Virtual Migration, Racism, and the Multiplication of Labour

Digitisation has profoundly changed the spatial constitution and economic geography of contemporary capitalism, from the micro-architecture of production in a single office or factory, to the ways we buy, sell and consume goods and services up to global circulatory systems. Concerning the latter, digital computing has revolutionised and accelerated the logistics industry in a way that can be compared to the impact of the standard shipping container in the 1960s.1 Shipping software, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, Global Positioning System (GPS), Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), and other digital technologies which organise, capture and control the movement of things, finance and people, are at the heart of contemporary logistics.2 Digitised logistics transform the spatial ordering of circulation and production; ports, harbours, corridors, special economic zones and other forms of logistical space are created and rearranged, new value chains emerge, others cease to exist. The digitised logistics of circulation accordingly constitute the space of global capitalism as relational, infrastructural, and changing dynamically.