We go through the various legal or contractual mechanisms that are meant to protect seafarers in war. We argue that when you read the fine print, they are razor-thin: virtually non-existent.

Using a publicly available search tool of the International Transport Workers’ Federation, we went through the bargaining contracts of 500 vessels present in the Gulf in August 2026. We found that 80% of the vessels in the sample had no ITF-approved contracts on board, meaning the ITF cannot enforce the repatriation and compensation rights that seafarers would otherwise be entitled to following a war-zone declaration.

We also argue that while there are distinctly life-threatening dangers in the Gulf specific to this moment, the stranding of seafarers in the Gulf should not be understood as exceptional. It is instead shaped by a logic of organised abandonment that sustains the everyday workings of the shipping industry at large.

Read an excerpt below, or the whole thing here (open access).

Introduction: ‘A Busy, Crucial, and Relatively Conflict-Free Trade Route’

On June 12th, 2025 – about 10 days before the US strikes on Iranian nuclear sites – a ship called the Berkat Tuah sailed into the Gulf. The Malaysian and Indonesian crew aboard spent a few months running supplies back and forth from Sharjah to one of the many gas fields out at sea. Nothing about this is exceptional: as the New York Times put it, “the Strait of Hormuz had been a busy, crucial and relatively conflict-free trade route. Every month, thousands of ships passed through the strait, and one-fifth of the world’s oil supply depended on it” (Gross and Eavis, 2026).

In October, however, their employer stopped paying their wages. ‘Financial difficulties’ led to disputes over who owned the ship (Loh, 2026), and in December – after two months with no payment – the crew qualified as officially abandoned (ILO, 2026). In the following months, the US and Israel intensified their bombardment. Throughout all this time, the crew remained stuck at Hamriyah Port, receiving no payment, unable to leave the ship and return home. Their insurance expired in February – just as the bombs started dropping again – and was not renewed. In late March, Iran shut down the Strait of Hormuz.

Case notes on the ILO/IMO Joint Database of Abandoned Seafarers detail the “deep psychological and mental distress’ of the crew,” that could lead to “potential tragedy o[r] suicide”. In a candid appeal for intervention around a number of ships – including this one – the ILO stated that “All possible efforts by our representatives to engage with flag states, port authorities, P&I clubs^[1], and ship agents, have not yet resulted in any tangible improvement in the crews’ wellbeing” – a sobering acknowledgement of the limitations of intervening meaningfully in the labyrinthine structures of maritime trade.

The International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF) approved a payment of $1000 to the seafarers’ families, offsetting the risk of them taking on high-interest loans at home to cover the missed wages: a common practice amongst the families of abandoned seafarers as households inadvertently absorb the unpaid debts of shipowners (Bolton, 2024). After nine months stuck on a metal boat without power in the beating sun, crew members were repatriated in June 2026 thanks to a diplomatic intervention from Malaysia, with the last of the crew finally heading home on the 21^st of July.

With or without a war, this was not an isolated incident. 2025 set yet another abandonment record: over six thousand seafarers cut off and unpaid, with the Gulf once again the world’s hotspot (ITF, 2026). Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait and Bahrain have not ratified the ILO’s Maritime Labour Convention (MLC), meaning seafarers left in Gulf ports after shipowners cut ties have little legal leverage to get what they’re owed, or get home. Much well-intentioned narration of the current shipping crisis has overlooked this: The Guardian, for example, notes that “what should have been a normal journey when they passed through the strait and entered the Gulf back in February has turned into a long and stressful waiting game” [emphasis added] (Partridge, 2026) – for the crew aboard the Berkat Tuah or one of the many other abandoned ships that also made a ‘normal’ transit through the strait, the ‘long and stressful waiting game’ pre-exists any war.

Figure 1: Left: Ships waiting at anchorages in both the Persian / Arabian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. Top right: Dubai and Sharjah Anchorage (note the ship broadcasting ‘Chinese Owner w/ Crew’ as destination). Bottom right: Ships waiting at Khor Fakkan and Fujairah Anchorage.

Source: Screenshots taken from MarineTraffic (www.marinetraffic.com), 18^th August 2026.

Whose Risk, on Whose Terms?

Before the war, ship transits through the Strait of Hormuz – primarily oil tankers and bulk carriers – averaged about 130 a day. Since its effective closure in late February, this figure has fallen to low double or even single digits, with only a handful of vessels making the transit on a daily basis. Figure 1 shows broadcast locations of ships in the Gulf on 18 August 2026, many of them densely clustered at port anchorages on either side of the strait, waiting to leave. The International Maritime Organisation estimates that around 20,000 seafarers remain stuck aboard these ships (IMO, 2026).
Much of the coverage of shipping in the Gulf has focused on the risks of being struck by a missile while passing the strait. This is, of course, a very real and very dire workplace risk. But this approach to risk in the region masks the routine, durational and more ambient forms of labour exploitation in the Gulf that preceded the war but are also intensified by it: abandoned crews, unpaid wages and the physical and mental toil of languishing on ships with no power, no food and no means to return home.

In an industry publication, a tanker ship captain who flew into the Gulf to replace another is lauded as a hero, making sacrifices to keep the wheels of global trade turning. In an interview, he stated that he accepted the job because “somebody had to be there with the remaining crew, and the maritime trade should keep going” (Minchin and Göksedef, 2026). When eight of this ship’s crew went on to refuse to make the transit as ships in the queue around them started getting hit, they were repatriated and replaced with another eight workers, who were made to sign letters accepting responsibility for risks. By heroising the captain as a key worker braving the strait to keep oil flowing, this framing applauds a form of risk-taking that serves the interests of commodity traders much more than seafarers. Whilst maritime labour is a crucial workforce that is all-too-often overlooked, the moral urgency with which the work is narrated risks making veneration its own form of reward, in lieu of any material improvements of working conditions aboard ships, in ways reminiscent of the UK government encouraging the public to applaud nurses in 2020 whilst rejecting a pay increase.

Read the rest over at the journal site.

^[1] P&I (Protection and Indemnity) Clubs are mutual insurance associations created by shipowners to provide coverage for a broader range of liabilities than traditional marine insurance.

In recent months there’s been a lot of talk about the ‘dark’ fleet, or the ‘shadow’ or the ‘ghost’ fleet. For a while now I have felt that people use these terms without really examining their origins, nor the assumptions that come with invoking them. In what follows I go through some things that have been bothering me, both in specialist shipping media but also increasingly mainstream news platforms. I argue the following:

1. Despite being evoked constantly, the terms ‘shadow fleet’, ‘dark fleet’, etc. are seldom clearly defined, and the definitions that do exist are both vague and varied. This conceptual stretching becomes easily weaponised by hawkish US lobbies, and generally does a massive disservice to public understandings of how the shipping industry works.

2. The main ideological obfuscation at work in the use of the term ‘dark’ fleet is that it completely (and often intentionally) blurs the line between legality and projections of extraterritorial sovereignty (i.e. unilateral sanctions).

3. Paying attention to what kinds of vessels are *not* included in the dark fleet also tells us about the imperial/geopolitical foreclosures baked into the term.

4. The loose use of this term has set the discursive stage for the Trump administration to legitimise not only sanctions, but also outright seizures of vessels, increasingly outside of any legal framework.

1. How is the “dark”/“shadow” fleet defined (and by whom)?

The ‘dark’ in ‘dark’ fleet used to refer to the specific practice of vessels ‘going dark’ i.e. turning off their AIS transponders to avoid being detected, but increasingly the term seems to allude to a different kind of darkness, whose connotation is not so much technical as it is ideological, and the term ‘dark’ fleet has become increasingly interchangeable with the terms ‘shadow’ and ‘ghost’ fleet. It is sometimes invoked without being defined at all, and sometimes defined in rather vague terms, like the New York Times defining it as “a loose term used to describe a hodgepodge array of ships that obscure their locations or identities to avoid oversight from governments and business partners.”

Given that the ‘shadow’ fleet is a subject inextricable from geopolitical antagonisms that always also operate as information wars, it seems important to examine this definition a bit more closely. For example, it’s worth noting that the sources from the Wikipedia entry called “Iranian Shadow Fleet” come largely from either the US State Department, the US Treasury, or United Against Nuclear Iran, a hawkish neocon lobby chaired by Jeb Bush (US news organizations writing on ‘ghost’ fleets often take UANI as an authoritative source on the topic, quite literally tagging along). Given how heavily this term is pushed by such organizations, some critical examination and unpacking is really warranted as a bare minimum.

