understand the politics of contemporary technology. We certainly do not disagree, but we would hesitate to suggest that this move is, in fact, either critical or even an “unveiling” of much of anything today. Allen’s videos reveal that popular culture is, in fact, well aware of at least some dimensions of this infrastructural and logistical economy. We just do not care, or do not care as long as this economy underpins the potential to generate more—more waste, more content. Socially responsible, critical pedagogy is only an excuse to permit one to delight in economies of waste that are, otherwise, destroying the planet. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 260

Categorization

• XREF: Reverses a premise common in media-infrastructure theory (Rossiter, Parikka, Starosielski) that this reader may have encountered; useful counterpoint when teaching how infrastructural critique has been absorbed by the very economy it names.