ABSTRACT
Historically, the warehouse functioned to contain habit. Be it routines of work associated with the packing of goods or the use of ledger books to keep track of inventory, the warehouse operated as a storage and processing technology, making habit accountable. More recently, the architectural form of the warehouse has been repurposed within digital economies as data centres. These two primary typologies—of the warehouse as storage and processing facility, and the warehouse as digital infrastructure for the circulation of data—are, respectively, marked by habits of labour and habits of data. How do the ubiquity of computational regimes, the calibration of subjectivity and routines of organizational culture standardize habit within warehouse settings? What is the traffic in data between warehouses and data centres, and what sort of tensions prevail between systems of management, operational routines and labour practices in these two separate but intersecting settings? What political, economic and social implications arise in the historical shift from ‘statistical populations to logistical populations’, and how does this bear on the habits of labour and the computational processes of data? These background questions orient and motivate the inquiry set out in this chapter. Our focus is on how the habits of data—that is, the routine and repeatable processes through which digital data circulate within and across logistical operations—connect with and shape the habits of labour in warehouse settings and the movement of goods from warehouse to supermarket in ways that calibrate the rhythms of working lives in the contemporary city.