Definitions of the dark fleet

One of the challenges in defining the ‘shadow’ fleet is that even if you resort to shadowy terms like “opaque ownership structures”; “post-box addresses”; “obscure locations”; “shell companies”; “flags of convenience” and “flag hopping” (these are all taken from a definition given by The Atlantic Council), you just end up sounding like you’re describing the entire shipping industry. To claim, as UANI does, that “flag-hopping is a blight on legitimate maritime commerce” is disingenuous, since both the use of shell companies and the ability to re-flag overnight are two of the industry’s central organizing principles. So all of these definitional criteria are not just mystifying but downright unhelpful, especially to a larger audience.

Perhaps the most comprehensive attempt at a definition comes from Lloyd’s List, the industry’s oldest publication. In fact I would argue they basically coined the term. In an April 2023 report titled “Shifty Shades of Grey”, Lloyd’s List provides a ‘methodology’ which defines a tanker as part of the dark fleet if:

• it is aged 15 years or over, anonymously owned and/or has a corporate structure designed to obfuscate beneficial ownership discovery

• solely deployed in sanctioned oil trades

• and engaged in one or more of the deceptive shipping practices outlined in US State Department guidance issued in May 2020.

Another definition given by the Kyiv School of Economics and picked up by the European Parliament’s research report on the topic casts a wider net: they depart completely from the ‘dark’ fleet having to be at all related to the practice of ‘going dark’ during sailing or loading operations, arguing instead that the dark/shadow fleet encompasses any vessel that “lacks Western insurance and belongs to a non-EU/G7+ company”. This definition seems to work more by proxy than by actually attempting to give the term any substantive meaning: making the definition hinge on insurance is an efficient move if you want to encompass the kinds of vessels that might be attempting to evade US or EU sanctions, as Western insurers usually do not underwrite cargo sanctioned by Western governments (though it’s not hard to find exceptions: an NYT-identified ‘shadow’ tanker engaged in spoofing activity near Russia called Alma - IMO number: 9235892 - is owned by an Irish company and insured by the American Club, a Western insurer) but the sheer scope and geopolitical underpinnings of this definition, which implies that the non-Western is, by definition, in the shadows, should give pause. This definition can also make it seem as though having a non-Western insurance would somehow be per se illegal, when actually it’s just that London remains the de facto insurance capital of the world (as I’ve written about elsewhere, most insurance clubs deploy contractual clauses to ensure any compensation disputes arising from oil spills or other environmental damage caused by tankers are settled exclusively in London arbitration courts).

When I started thinking about the use of these terms, I was mostly thinking about the ideological connotations of words like ‘dark’, and ‘shadow, but the term ‘fleet’ isn’t all that helpful either, especially when invoked with a country (the ‘Russian’ shadow fleet, the ‘Iranian’ shadow fleet), because it suggests a far greater degree of cohesion between different ships than is probably the case. There might very well be some strategic assembling of vessels for particular trades, but the shipping industry, in particular bulk trades like oil, is highly decentralized and fragmented, and a lot of this is probably just individual risk-taking by profit-seeking shipowners who smell opportunity and estimate that benefits outweigh risks. A recent FT piece on the ‘shadow’ fleet points to just this, citing a maritime analyst who says that “as long as there are barrels that need to move outside compliant channels, there will be operators willing to take on that risk — especially when freight rates and price dislocations increase the incentive”, a picture that is at odds with the impression of cohesion implicit in the suggestion that ‘ghost’ fleets are ‘Russian’ or ’Iranian’.

2. Locating the ‘shadow’ fleet between legality and projections of extraterritorial sovereignty: is the ‘shadow’ fleet engaged in illegal operations?

Amidst this flurry of vague definitions, in fall 2023 the IMO began drafting a resolution on ‘dark shipping’ which would include, for the first time, its own definition. When the discussion of ‘dark shipping’ was tabled at the IMO, Iran proposed amendments that took issue with the language used in the draft resolution, due to what it deemed were “controversial concepts and terms” like “dark ship” or “illicit,” which it argued lack universally accepted definitions within the member states or international law. In the final IMO resolution, the word ‘illicit’ was changed to ‘illegal’. ‘Illicit’ is a preferred term of US state bureaucracies when talking about these oil shipments, and they seem to quite intentionally avoid the term illegal, and this raises my next question, which is to better understand where exactly the ‘shadow’ fleet sits between legality and projections of (mostly US) extraterritorial sovereignty.

‘Illicit’ is a far more politically useful term for the US than illegal because the operations of the ‘shadow’ fleet are not always illegal. An FT piece on the Russian ‘shadow fleet’ from October 2024, which did a deep dive on some of the ownership structures of vessels transporting sanctioned oil out of Russia, does not use the language of sanctions evasion but rather states that the 4 million barrels of oil being moved every day on these vessels are “beyond the reach of the sanctions”. “It is not alleged”, the piece states, “that the transactions have broken any laws.”, And herein lies what to my mind is the crux of the obfuscatory mechanisms at work in terms like ‘dark’, ‘ghost’, and ‘shadow’ fleet: to engage in illegal activity in order to evade sanctions (which does happen!) is not the same as conducting transactions that fall beyond the reach of sanctions, and the terms ‘dark’, ‘ghost’, and ‘shadow’ fleet intentionally blur this distinction. Why does this distinction matter? Let’s take this tweet by UANI researcher Jemima Shelley from March 9th:

‘UANI-listed’ refers to the UANI’s ‘Iran Tanker Tracking’, which from what I can see just tracks every single oil shipment leaving Iran full stop, every single one of which UANI considers to be ‘clandestine’. It seems to me like UANI are driving an agenda to simply frame every single transaction that somehow involves Iran as illegal (though like the various US departments it always resorts to words like illicit and clandestine) regardless of the legal reach and applicability of US sanctions.

Assertions of the ‘illicit’ and ‘clandestine’ to name every single shipment that has somehow involves Iran, Russia, Venezuela, or China is obfuscating because it blurs the line between what constitutes sanctions evasion and what kinds of trades simply fall outside the very wide but perhaps not yet total (and perhaps receding) extraterritorial reach of the US sanctions regime. The vast definitional scope that the dark fleet moniker has taken on means one of two things: either the label’s vagueness is obfuscating, or, if it is accurate, it implies that there cannot be a single shipment between two countries on earth that falls outside the scope of US extraterritorial sanctions.

If you combine US-incorporated flag registries (chief among them Liberia and the Marshall Islands), dollar-denominated transactions, the use of US financial systems, the quasi-monopoly (90-95% market share) that the the US-sanction compliant International Group of P&I has on shipping insurance, and you add to that the corporate due diligence that US companies must carry out to comply with sanctions throughout their transnational supply chains, this actually strikes me as not entirely implausible. And in that case, perhaps the point becomes that we live in a world where one country’s unilateral sanctions can have such planetary and tentacular reach that no bilateral trade between anyone else is possible without depending in one way or another on a mechanism that falls under US jurisdiction. In any case, the ability to make this analytical distinction should still matter to us given the political and legal contestability of sanctions as well as the latent possibility of an emerging world order where countries find ways to decouple from the seemingly total reach of US-dominated financial, commercial, and legal infrastructures.

While they may not be driving as forceful an agenda as an organization like UANI, media outlets that have taken up the ‘ghost’/‘shadow’/‘dark’ fleet moniker have played a part in perpetuating this narrative insofar as they continuously evoke the term sanctions in the context of talking about the ‘dark’ fleet without ever caring to specify their legal scope or applicability. Those omissions end up doing a lot of ideological work.

3. The Geo-Imperial Foreclosures of the ‘Shadow’ Fleet

In its December 2023 definition of the ‘shadow’ fleet, the IMO goes beyond sanctions evasions to include also ships “engaged in other illegal activities”. When the IMO resolution was being passed, Iran was not the only member state to table an amendment. Another amendment, supported by the EU, the US, the UK, and Japan, sought to ensure that the resolution allow for situations in which ‘going dark’ (turning off AIS transponders) would be deemed legitimate for safety and security reasons. And this leads me to my third question, which is to think about which vessels are definitionally foreclosed from being considered ‘dark’ or ‘shadow’ vessels.

In their piece on the “global shadow fleet”, The Atlantic Council offer up the valuable insight that “shadow vessels by definition operate in the shadows”. The only problem with this is that defining ships possibly engaged in illegal activities by their need to hide assumes that there is someone they need to be hiding from in the first place. But of course, not everyone has to bother hiding their transgressions of the law, no matter how blatant, no matter how violent.

Around the time I started thinking about the shadow fleet question (late summer/early fall 2024), Palestine organizers from Houston to Piraeus were tracking oil and arms shipments fueling the genocide in Gaza under the No Harbour for Genocide campaign, which started with a mobilization against the US tanker Overseas Santorini, a vessel carrying military jet fuel from the US to Israel that went ‘dark’ on July 31st 2024 to avoid being detected between Algeciras and Ashkelon, where it was expected do arrive 7 days later. These shipments were of course unsanctioned, but as far as licitness and legality are concerned, these were shipments that were directly and materially enabling a genocide, and any assistance in facilitating the shipments would be in contravention of states’ international legal obligations to prevent genocide and not to provide assistance to international crimes.

