Love this, the conclusion of a recent blog post by Giovanni Tiso:
The port of Singapore is the world’s largest in terms of shipping tonnage, and this is how busy it was at one in the morning. The spectacle of its activity spoke of a very different economy from the one apparent inside Terminal 3 at Changi Airport: no longer the highly symbolic, late postmodern economy that sells the image of the cybernetic woman in order to move tiny bottles of absurdly expensive perfume, or the image of the socially conscious playboy film star in order to hawk the world’s most prestigious watch, but an economy of things. A fifth of the world’s shipping containers. Half of the world’s supply of crude oil. An unfathomably vast quantity of stuff, some of which to be sure must have an emotional content, and be subject to intellectual property laws ensuring that the profits keep flowing to the old centres of Western power for a while longer. But in those quantities, when they ship by the containerful, even the products that currently most define our affective relationship with brands – the iPhone and the iPad – turn back into objects, mere slabs of glass, metal and plastic that couldn’t possibly be as different from other slabs stamped with different logos as we have been vehemently led to believe.
The sight of the port of Singapore at one in the morning convinced me of two things: firstly, that we don’t live in a post-industrial world; secondly, that the image of a global economy based on the exchange of symbols and the almost-as-flawless transmission of bodies produced in sites such as Terminal 3 of Changi Airport is nearing the end of its useful life. Perhaps postmodernity was an interlude, a confidence trick, and modernity is the Port, the place that things must go through, like so many other places throughout geography and history. We who look at it as we fly overhead are the unreal ones, the cyberwhite creatures they use to sell things.
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