The Container Ship Project
The application comes in 3 parts; Containerizer, ContainerShip and ShippingLines:
Containerizer: An application for creating a shipping container and filling it with contents. To use it, simply drop files onto the application; the application will create a uniformly sized container with a unique id number on the desktop. Each container will hold up to 500K.
(Technical Overview: This is a GUI front end for a simple BASH shell script; which creates the container (a 600K Disk Image), with a unique id.)
ContainerShip: An application for loading containers onto the ship for delivery. To use it, drop a container onto the application; you will be asked for an email address for the recipient, the sender's email address and a password, which will allow the recipient to download their container.
(Technical Overview: This application, again a GUI front end for a simple BASH shell script, sends a POST request to the web server, passing the recipient‘s email address, the sender’s email address, the password and the disk image. On receipt of the data, the container is assigned to a ‘ship’; if that ship is full it is given a ‘sailing date’ and a new ship is created ready to take the next consignment of cargo.)
ShippingLines: This application is used for showing the progress of a container. To use it, drop a container onto the application; assuming the container has been loaded onto a ship, it will show the progress of the container.
(Technical Overview: A GUI front end for a simple BASH shell script, which simply opens the user‘s browser to the progress page on the web server passing the name of the container. The progress page checks the current date against the sailing date for the container’s ship and works out what percentage of the journey has been completed.)
When a container reaches its destination, an email will be sent to both sender and recipient informing them of the arrival. The recipient will be able to then download the container from the system using the password set by the sender.
(Technical Overview Behind the Scenes: A timer runs an update script on the web server twice per day, checking for arrivals (ships where the journey percentage is 100%) and emailing recipient and sender with details of the transaction.)
The shipping container was designed as a fast and efficient method for the transportation of diverse goods - a method that would work on road, sea or rail.
The Container Ship Project explores the similarity between shipping container traffic and network packets, and also their relationship with each other, as it is the network packet (the order) that fills the container (with the product) for delivery by the ship.
The article ‘20 Ton Packet’ from Wired makes the following comparison
At its heart, ocean shipping is a network business, just like airlines and telecommunications. Passengers, bulk goods, data - all three represent uniform-size cargo, shooting through global transport and sorting systems 24/7/365. Viewed this way, airline seats, data packets, and 40-foot shipping containers are much the same - commoditized units for carrying content.
…
The irony of comparing the processes of container shipping with those of telecommunications is obvious. How can the mammoth bricks stacked on Koch‘s freight ship be reduced, through analogy, to nothing but a series of electrical impulses coursing through a thread of glass? Yet the redolence of the concept of “network,” pumped full of the corporate giddiness set off by the Internet, makes the comparison irresistible. And worthwhile. Since Malcom McLean, it’s safe to argue, no single shift in the big-picture view of the business has been as important as the introduction of systems and insights produced by digital networking.
Yet in this comparison, we are faced with a peculiar dialectic between the similarities created by analogy and the differences, which root us in the physical and political.
In order to begin to explore these ideas, the system is set up so that you have to wait for this process to complete; unlike web services of a superficially similar nature (sending files), an important aspect of this project is that it takes time to both load and deliver the containers. Firstly, you have to wait for the whole ship to be full and then for it to make its journey. A ship may take two weeks to deliver a cargo from China to America.
Obviously, as electronic documents are transmitted around the world almost instantly, the system is somewhat of an artificial construct. However by modelling the physical process of shipping, the system seeks to change the nature, or perception of sending the documents; it automatically makes it a more deliberate process. You have to decide, up to a month in advance, that you want to send a particular document to a particular person. You also have a finite size to work with for each container; so you have to make deliberate choices as to what to put in there. If it were a paid for service, these choices would become even more important.
In the system, all the files sent are packaged up as containers - they are equal in size (data size), faceless and closed. In transit they are uniform. It is only once they have reached their destination that they can be opened up. Just as the anonymous shipping container hides its contents from prying eyes, the computer archive gives few clues about the files inside it.
The system has been built using object oriented programming. The primary principles of which are abstraction, encapsulation and inheritance. There are parallels between shipping containers and object oriented programming; a standardised design (abstraction) for the packaging of goods (encapsulation) for shipping across different modes of transportation (which interestingly took hold because not only was is standardised, but also it was open - given freely to the ISO standards organisation), which is turned into many instances of the design (or class), and which is extended in many different ways (inheritance).