With the exception of a recent Middle East Eye article reporting on new research from No Harbour for Genocide - which actually does show 57 cases of covert oil shipments to Israel disabling transponders and listing false locations between May 2024 and December 2025 - terms like ‘dark’ and ‘shadow’ are never invoked to describe the vessels that have continuously supplied Israel with military and other equipment for carrying out its genocidal war, which highlights the geopolitical faultlines that circumscribe the use of this term. Perhaps the most obvious explanation for that is, as the Atlantic Council so astutely notes, that these shipments have been able to continue in plain sight with little legal or material contestation besides activists’ efforts.

4. From sanctions to seizures?

The final thing I want to consider is that years of media narratives playing fast and loose with terms like ‘dark’ and ‘shadow’ fleet - with little critical or detailed regard for where they sit between legality and extraterritorial projections of imperial power - has made it much easier for the Trump administration to slot themselves right into this discourse as they ramp up their ‘sanctions enforcement’ by seizing vessels and cargo. In late 2025, when the Trump administration began seizing vessels, even Lloyd’s and the Atlantic Council cautiously expressed concern about the lacking legal basis of such actions. “Sanctions alone”, Stephanie Connor writes, “do not authorize the seizure or confiscation of property”, and while under UNCLOS (United Nations Convention on Law of the Sea) Article 110(1)(d), a warship or government vessel can board a vessel suspected of being stateless on the high seas, after which they can then apply their own jurisdiction, the US is famously not a signatory to UNCLOS. On X, Pete Hegseth extended the reach of the ‘blockade’ of sanctioned ‘illicit’ Venezuelan oil to “anywhere in the world”, while Kristi Noem celebrated the US seizure of a “ghost fleet” tanker as akin to “owning the sea”. Sean Parnell, a state official at the Department of War, tweeted that the Department of War “will hunt down and interdict ALL dark fleet vessels transporting Venezuelan oil at the time and place of our choosing”. Trump himself seemed most excited by the prospect that the US would get to keep the oil in the seized tankers.

On March 12th, the US filed an order to permit the immediate sale of the vessel Skipper which it seized off the coast of Venezuela in December 2025, alongside the oil it was carrying. Maritime Executive reports that since the seizure, the US has spent $47 million on repair, maintenance, and storage costs associated with the vessel and its cargo, and while the vessel is worth about one fifth of that, the oil cargo is valued at around $120 million. The US expects this could rise by a further $5 million over the next two months, in addition to oil storage costs which are $450,000 per month. The longer they hold the vessel then, the smaller the profit margin from the seizure, though the exploding oil prices following the closure of the Strait of Hormuz might alter the speculative calculus at work here. The label of piracy to name this situation has been rejected by international law scholars as inadequate because pirates are private actors and the US is a state actor. But, if the Trump regime is best understood precisely as a fusion of the two, where Trump seeks to turn the presidency, as Melinda Cooper has argued, into a “founder-controlled family firm”, where any and all available arms of the state can be instrumentalised and weaponised for private gain, then whatever public-private binary sustains the definition of piracy in international law quickly begins to collapse.

The FT has argued that re-flagging vessels to Russia constitutes a form of legal protection for the ‘shadow’ fleet as this prevents them from being boarded on grounds of statelessness. However, an even more recent piece from Lloyd’s List argues that the Russia flag switch is “losing appeal” for shadow fleet operators because the assumption is now that the US will just seize Russian-flagged ships if they want anyway (which is basically what is being spelled out in the tweets above). Charlie Brown from UANI, who is consulted once again in this Lloyd’s List article, says the following: “In the immediate aftermath of the Venezuela enforcement surge, moving into the Russian registry was likely seen as a way to complicate interdiction decisions and raise the political cost of action. But the US seizure of the Russian-flagged Marinera decisively broke that assumption, demonstrating that the US was prepared to act even after a vessel claimed to have adopted Russian registration.” Nowhere in this article is the legality of such a seizure examined, nor are euphemisms like “enforcement surge” or the US being “prepared to act” called into question as likely transgressions of international maritime law.

Journalists may very well believe that in highlighting the ‘dark’/‘shadow’ fleet they are bringing attention to ‘lawlessness’ at sea, but as I’ve tried to show here, simply adopting or regurgitating these terms without bothering to develop a proper account of the geopolitical and ideological assumptions they entail will leave even the most earnest believer in international law extremely ill-equipped for what is to come.

This research builds on our film Methanol Blue from last year. We wanted to first follow-up on developments around FuelEU and alternative fuels since last summer, before digging into FuelEU’s sister legislation that will soon extend the use of Emissions Trading Systems (ETS) to maritime transport. We’ll go into ETS in the next issue, but we mention it here because FuelEU and Maritime ETS can be thought of as a kind of regulatory pairing where the former seeks to incentivise gradual uptake of so-called “clean” fuels like methanol, ammonia, and LNG, whilst the latter is designed to bring down emissions through a polluter-pays principle and cap-and-trade system. FuelEU Maritime and Maritime ETS are further linked by the fact that part of the revenue generated from the surrendering of emission allowances is supposed to be earmarked for the development of these “clean” fuels.

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Over the course of the summer, liner giant Maersk has begun signalling a shift away from methanol toward LNG – AKA methane, a greenhouse gas with a planet-heating effect far more potent than carbon dioxide. According to the National Resource Defence Council, methane’s global warming impact is almost 30 times greater than that of carbon dioxide over a 30-year period. That LNG gets to even be remotely considered a ‘green’ alternative to heavy fuel oil belongs in the pantheon of greenwashing crimes. This swerve is remarkable given the following comments on LNG by Maersk’s head of decarbonisation Morten Bo Christiaensen just three years ago: “It’s a fossil fuel; it just doesn’t solve the problem. And if you do the analysis, it can actually be worse than burning bunker, because of the methane slip. Fundamentally it’s another fossil fuel, and we don’t want to invest in more fossil fuels.” (source).

But the decision makes sense so long as Maersk’s ambition to ‘lead’ the industry’s green transition is read as having far less to do with any normative environmental ambition and everything to do with creating a competitive advantage for itself in a future regulatory environment of high non-compliance costs and carbon prices (in addition to, as we shall see later, juicy compensation mechanisms for anyone who happens to be willing to do the work of owning a couple massive dual-fuel vessels that can absorb the heavy fuel oil sins of others). But what happens if this anticipated regulatory environment is much weaker than expected? By retaining its methanol dual-fuel vessel orders whilst ordering more LNG vessels, Maersk hedges its bets in anticipation of a future scenario where shipping decarbonisation is essentially abandoned as a project or goal. And where Maersk goes, others follow. The sudden rise and fall of Methanol was further exacerbated with the announcement two weeks ago that Danish energy company Orsted was pulling the plug on its e-methanol plant in Sweden - the largest of its kind announced in Europe up until now - due to lack of demand and an unwillingness in the market to sign long-term uptake contracts.

So: those demanding the fuels complain of no supply, those supplying the fuels complain of no demand. One of the core pillars of EU green fuels regulation is the principle of technological neutrality, i.e. setting emission limits “without prescribing the use of any particular fuel or technology”, on the basis that the market is entrusted with figuring out the best way forward and needs no further public intervention. But as the above stories suggest, this principle is directly at odds with a parallel narrative about shipping decarbonisation, the ‘chicken-and-egg’ problem, according to which the regulator cannot mandate the use of a particular fuel without some degree of certainty that there is an extant market for it with sufficient supply, and the market does not want to supply such a fuel in the absence of a strong enough regulatory incentive.

The current market stalemate needs to be placed in its adequate regulatory context, but such an analysis also needs to go beyond the chicken-and-egg problem, which is a construct that ultimately allows both sides to claim innocence simultaneously. What is of particular interest to us, which we began to explore in our film and continue to explore further below, is how climate regulation like FuelEU Maritime creates or exacerbates this impasse by generating the very conditions that allow shipping companies to circumvent the true stakes of the climate crisis, not by ignoring climate regulation, but precisely by adhering to it, and using the market mechanisms baked into those very regulations to turn (rig?) the green transition into just another profit game.

While FuelEU has technically not yet started, preparations since last year have intensified in anticipation of the regulation going into effect. When we dug into FuelEU last year, we were particularly interested in the regulation’s various accounting, time-bending, and semantic loopholes, especially:

• A ‘multiplier’ mechanism which between 2025 and 2033 allows the use of RFNBO (renewable fuels of non-biological origin) to be counted twice, which means what you think it means: the de-facto reduction of carbon intensity is only half of what it will look like on paper.

• A roll-over and future banking mechanism which allows one to borrow a future compliance surplus to make up for non-compliance in the present.

