Efficiency displaces friction onto hidden labor and environmental costs throughout supply chains

Evidence

For the purposes of this map, we can call them the Shadow Lands. They are the mangled and dense understory of our supposedly frictionless global economy. Decades of wringing out every possible efficiency means that each link in the chain—the mines and industrial farms where raw materials are extracted; the factories and slaughterhouses that turn those inputs into parts and finished products; the trains and ships that carry them across continents and oceans; the warehouses that sort and store them to be ready at the click of a cursor; the trucks and cars that deliver them when the click arrives; the mountains of waste and poisoned waterways where the detritus from each stage ends up; the glimmering playgrounds where the ultrarich enjoy their spoils—carries a distinct yet numbingly familiar story of depredation. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 777

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the chapter’s organizing concept, the Shadow Lands, as the hidden understory of the frictionless economy.
• XREF: Connects to Klein’s recurring focus from No Logo on supply-chain exploitation — she explicitly references it in the following paragraph. — connects to: Sustainability accounting quantifies some impacts while obscuring hard-to-measure ones — Gerald F. Davis & Suntae Kim, Financialization of the Economy, 88; Global supply-chain efficiency transfers ecological costs onto the world’s most vulnerable people — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 306; Carbon permit markets divert emissions curbs into market-making technicalities — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 928 (+2 more)