Book part:
Logistics of Probability: Anticipatory Shipping and the Production of Markets

Abstract

Predictive analytics is becoming increasingly important in various sectors of contemporary societies. At the same time logistical media have a profound impact on our everyday life. Both elements—the importance of logistical media and the growing impact of predictive analytics—are coming together in Amazon’s method of anticipatory shipping. By shipping packages based on the probability of an upcoming order, the logic of logistics is changed in a profound way. Based on the analysis of Amazon’s U.S. Patent No. 8,615,473 B2 (Spiegel et al. 2013), which describes the process of anticipatory shipping, we argue that this logistic of probability pre-assumes structures of desires and needs in the targeted community, while at the same time providing methods to realize these presumptions via the entanglement of anticipatory shipping with algorithmic logistical infrastructures and a second logic of prediction: the recommender system. Connecting these two forms of prediction via common centers of calculation (Latour 1987), these media logics become entangled by predicting as well as producing their customers’ demand at the same time and actively preparing the grounds for logistics of probability.


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BibTex
Poechhacker, Nikolaus; Nyckel, Eva-Maria: Logistics of Probability: Anticipatory Shipping and the Production of Markets. In: Burkhardt, Marcus;Shnayien, Mary;Grashöfer, Katja: Explorations in Digital Cultures. Lüneburg: meson press 2020, S. 1-19. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/14854.
@INCOLLECTION{Poechhacker2020,
 author = {Poechhacker, Nikolaus and Nyckel, Eva-Maria},
 title = {Logistics of Probability: Anticipatory Shipping and the Production of Markets},
 year = 2020,
 doi = "\url{http://dx.doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/14854}",
 editor = {Burkhardt, Marcus and Shnayien, Mary and Grashöfer, Katja},
 address = {Lüneburg},
 booktitle = {Explorations in Digital Cultures},
 pages = {1--19},
 publisher = {meson press},
}
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