• And perhaps most interestingly, a ‘voluntary pooling’ mechanism, which allows companies to “pool the performances of different ships”, i.e. the over-compliance of one ship should be allowed to compensate for under-compliance of ships provided that the total pooled compliance is positive.

There is a moment in our film where Jacob reflects on the likely effects of voluntary pooling, predicting that it will probably generate a secondary market for leasing LNG or dual-fuel methanol ships (i.e. over-performing ships by the standard of the FuelEU regulation). One year later, this seems to be exactly what is happening: According to Lloyd’s List: “LNG and methanol dual-fuel vessels are to rake in millions in 2025 by pooling with non-compliant vessels under the FuelEU Maritime legislation, as overachieving vessels can buy compliance for non-compliant ships that would otherwise face hefty penalties.”

According to the European Commission, one LNG vessel can cover the compliance of 4 non-compliant vessels, whereas a vessel running on e-methanol can absorb the carbon sins of 40 vessels. Ahti Consulting, a Finnish consulting firm that will provide FuelEU and ETS compliance calculators, predict that it could go further than that, estimating that 65 Heavy Fuel Oil vessels could be covered by one methanol vessel. While the EU might just frame this as a rewarding incentive for “first-movers”, in effect this turns “green” ships into investment objects that will disproportionately benefit the usual liner giants (CMA CGM, MSC, Maersk) who have started developing their dual-fuel fleets since a few years back.

According to the same Lloyd’s List article, pooling can be arranged not just between shipping companies but also within them, meaning container shipping giants can apply the pooling mechanism to their own fleets. So if we take the fleet of, let’s say, Maersk, which in 2019 was 740 (and many of these do not have any port calls in Europe but let’s just suspend that for the sake of calculation), even assuming the entire fleet calls at a European port, Maersk would need just 19 methanol vessels to be covered under the pooling mechanism. As of August 2023, it has 25 methanol-enabled vessels on order – enough to cover their own asses and make millions from leasing out the rest (on top of the billions made off the back of the pandemic and currently being made from the Red Sea crisis). So far then, FuelEU Maritime seems to skew heavily in favour of liner giants, further consolidating an already highly oligopolised market through a regulatory competitive advantage. And lest we forget, one of the most ecologically devastating aspects of container shipping is the very size of the ships themselves, a development spearheaded by the same companies now claiming the green mantle.

Finally, one thing FuelEU Maritime pays scant attention to is that beyond their variation in carbon intensity, the varying chemical properties of different fuels have a range of other implications, especially for workers and worker safety. Although the Maersk Mc-Kinney Moller Center for Zero Carbon Shipping (Maersk’s green non-profit arm) classifies the “Onboard safety and operations” of e-methanol and bio-methanol as mature, which it defines as there being solutions available “with no or limited barriers remaining”, a recent fire safety study by Survitec showed that the firefighting methods developed for conventionally fuelled ships are wholly inadequate for dealing with methanol-based fires, with the product manager concluding that “a completely different approach is required if these ships are to remain safe”. There are currently 229 methanol vessels in the global orderbook.

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Economists are taking note too. The multiple overlapping crises of pandemic, climate breakdown and war have brought about a kind of reckoning with what the economy is actually composed of, and how mainstream economists pick up the constant fight against inflation. In 2021, Isabella Weber contended that crises and commodity shocks can accelerate price gouging on foundational commodities (gas, oil, wheat) that form the basic building blocks of other commodities, and that these increased prices lead to greater inflation further down the supply chain (she called this “seller’s inflation”, and crucially, it is enabled in situations of supply chain bottlenecks). Her suggestion to combat inflation not solely through monetary policy but by imposing strategic price caps on critical things was roundly laughed at in 2021, but has since rapidly become adopted. Similarly, in 2022 Zoltan Poszar (of the now-collapsed Credit Suisse) wrote in the introduction to a highly influential note to clients that “commodities are real resources (food, energy, metals), and resource inequality cannot be addressed by QE [quantitative easing]”. Basically, economies (and the economists that theorise them) started coming down to earth again, and in many cases, that earth turned out to be the sea.

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Amidst all this, the US federal reserve launched the Global Supply Chain Pressure Index (GSCPI), pulling data from manufacturing and transportation sources to get a single figure on how much ‘pressure’ the supply chain is under. It’s updated monthly, and uses standard deviation: if the line goes up, then things are pressured, and if it goes down, things are easing up. Like many indexes, the GSCPI is primarily an index of indexes. The components of the index are:

• Freight cost data, which is pulled from other indexes. This includes the Baltic Dry Index, which is pretty industry standard, and the Harpex index – which isn’t. It also takes into account airfreight and trucking indexes, including US Bureau of Labor statistics.

• “Purchase Manager Indexes”, which are just surveys of various senior executives, ostensibly to get a sense of the temperature of the market. This would cover things like backlogs and current actual delivery times.

For a supply chain index that’s “global”, there are some pretty big omissions here. Trucking data, for example – the leading form of internal commodity transportation in much of the world – seems absent, perhaps in part because reliable global trucking data simply doesn’t exist. It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that the ambition of the “Global Supply Chain Pressure Index” is something more like “ease with which commodities are moving towards or away from the US”.

In an instructional video about the uses of the GSCPI, the Fed state that:

Although it claims to not be a forecasting tool, it is based on several private indexes that are essentially marketed as forecasting tools, and I don’t think the Fed has any power to stop people writing articles with advice on “how you can use it to predict and manage supply chain pressures.” It describes itself as more of a “nowcasting” tool – using recent data to estimate, with more confidence, economic indicators that tend to take a while to come out, like GDP or inflation. But the function of nowcasting and forecasting tools is, for all intents and purposes, pretty much the same: to build up a temporal picture that guides people with capital on what to do, right now, with that capital. As our friend Gary Zhang notes, “You could say that the financial market to which we are habituated is largely a game of self-fulfilling prophecy, an ourobouros narrative of its own making and unmaking. Its players compete to predict a future which is – by the laws of their own models – unpredictable. As sociologist David MacKenzie puts it, the tools of contemporary finance form ‘an engine, not a camera’.”

In finance, for all intents and purposes, the horsepower of the engine is basically determined by how powerful and reliable everyone thinks it is. Accordingly, the Fed take time to validate the index through noting the extent to which it correlates with past supply chain shocks and crises:

“For instance, the index surged in 2011 following the Sendai earthquake and resulting tsunami. Japanese car manufacturing and its exports to foreign markets were severely impacted. The same year, flooding around Bangkok, Thailand, disrupted global supply chains in the automotive and electronics sectors, particularly hard drives, leading to shortages among global computer manufacturers. The index rose again in 2018 and 2019 following United States-China trade disputes, inciting several large manufacturers and retailers to revise their manufacturing and procurement strategies, but mostly absorbing higher costs.”

This seems to be less of a method of studying “inflationary events” guided by the GSCPI, and more of an exercise in attempting to validate the veracity of the index itself. Testing other shocks on it though, it doesn’t always work out: in August 2005 Hurricane Katrina knocked the port of South Louisiana – the US’ 5th largest –out of use. Gulf Coast oil production fell by 88%, also causing fuel prices to spike. At a time you’d expect the index to rocket, it barely moves.

In their pitch for the GSCPI, the video explainer also notes that “conventional measures tend to focus on specific elements of the global supply chain rather than as one interconnected whole”. What we’d caution here is that logistical systems are really not as much of a harmonious ‘interconnected whole’ as people think, but are instead characterised by the management of all kinds of strategic frictions, stoppages and artificial scarcities. These are decoupled from landside production (but highly reminiscent of their often counterintuitive profit-motive logics).

A criticism of the supply chain index would be an extension of the argument we made in a piece we wrote last year, which is to assume that circulation is a logical extension of production and transportation systems exist to diligently move things smoothly from A to B. Because of how it conflates data on production and circulation, the GSCPI draws a field of equivalence across those things, assuming that transportation acts as a subsidiary to the best interests of manufacturing.

Maybe we could call this something like the “diagram of smooth lines” fallacy. If you search for ‘logistics’ in google images you inevitably get stuff like this:

When the reality it is something more like this:

That last picture shows oil ships waiting to unload crude in Singapore in June 2020, during a period of contango: when futures (prices for forward delivery dates) are higher than nearer delivery dates, meaning it becomes more profitable for oil movers to simply tell the ships to stop for a while and become floating storage facilities. And what senior executive is going to tell market researchers that they are doing that – the same market researchers that compile the surveys that go into the GSCPI – when doing so would risk dropping the futures price of the oil they’re betting on.

