Big tech has been using the Covid-19 pandemic to take over various regions in the world, including Northern Italy. Amazon, for instance, one of the biggest profiteers of the crisis, has been turning its logistical empire into ‘critical infrastructure.’ Meanwhile, workers are being romanticized as an ‘essential’ labor force in order to suppress their bargaining power: ‘heroes’ are expected to sacrifice themselves for ‘the greater good’ rather than go on strike. This big tech-driven neo-feudalism is fostered by the fact that Northern Italy is at the forefront of the global neo-liberal transformation – including a far-reaching privatization of health care services and hence not coincidentally emerged as one of the first epicenters of the pandemic.
The work of the research collective Into the Black Box in this context is based on the assumption that the present system of production is in crisis and that it – as history has already shown at earlier stages – moves its balance from production to logistics (and finance) in order to survive.
The questions raised by the collective are the following: What is inside the Amazon warehouses that can be seen next to the highways? How does an Amazon Locker located in a supermarket work? How does a delivery girl, a truck driver, a picker, an Amazon technician work? How does Amazon promote its services as Amazon Prime?
This inquiry is representative of Into the Black Box collective’s agenda that is in turn mirrored in its name. It derives from the symbol of contemporary management techniques that hide to external viewers the whole logic of the system.
Similar black boxes are all around us: in platform capitalism and industry 4.0, in urban planning, in labor organization, in State governance. A way to penetrate the opacity of the system is to analyze inputs and outputs, operations and consequences, procedures and resistances. Thus, the collective’s multidisciplinary approach provides a flexible tool to gain deeper understanding of the contemporary world. Into the Black Box’s visual inquiry not only enables an elaborate critique of the Amazon model and its thorough restructuring of labor, but also offers a glimpse into the potential for labor struggles yet to come.
Taking this question as a starting point for their contribution to the SILENT WORKS exhibition, the collective started a broad and shared project of visual inquiry around the way in which one of the most ‘advanced’ enterprises of contemporary capitalism is transforming work. At first, they launched a call for an artistic mapping on the presence of the multinational company Amazon in Northern Italy and the working conditions within it. Here we present three works selected by the call. Davide Blotta documented the workind day of an Amazon driver in Bologna; Ilaria Depari iconized Amazon presence through and outside the city inviting the spectator to reflect on the work behind the supply chain; Dario Sanna condensed the first Amazon delivery as a milestone.
At the same time, IBB started to collect information on the company organization, history, working conditions and ambitions using videos and newspaper articles. The ambition is to create a polyphonic narrative combining inquiry and art. Here we present part of the materials collected creating Amazon, A Critical Tour, a path of investigation on Amazon through different steps, from the history to the company to workers’ strikes.
Flying Drones crossing the sky to delivery packages. AI devices managing your home while waiting for next Amazon Prime Video series. Thousands of robots working in a smart warehouse with all kind of commodities. Welcome to the Amazon World. This is the surface of a black box containing all the information on how this Giant achieved to gain his leading position in the global economy.
The Critical Tour prepared by Into the Black Box will lead you inside the box, behind and beyond the curtain of its rhetoric. Collecting opinions and info from newspapers, workers’ protests, videos and paper, Into the Black Box prepared a path of 6 steps to discover the hidden contents of the box. Starting from the history of the company the spectator will move through its expansion and vision of the future to gradually arrive to the “secret laboratory of production” where thousands of workers are exploited along a supply chain that connects all the globe in one click.
This Tour is focused on Amazon but talks about capitalism in general, with its ambition to replace human labor with machines and flows in a smooth and frictionless world. Nevertheless, working class cannot be totally replace as well as class struggles agitate the capitalist dreams.
Davide Blotta Dario Sanna Ilaria Depari Into the Black Box
