Abstract
This chapter employs the concept of the machinic assemblage, which denotes the entanglements of machines, humans, software, and discourses that produce relations of power, exercised through the logic of control. We analyze the operations in the container terminals of the Piraeus port as a social machine: human labour is entangled with the lives of containers and all the machinery that moves them around the terminal: cranes, trucks, and software platforms, which generate and control complex movements through algorithmic computations. We argue, from this perspective, that labour in the Piraeus container terminals is enabled through the everyday functioning of cybernetic organisms whose lives are ordered according to objectives of maximum efficiency and the minimization of idleness.
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Hatzopoulos, P., Kambouri, N. (2018). Piraeus Port as a Machinic Assemblage: Labour, Precarity, and Struggles. In: Neilson, B., Rossiter, N., Samaddar, R. (eds) Logistical Asia. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-8333-4_8
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