This example poses a problem for the assumptions of the architects of the GSCPI and critical logistics scholars alike: that disruptions, decelerations and bottlenecks in logistical systems rise out of either design inefficiencies (bad planning) or social disruptions (strikes and blockades), and that this negatively impacts profit and accumulation. Micheal Simpson explored this in a 2018 paper called ‘The annihilation of time by space: Pluri-temporal strategies of capitalist circulation’, and I’m going to end on it:

“These explanations for delays or gridlock in supply chains are not incorrect, but taken together what they miss are the instances in which slowing down circulation occurs intentionally and in the interest of capital accumulation. In other words, slow circulation is not always a result of accidents, oversights, or disruptions – rather, there are moments at which decelerating speed is an outcome consistent with the internal logic of capitalism.”

Notes:

Interestingly, the World Bank also released a very similar index focusing more solely on shipping, called the ‘Global Supply Chain Stress Index’, which it seems never really took off.

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If you’re enjoying this, tell your friends! Also, some personal news: Miriam has wrapped up the first year of her PhD looking at how ‘green’ regulations are accelerating the datafication of maritime capitalism, the move of shipping functions from ship to shore, and where this leaves crews. Jacob got funding to also go and do a PhD at LSE, looking at ongoing speculation and securitisation of shipping lanes in the North Pole that don’t exist yet, but are looking viable because of melting sea ice, so expect a lot of writing on that over the coming years.

Source: World Economic Forum

Here’s the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development:

Source: OECD

And here’s the International Maritime Organisation:

Source: IMO.org

It was even used as the title of a 2013 book, “Ninety Percent of Everything: Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry That Puts Clothes on Your Back, Gas in Your Car, And Food on Your Plate”

It’s hard to come up with another one-liner that so neatly establishes the centrality of maritime transport to the machinery of the world economy today. This is a stat that is repeated so often, is so central to how shipping understands and presents itself, that it no longer needs citation. Which is a problem, because a) if it ever was true, it’s almost definitely not today and b) it’s unclear where it actually comes from.

More than 100% of Everything

First off: what is this stat even actually saying? Is it saying that 90% of all traded goods are moved by sea – as the World Economic Forum puts it? Or just 90% of international trade – as OECD (WEF’s source) puts it? Because these are very different claims. Additionally, the statistic is referring to volume of goods rather than value, but that’s not immediately clear in the way its often presented. These, too, are very different claims: 10 tonnes of sand is a very different thing to, say, 10 tonnes of laptops.

On top of that, nothing is moved exclusively by ship. Generally, things arrive at ports to get loaded onto ships by truck, rail, or – in the case of oil and gas – pipeline. Let’s say that 40% of goods arrive to port by truck (they don’t, but we’ll get onto that later). How does this 40% then get calculated alongside the supposed 90% of seaborne goods? The answer is: it doesn’t, and statistics on international trade by transport type will never add up to a neat 100% because supply chains are convoluted things that generally involve many steps.

Let’s take the most traded commodity by volume – sand – and think about how it moves. Let’s say it’s loaded onto a truck and driven to a railway, where it’s loaded onto a train and taken to a port, that then loads it into a ship by crane, that then moves it to a port 3000 miles away, where it is loaded back onto a train before eventually reaching another truck that drives it to its destination. That sand has then gone through 5 different modes of transport (7 if we count the cranes at each port, and why not). If we take the “90% of international goods” stat to mean “90% of things moved internationally have at some point been on a ship”, then we could also say that X% have been on trucks, or railways, or pipelines, meaning that we obviously end up with a total way more than 100%.

It’s interesting to note that it’s not easy to find “X% of everything” statistics for trucking or rail. One reason for this may be that a ship is conducive to thinking about and measuring weight in a way that other forms of transport are not. A ship can act as a massive scale – it has a maximum weight (expressed in deadweight tonnage, or DWT), which can be relatively easily measured against based on how deep the ship sits in the water, known as a ship’s ‘draught’. The same cannot be easily said for trucks or trains. Adequately comprehensive data on the tonnage of world transport carried by truck is non-existent. The closest we have is data on land freight volumes from the 74 member states of the International Transport Forum, viewable here. The bottom line is that is obviously not possible to actually account for the weight of every single thing that moves by every transport system – especially when that would mean things in most cases getting double, triple or quadruple counted.

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Around 80% of Some Things

In a 2019 essay Kathryn Moeller writes about a stat that has become central to movements towards gender equality: “Women spend 90% of their income on their children, whereas men spend 30-40%”. The sources for this stat, she writes, are varied:

“The State Department cited the World Bank. The World Economic Forum cited the Nike Foundation. The Nike Foundation didn’t cite any study. Neither did the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization. Melinda Gates has said it again and again, but has never cited a study.”

When she tracked the stat back to the World Bank and asked them about the research, they replied to say that verified data does not exist, and would remove the stat from their website. This is what is known as a ‘ghost statistic’ or ‘zombie statistic’. Could ‘Shipping moves 90% of the world’s trade’ be one?

When we originally set out to write about this statistic, we thought we would be writing about the fact that people have stuck with the 90% figure and are not citing the most recent numbers, which we thought could be found in the UNCTAD (UN Conference on Trade and Development)’s Review of Maritime Transport, published annually since 1968. The 2021 edition states that 80% of world trade is carried by sea, so we had initially imagined that we’d be looking into what might be the possible drivers of a decrease from 90% to 80%.

Given that this report is perhaps the most authoritative and comprehensive source of maritime trade statistics available, we had assumed that we would find the figure in there, as well as a more detailed breakdown of the methodology behind it. But once we started combing through the actual reports, we couldn’t find this statistic anywhere, despite the UNCTAD regularly using it in exec summaries on its website.

In fact, the first time UNCTAD mention this stat is in 2008. The ‘highlight’ section of the report reads:

“With more than 80% of international trade in goods being carried by sea, and an even higher percentage for the trade of most developing countries, the Review of Maritime Transport is an important source of information for a broad audience”

This is a departure from previous editions. The 2007 highlight section, for example, does not include the statistic, and instead merely claims to offer a “detailed account of the main development affecting world seaborne trade, freight markets and rates, ports”, et cetera.

This year 2008 marked – as the 2009 report puts it lightly – “a major turning point in the history of the world economy and trade”. Growth in world exports grew at a decelerating rate in 2008, and declined in 2009, resulting in much lower levels of seaborne trade. This was happening whilst hordes of new ships ordered in the halcyon days prior to the financial crash were materialising, prompting a crisis of oversupply – a dynamic that we’re actually seeing a repetition of today, which we explored in our essay for Weird Economies last year.

Aside from the UNCTAD reports, one source that has undoubtedly played a role in popularising this statistic is the book ‘Ninety Percent of Everything’ (2013) by journalist Rose George. You would think that if you wrote an entire book based on this statistic you might want to mention where that stat comes from, but we couldn’t find a reference for it anywhere in the book. Also, when it came out, the figure reported by UNCTAD for multiple years had been “more than” or “around” 80%, not actually 90%. Although, in fairness, “90% of everything” does have more of a ring to it than “80% of everything”.

Since the UNCTAD Review of Maritime Transport turns out not to be the original source, and – to the extent that their somewhat pithy ‘highlights’ or executive summaries count – has only ever said 80% and not 90%, we are left wondering where the 90% statistic comes from. We tried finding the earliest possible mention of the statistic which led us to:

• A 2004 book Globalization and Maritime Power by Sam J. Tangredi, which states that “The maritime world can also be seen as a primary source - in recent parlance, a root cause - of globalization because it is the medium by which 90 percent of world trade (when measured by weight and volume) is transported.”

• A 1998 working paper by Mark W. Zacher titled Uniting Nations: Global Regimes and the UN System, where the sentence “Ninety percent of world trade by weight moves by ship” appears in brackets, and without citation.

• A 1987 report from a UN body for Latin America, titled ‘Basic concepts of Maritime Transport and its present status in Latin America and the Caribbean’, which states that “Over 90% of the foreign trade is carried by sea in all countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, except for Mexico, which has an extensive land border with the United States, and Bolivia, most of whose trade is with Argentina.”

We also found a closely related statistic that comes up in the mid-90s with the founding of the World Trade Organisation in 1995. As one of the first ever WTO overview reports states: “present membership accounts for more than 90 per cent of world trade.” (WT/TPR/OV/1, December 1995). This is one of the closest phrasings we can find to the (still completely unfounded) “Shipping moves 90% of world trade” stat. Could there be a case of a broken telephone line, with a broad-brush stat set up to make bold claims on the state of world trade moving and morphing as it’s repeated across UN white papers, World Bank reports and shipping company sales pitches?

The question all this raises for us is: What (apart from the obvious) was at stake for the shipping industry in 2008 that required it to find a way to claim its centrality to the world economy at a time when freight rates were crumbling? If it really was (and is) so central to the functioning of an economy stretched all over the globe, then why did it suddenly feel the need to make a sales pitch for itself? We’re looking forward to exploring this more.