<?php
// object oriented presentation of the shipping container:
class shippingcontainer {
public $height;
public $width;
public $length;
private $contents;
function __construct( $height, $width, $length )
{
$this->height = $height;
$this->width = $width;
$this->length = $length;
}
function storeGoods( $goods )
{
$volume = $this->height * $this->width * $this->length;
if ($goods->volume > $volume || isset($contents))
{
return false;
}
else
{
$this->contents = $goods->contents;
return true;
}
}
function unloadGoods()
{
if (!isset($this->contents))
{
return false;
}
else
{
$goods = $this->contents;
unset($this->contents);
return $goods;
}
}
}
class politicalmeaning extends shippingcontainer
{
public $meaning;
function __construct( $height, $width, $length )
{
$parent::__construct( $height, $width, $length );
$meaning = array();
}
function addMeaning( $new_meaning )
{
$meaning[] = $new_meaning;
}
}
?>The success of the shipping container as a method of shipping diverse goods across a number of different modes of transportation has lead to it being used as a model for developing new software systems and networking concepts.
Although the lessons of logistics learned from containerisation are helpful for the development of digital systems using analogies of objects and networks, those same analogies, expressed through this project, also demonstrate the dialectic relationship between digital systems and the physical act of shipping - and ask questions about the dominance of digital systems.
My argument here runs against the commonly held view that the computer and telecommunications are the sole engines of the third industrial revolution. In effect, I am arguing for the continued importance of maritime space in order to counter the exaggerated importance attached to that largely metaphysical construct, “cyberspace,” and the corollary myth of “instantaneous” contact between distant spaces.
Allan Sekula, “Fish Story”, pp50, 1995
Allan Sekula argues in Fish Story that there is a tendency in the west to think of the world in terms of the digital documents travelling through cyberspace almost instantly and the physical (people, objects) travelling through physical space primarily by plane.
Of course this is only really a small part of the bigger picture. Two thirds of the world does not have access to clean drinking water let alone have email, or access to air travel; and 99% of goods travel by sea and then land.
The distorted lens, through which we in the west look at methods of production and distribution, has become even more extreme in the 12 years since Fish Story was published.
For Sekula, much of this is a political argument; it is the societal embodiment of the Marxist struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, played out not just locally or nationally, but increasingly globally. China owes it‘s economic boom at least in financial terms to the shipping container; making it practical and cost effective to ship vast quantities of goods across the world to America and Europe; but not without paying a high human price. The sweatshops of Europe have just moved further east. Even India, once the cheap labour capital of the world, cannot compete with China’s ‘economic miracle’.
Workers continue to be necessary, and the entire globe is scoured and policed in a restless search for the cheapest labor markets, thus cheapening all labor in the process. But the very existence, and need for, work and workers is increasingly denied. And with this denial comes a new Malthusian indifference, coupled with new fantasies of self-sufficiency. For functionaries serving technical, financial and cultural elites, the imaginary economy takes on the shrinking dimensions of carry-on luggage: the laptop computer with its internal modem, the very image of the self-sufficient brain of capital.
Alan Sekula (Fish Story)
Marx‘s political struggle played out but not without the demand from the west. We are so enamoured by the perceived notion of the ’digital era‘ that we fail to see its disconnection from the physical world that that notion must be superimposed upon. The ’digital‘ is merely a brand, alongside all the Nike’s and Adidas‘, a disembodied reputation, in a dialectical relationship with the means of production and transportation. ’Speed‘ and ’progress' have become the gods of the era, following the lead of the Futurists before. Even though we have rejected the extremes, their passion for speed and progress has seeped into our consciousness.
Ideas of abstraction and encapsulation have become more than just models. We have abstracted production and transportation into systems, denying the place in those systems of the workers and the physical processes that actually enable those systems to function.
The problem with our disconnectedness from the means of production and distribution is that we are removed from the consequences of our demands, and thus in our drive for progress, we maintain social and economic injustice.
Furthermore, looking at the concept of progress, it would seem to run into trouble when looked at alongside Walter Benjamin‘s essay ’Thesis on the Philosophy of History‘; if ’history‘ is a fake, then ’progress' must also be. In this context the futurist notion of only progressing forwards (at speed) must be seen as problematic.
In his own words, ‘Fish Story’ unmasks the ‘bourgeoisie’s fantasy of a world of wealth without workers‘ and depicts an industry hidden behind the myth of an industry-free ’information economy‘. ’Interpretation,‘ he writes in ’Dismantling Modernism, Reinventing Documentary‘ (1978), ’is ideologically constrained. Our readings of past culture are subject to the covert demands of the historical present. Mystified interpretation universalizes the act of reading, lifting it above history.'
What Benjamin and before him Marx and Engels, seem to say is that the idea of history as a narrative is flawed, because it is always subjective; it is seen through the philosophical bias of the viewer, the historian and the influence of the ruling party. Thus, by using a tool such as Historical Materialism, we can attempt to look at the past without philosophical bias - using economics as a tool to root everything into the actual.
In this way, although much of the method and technology of shipping has altered, the nature of shipping huge cargos across the oceans keeps us rooted into something very physical, and, like it or not, slow!