///

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You can watch it here:

There’s a lot we didn’t manage to fit into the film, without making it overly long and boring. Also, a lot has changed in 6 months. Here are some notes on that.

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Seeing Through Green Fuel

Moving the vast majority of things around the world takes a lot of energy. Most of the energy that moves those things comes from bunker fuel. Bunker fuel is also known as Residual Fuel Oil or Heavy Fuel Oil, neither of which sound great. It is the oil you have leftover when you’re done making other kinds of fuel. Petroleum is to Bunker Fuel what extra virgin olive oil is to pomace oil (the stuff made from dissolving olive stones in chemical solvents).

It is bad. There are pushes to ban the widespread use of it. This will obviously not happen anytime soon. Perhaps the most notable piece of legislation on it is FuelEU Maritime. Coming into effect in January 2025 (probably, after significant revisions), the regulations will set limits on the greenhouse gas emissions of ships trading in and with the EU. One of the best ways to do this, supposedly, is to switch away from Bunker Fuel to one of a crop of new ‘green’ fuels, the lead contenders of which are currently methanol or ammonia, or fuels like hydrogen but made using carbon-neutral processes.

Oil is traceable, to an extent. You can use a process called gas chromatography spectroscopy to identify its chemical fingerprint. As Andrew Craig-Bennett recently pointed out, however, there is basically no way to trace fuels like methanol or hydrogen, which means no way to trace that they actually were produced in any kind of carbon-considerate way. In light of this, he predicts a massive industry of reselling regular old dirty fuels as regulation-compliant green fuels, with a hefty markup. Fuel supply chains are – as anyone who has ever studied them knows – pretty opaque, and marine fuel is a $200bn market, so this scam seems entirely plausible.

The end result of all of these processes is the same. It’s all just methanol! (Source: Bureau Veritas).

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No one really believes in green corridors, or in the green transition for that matter

A green corridor is an agreement between two ports to support the movement of ‘green’ ships between them. For the Busan Biennale catalogue, we described our interest in tracking these corridors and the green transition in the following way:

“Is it possible for ‘green’ shipping to exist alongside - as an appendage to - the current shipping system? If so, what does it say about the industry’s notion of what ‘green’ means that it generates little conflict or incompatibility with the present state of things? Tracing the discursive production of green corridor infrastructure as an imagined shipping future while following the slow voyage of an actually existing container ship was a way to try and understand how the shipping industry simultaneously participates in and avoids change by continuously manipulating the space between transition and delay.”

However, in the midst of all this manipulation of the kind we sought to unpack in the film, there are moments of honesty, like when Lloyd’s List releases its Annual Outlook which includes an industry poll about pressing challenges. Some of the 2023 poll results regarding the ‘greening’ of shipping are as follows:

• 76% said the shipping industry would not meet the International Maritime Organization’s 2030 targets

• 56% thought the 2040 targets were out of reach

• More specifically on green corridors, it gets even more dire, with one third of respondents saying they don’t think green corridors will have a material impact on decarbonization, not just this decade or the next, but ever.

But as we explore in the film, perhaps the more insidious dimension to the transition is that the industry won’t meet its targets (and they know it), but that climate regulations are being designed in such a lax way that it’s possible to be in compliance with them without actually reducing one’s emissions (through various semantic, accounting, or time-bending loopholes). A recent example that captures this dynamic well is the rise in industry enthusiasm for what is known as scrubber technology. Mundane as the word scrubber may sound, scrubbers are an exhaust gas treatment system that can make ships compliant with low-sulphur regulations without having to actually switch to low-sulphur fuels. Essentially, scrubbers are cleaning systems that “desulphurise” exhaust gases to prevent the release of sulphur oxides into the atmosphere. These are instead absorbed by water from the cleaning process, which becomes scrubber water. Because of the price spread between conventional and low-sulphur fuels, these technologies are an attractive option for shipowners despite being expensive. A recent Lloyd’s List article estimates that in the coming year, the potential annual savings for the container shipping industry by installing scrubbers are in the order of $4bn. Addressing the dynamics between regulatory design, compliance, and emissions reductions that we were tracing in the film, Sea-Intelligence chief executive Alan Murphy sums it up in another Lloyd’s List article on the topic:

“It is clear that the intention from some proponents of the low-sulphur regulation was for the industry to switch to using low-sulphur fuel,” he said.

“Reality has instead shown it to be more cost effective to continue to use regular fuel in combination with scrubbers. And as this solution is fully compliant with the regulations, clearly it is a desired solution for the industry.”

But this raised questions over CO2 emission reduction goals, he added.

“Financially motivated regulations are indeed coming into effect, such as the EU’s ETS carbon taxation on shipping,” Murphy said.

“What remains to be seen, is to which degree the industry will find other ways to abide by the regulation in letter, but not necessarily in spirit.”

As long as regulations are formulated in the language of financial incentives, the shipping industry won’t hesitate to beat regulators at their own game. In the end, shipowners get to have their cake and eat it. It’s got a heavy fuel filling with a green cherry on top.

A ‘scrubber’. (Source: 2022 Nedmag B.V.)

Realigning the Oligopoly: The end of the 2M Alliance

The vessel we follow in the film was the MSC Venice, which operated on the Maersk AE55 Eastbound route between Rotterdam and Singapore as part of a longstanding vessel sharing agreement between the two companies: the 2M Alliance. In a joint press statement in January 2023, MSC and Maersk had announced that they would be discontinuing their 2M alliance in 2025, which they had introduced in 2015 to ensure “competitive and cost-efficient operations on the Asia-Europe, Transatlantic and Transpacific trades”. In January of this year, Maersk announced it would be forming a new alliance with German liner Hapag-Lloyd called the Gemini Cooperation, which also implies the exit of Hapag-Lloyd from the alliance it is currently part of (which is literally called ‘THE Alliance’), in which it is the largest partner. As part of their new cooperation, Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd will redesign the container network of the Far East-Europe trade, consolidating it around a small number of transshipment hubs, which are then moved via “shuttle services” to a larger number of ports. The implication is that the latter lose their direct calls to Europe, which in the case of the Gemini cooperation will affect Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, and Taiwan.

This consolidation pattern seems to intensify the hub-and-spoke model that a monopolized container industry tends towards, as we wrote about for Weird Economies last year. While the current 2M alliance makes 54 port calls per week in Asia, the Gemini cooperation will be making just 26. This shift is even more dramatic when one considers that the total tonnage capacity shared within the 2M alliance is 2.82m TEUs, whereas for the Gemini cooperation it is expected to be 3.4m TEUs, i.e. half the port calls despite higher capacity. The customer pitch here seems to be schedule reliability, but it’s a bit unclear how convincing that will be for shippers given that transshipment increases transit times as well as the risk of delays. It is also worth pointing out that the port terminals that liner alliances redirect their traffic toward are often ones where they themselves have a stake. Along with Shanghai, Ningbo, and Singapore, one of the four transshipment hubs of the new Gemini cooperation’s network is the Port of Tanjung Pelepas, operated by APM terminals, Maersk’s port operating company.

The Red Sea and War Insurance Premiums

Unlikely to be news for anyone at this point, another major change since we worked on the film is that the route we followed has been disrupted by the Houthis’ response to Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, leading ships to re-route around the Cape of Good Hope. A key point here however, as was stressed by maritime historian Sal Mercogliano in a recent Odd Lots episode, is that the most significant material driver of the diversions are not so much the Houthi attacks themselves as the war risk insurance premiums charged by insurance companies, most of which are based in London (roughly a tenfold increase from ~0.1% to ~1% of the value of the vessel. In real terms this represents, for a vessel worth $100m, a jump in the cost of insurance from $100,000 to $1m). The attempt to frame the diversions as driven primarily by just another cost assessment on the part of logistics’ companies matters in a time when ideological abstraction around threats to the ‘freedom of navigation’ - that simultaneously work to obfuscate the direct relationship between the Houthis’ actions and the genocide in Gaza - are on full display across the Western political class.

While many have pointed out the additional time and costs (ten days of extra travel time and millions of dollars in additional fuel costs) entailed by having to circumnavigate the African continent instead of passing through the Suez canal, less attention has been paid to the geographical particularities of the route change, and especially its consequences for bunkering (vessel refueling).

In December, Lloyd’s List reported a surge in demand for bunkering in South African ports, which makes sense given that Suez used to be one of the main bunkering stops along the East-West trade. As we discuss in the film, Suez is also a port where large-scale investments into ‘green’ bunkering infrastructure are being planned. South African ports have struggled to keep up with this rise and demand, which has pushed vessels to look for more fuel in Namibia (Port of Walvis Bay) and Mozambique (Ports of Nacala and Maputo), South Africa’s coastal neighbours to the west and the east, respectively. The red sea crisis thus seems to be having a twin impact on bunker demand and supply: more fuel is needed because the voyages are longer, and supply is restricted because it’s not in the right place.

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You probably forgot this newsletter existed – I certainly did! Since it wound down I’ve been continuing to work on stuff around the political economy of logistics, but I haven’t been doing it alone. Over the past 18 months or so, I’ve been working with Miriam Matthiessen. We met through the Abandoned Seafarer Map project, and have been texting each other about marine insurance since.

We’re now a research-arts duo, called Liquid Time. We’ve been writing and making video work around shipping, finance, and the temporalities of maritime worlds. This newsletter is now going to become the Liquid Time substack. It will be a blend of logistics news, takes, and experiments.

It’s a bit old now, but a quick way to get a sense of what we’re thinking about is this piece we wrote last year for Weird Economies, about how container shipping is, well, weird.

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Notes on Houthis

The big story in shipping right now is, obviously, the attacks on ships passing through the Red Sea, in solidarity with the people of Palestine. Olaf Merk from the ITF has been keeping a spreadsheet of the attacks, and noted that all were indeed on ships with some connection to Israel. After the US and UK started attacking Yemen, US-affiliated ships also became targets.

One thing that people on Twitter have been noticing is that ships have been using the ‘Destination’ input field on their public AIS broadcast (basically a ship’s location transmitter) in order to communicate a lack of affiliation with US or Israel. Miriam grabbed these screenshots from Marinetraffic.com.

Insurance premiums for passing through the Red Sea (and beyond it, the Suez canal – a key gateway between Europe and Asia) are spiking due to war risks. This is pushing carriers to reroute cargo around Africa, increasing journey times (and fuel costs). But there’s another crucial factor within this. In our piece for Weird Economies, we wrote about how the container shipping industry has been facing oversupply issues, dubbed the ‘overcapacity crisis’: too many ships have been built, that can carry too many containers, which would potentially put an end to the pandemic-initiated era of inflated prices and resultant record dividends for shareholders. To keep the price buoyed up, shipping companies have to push supply down. As a container shipping company, there are multiple ways that you can reduce your carrying capacity. You can sell your ships (although you’d struggle to find a buyer), you can simply destroy them (at a place like this), or you can find ways to slow your entire system down, so that everything takes longer and demand is maintained.

Anang Shipbreaking Yard, Gujarat, India, where you might destroy a ship.

Having to reroute ships away from the Red Sea / Suez Canal and around Africa is having this effect. Although the attacks are taking their toll on some American companies, for the carriers themselves it’s a different story. The stock price of Zim – Israel’s largest carrier – has actually been creeping back up since the attacks began. We kind of hate to see it, but there are ways that for some of the big players, the Houthi attacks a blessing in disguise.

Source: Bloomberg. The first Houthi ship seizure took place 19 November.

This points to something Martin Danyluk wrote about last year, on how disrupting flows of commodities at choke points does not always translate into effective pressure on multinational corporations supporting various atrocities worldwide. The fact that money can be made not just from the speeding up of getting things from A to B but also from the slowing down also points to how supply chains have adapted into a particular kind of resilience – not resilience in the sense of ‘we will get you your shoes in 5 days no matter what’, but resilience as in regardless of whether things are shipped quick or slow, the big players get paid.

What We’ll be Thinking About and How We’ll Think About It

We study logistical systems because we think they are the best way to understand counterintuitive movements in global political economy, geopolitics and labour struggles. We focus on maritime trade systems, because that’s the main way commodities move. We approach logistics as a project of time management: an expanded process of configuring, distributing and expropriating planetary time – both present and future.

Logistical infrastructures are global capital’s nervous system. They are not just passive enablers of trade, of getting goods to market. They are active agents in making, shaping, reshaping those markets, of determining what commodities will flow and how they will do it. These infrastructures – mega-ports, container ships, and the millions of people that work to keep them running – carry with them a forward motion, an inertia that keeps the wheels of accumulation turning.

Logistics would seem to be about enabling present markets to function, but every port expanded, every megaship built, every shipping lane securitised is at once a bet and an assurance on a particular version of the future. Logistical planning, in this sense, mirrors the temporal acrobatics of finance: the present is produced through anticipation around competing futures.

We are interested in the interplay between prediction and production, between forecasting and manifesting. We want to understand how logistical infrastructures don’t just enable particular economies to function in the present, but work to produce and normalise particular futures. The futures that logistics produces are often just continuations, updates, patches on an untenable and violently accumulative present.

Stay Tuned, and tell your friends!

Jacob and Miriam

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Back in March I reported on the launch of a project from researchers Eliza Ader and Miriam Matthiessen: the first mapping of seafarer abandonments at scale. In the months between, I’ve joined their research collective and worked with them on a new and expanded map and database. Last month we launched it. It shows all abandonments in the ILO database, alongside territorial seas.

We’ve set up a Substack for that, which you can follow here — this will be mostly quarterly updates on abandonment, as well as some notes and reporting on cases that we find interesting or revealing. We’re also looking to do some more longform reporting and investigations, as a collective. From now on, I’ll be posting things related to abandonment investigations over there, so go sign up if you’re into that.

Goodbye, kind of

Over the coming weeks I’m going to be winding this newsletter down – or at least this phase of it. I’ll be sharing some things I’ve been working on over the past few months, including another video essay and an interactive archive of abandonment stories. I may relaunch it as a more general newsletter on maritime investigations, or logistics reportage/ writing more broadly. In any case, let me know what you’re into.

This week, researchers Eliza Ader and Miriam Matthiessen published their seafarer abandonment map, alongside a free and open source dataset that they compiled. This is the first time abandonments have been mapped at scale.

It’s a crucial bit of work, and one they did in their spare time (a massive undertaking!) so big kudos. You can follow them here and here. I’ve been playing around with the dataset and doing some mapping work too, which I’ll release here in due course.

Laboring on The Black Sea

I want to bring up the workers from all over the world in the Black Sea right now, whose workplace (like many) has become a warzone. This morning someone posted a picture of something smoking off the coast of Odessa:

People began to speculate that it was a civilian ship, bringing up marine tracking services and spotting a cargo ship (the Helt, flagged to Panama) at sea. Thankfully it seems like it wasn’t, as the ship is still transmitting an AIS signal, but it is currently (18:50GMT, Wednesday) static, at anchor.

In an interview conducted by Tradewinds with a merchant vessel currently in Odessa (not necessarily Helt, but potentially), the captain said “We strongly fear that [the] ship and her crew will be used as human shields!” UV, a Ukrainian news outlet, claim that the ship was ordered into dangerous waters by Russian military, in order to be used as a human shield [update 3/2: this site has been downed, but NYT have also briefly reported on it]. This is unverified, but whatever the case the people that labor at the gears of the world’s circulatory system, away from home for months at a time, didn’t sign up to float in a warzone, waiting.

The UK said it’s basically going to blockade itself

I don’t know enough about Ukraine/Russia historic relations to weigh in there, but I can point to a couple things happening at sea. This week Grant Shapps, secretary of state for Transport, announced that UK ports were going to blacklist ships connected to Russia.

In the accompanying letter, he announced that:

The problem with this is that in the sprawling, explosive geography of shipping, a great deal of ships are somehow connected to russia. It’s not clear how far the categorisation of ‘connected with Russia’ extends, but around 10.5% of the maritime labor force are Russian, so if this blacklist includes russian-crewed ships then we could be looking at a spate of abandonments as smaller shipping companies operating on thin profit margins collapse after being turned away. Russia isn’t a hugely popular flag as far as flags go, but its still a lot of ships:

This will also mean further backups and tangles in the UK’s supply webs, exacerbating the so-called ‘cost of living crisis’ (planned austerity and apalling wealth distribution). Whilst I’m generally supportive of sanctions and boycotts on war states (like the BDS movement on Israel, obviously), this feels badly thought out and could be one of the sanctions that just hurts ordinary working-class people in the UK and on ships far away from home, rather than oligarchs (read: billionaires).

Interestingly, this blacklist has also been taken up by shipping companies themselves: MSC, Maersk, CMA CGM, Hapag-Lloyd, ONE and Yang Ming have all refused to move cargo. Miriam Matthiessen pointed out that the framing of this as Corporate Social Responsibility or companies picking up the good fight clashes with how labor organisation around refusal to serve war states is framed — such as the International Longshore and Warehouse Union in Oakland refusing to unload the Israeli boat ZIM, or workers in Livorno in Italy refusing to load an arms shipment destined for Israel in 2021 during the spike in the bombardment of Palestine. To be clear, the action on the part of the shipping companies isn’t politics, it’s business planning.

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As ever, drop me a line and let me know what’s good/interesting/useful here, or just say hey. Also please consider sharing this — i’ve decided I’d like to move this from being a sounding board/publishing schedule into something with a bit more of a base. Thanks!

Meant to post this sooner but I — like absolutely everyone in London — had covid.

I made a short film about what I’ve been thinking through and looking into over the past few months, about logistics and the break.

I know everyone says this but I really would be into hearing your responses to this, what’s working, what isn’t — you can email me directly by just replying to this I think (if not, I’m jacobbolton@live.co.uk).

In the new year I can see all this going one of two directions — either lean more into this ‘from the break’ idea, looking at logistics at different scales and sites (so more a theorerical project) or look much more specifically at abandoned cargo ships (more investigative), we’ll see.

Thank you for following along with this over the last few months btw, it’s good to have you, and thank you to all who’ve already got in touch. Speak soon!

Over the course of a few days in Winter 1781, somewhere to the West of Jamaica, slavers aboard the British ship Zong threw 142 abducted Africans overboard. Tim Collingwood, the ship’s captain, said that this was because the ship had got lost and they were running out of water. After it rained and they replenished their water stores, they threw more over anyway. When they arrived in Jamaica, they auctioned off the enslaved people and then filed an insurance claim for their 'lost cargo'.

How do you account for loss at a scale that goes beyond any of the contexts in which it's framed — when the law or processes of accounting aren't just inadequate to describe it, but actively involved in producing and sustaining it? I want to start with Zong! #11 from M. NourbeSe Philip's Zong!, a poem cycle composed from fragments of the legal text of Gregson v Gilbert, the case that followed after the slavers sued the insurance company for refusing to pay out.

What does it mean to' ‘suppose the law a loss’? The case was one of maritime insurance; murder was never discussed. One reason the slavers gave for throwing them overboard is because the insurance claim did not cover ‘natural death’ of those kept in the hold. In her book In the Wake, Christina Sharpe asks “A natural death. What would constitute a natural death here? How could their deaths be natural? How can the legally dead be declared murdered?”. The courtroom here operates as part of the production line of loss: the conversion of unaccountable and unquantifiable horror into the metrics of capital accumulation. In a piece by Tim Armstrong (quoted by Sharpe) he notes that “Captain Luke Collingwood thus brutally converted an uninsurable loss (general mortality) into general average loss, a sacrifice of parts of a cargo for the benefit of the whole.” What is the whole here, or what is the relationship between the whole and the hold?

Turner’s painting is generally known as just ‘The Slave Ship’, but its ‘real’ name is ‘Slavers Throwing overboard the Dead and Dying—Typhon coming on’. He made it a year after The History and Abolition of the Slave Trade was published, in which he read about the Zong massacre, and its generally understood that the painting is about that. But why the addition of the typhoon to the course of events? What difference would a typhoon make to those already legally dead, already killed at the point of abduction? Who, once placed in the hold, isn’t already dying?

Christina Sharpe and M. NourbeSe Philip have already answered my question about how to account for the Zong’s unaccountability, way better than I ever could. But I do want to look at the wake of the Zong case, and its ripples in the practices of abandonment that are on the rise today.

Marine insurance was the first ‘developed’ form of insurance, the one that formed the general structure of capitalism’s safety nets today. Slavers required support from the British Navy and marine insurance, both of which expanded greatly through the transatlantic slave trade. One key architect of the law that accompanied (and facilitated) the insurance underpinning the slave trade is Mansfield, the Lord Chief Justice who presided over the Zong case. There seems to be a tract of writing that defends Mansfield, on the basis that he was carrying out his project of building a solid framework for commercial law (goes without saying that these scholars are not particularly critical of commercial law and who it serves): Kirkler, for example, notes that Mansfield’s handling of the Zong case was “not merely cruel but bizarre unless seen in the context of his life-long determination to protect the emerging system of law (particularly commercial law) and to ensure that the law remained as certain as he could make it.” One thing the Zong case did was firm up the ‘principle of abandonment’: “the principle by which owners could, as it were, abandon their all-but-lost property to the insurers and claim its full value.” (that’s Kirkler). But this analysis overlooks the key thrust behind the case, the legal climate that has become the Zong’s wake: the construction of mechanisms of generalised unaccountability that exclude the labour (or lives) of those who work the supply chain.

Cases of abandoned ships or stranded crews are dramatically on the rise. These cases, defined by cutoff of communication between a ship owner and seafarer, leave crews stranded on boats without pay, visas, food, or the means to return home. These abandonments take place in the nonspace of international law, where a ship can be owned in Japan, operated in Taiwan, handled in Germany, crewed by Syrians and flagged in Panama (such as the case of the Ever Given), a cherrypicking of maritime law and wage expectations to minimise risk and maximise profit. Laura Carballo, head of maritime law and policy at World Maritime University in Malmo, Sweden, notes that “The laws and regulations haven’t kept up with how modern and global shipping is now… The way shipping is set up makes these abuses possible.”

Since the Beirut port explosion (which was, incidentally, caused by Beirut port begrudgingly and improperly storing ammonium nitrate left on board an abandoned ship in 2013), ports have grown wary of allowing crews to leave the ships that they are no longer paid to guard. They opt instead to effectively impound the ships and their crews, leading to the proliferation of floating prisons. Rather than pay security to watch over the ships, they leave it to unpaid workers. I’m not suggesting a neat continuity (and definitely not an equivalence) between the transatlantic slave trade and the conditions of this new form of modern slavery, but the latter certainly exists in the wake of the former. Or maybe you could say that in the cases of abandoned seafarers, the whole ship is now the hold. Or that through abandonment, the entire ship is now in the hold of the new logistical capitalism, the modality of capitalism that the transatlantic slave trade built the foundations of.

Samig Nabiyev, the captain of a ship called Captain Nagdaliyev, was moored up 900m out to sea when Beirut port exploded. They were there because they’d been abandoned by Palmali, a Turkish shipping company, who long ago had stopped paying their wages. The ship was abandoned in March 2020. Every so often The International Trade Federation drop off fuel and instant ramen. One day Nabiyev came down and found a noose hanging on the deck. Its unclear as to whether its a warning, an expression of the mood on the ship, or a kind of sculpture that generalises the entire situation of the ship and how its been put to death by logistical capitalism. The crew were eventually repatriated in March 2021, a year later, following a drawn-out dispute. It’s early December now, and the ship is still there.

There's a bit in All Incomplete where they say "Logistics would seem to value means over ends – everything is how to get it there, not what it is – but logistics is really the degradation of means, the general devaluation of means through individuation and privatization, which are the same thing. It is the science of lost means advanced with every act of loss prevention." In one sense, what they're saying is that logistics — as the global choreography of ownership and the infrastructure that enables (or necessitates) the leveraging of differential economies — is an assault on our capacity for sharing. Logistics infrastructures at all scales have become the war machinery of neoliberalism.

For logistics companies to claim the work of loss prevention whilst assaulting all that is held in (under)common — our means in each other — they must define loss in a particular way. 'Loss prevention' is a wide-ranging term in logistics, but broadly it covers activities relating to the protection of cargo and the minimising of (shareholder) risk along the supply chain. It is the legal and operational articulation of the relentless move towards impossible frictionlessness, a move that always shifts the supply chain's overheads, risk and inherent precarity onto a dwindling pool of workers.

What's the 'loss' in loss prevention? It is of course, before anything, financial. But its got secondary meanings that are watery. P&I Club, the london-based maritime insurance firm, define their loss prevention services as an effort to "offset rising claims and maintain quality amongst Members." Here, the prevention of loss is to offset losses incurred by insurance claims — so it's not just protection but also gain, an attempt to claw back some of what is lost through the supply chain's ordinary functioning, its inevitable decay.

P&I Club have published a set of guides for managing loss prevention, basically a set of corporate practices for smooth operation. A recent one is titled 'Grief: Our Journey to Healing', and deals with depression amongst crew. It's opening sentence is "Loss is an inevitable, fundamental truth of life that bonds people together." This, in the context of a programme to prevent loss at all costs. The front cover has a kind of Bon-Iver-but-he’s-at-sea vibe to it:

The back of the guide is telling of its principal aim: "Since 1996, the Crew Health programme has become one of the Club’s leading loss prevention initiatives. The aim of the programme is to reduce the volume and value of crew illness claims which are caused by a pre-existing illnesses or disease."

You can learn a lot about how loss is treated in shipping from reading the terms and conditions appended to Bills of Lading (basically delivery contracts that accompany all goods). Accountability in the supply chain is an impediment: it's risk, it's friction, so it's avoided at all cost. Maersk, the biggest shipping company in the world, provides a close-to-comprehensive list of conditions under which they unburden themselves of the responsibility for the loss or damage of goods in their care: these include strikes, 'insufficient or defective condition of packing' and, for good measure, 'nuclear incidents'.

They also put a time limit of on their own accountability, one that can be out of sync with the temporality of shipping: all damages must be reported at the place (or port) of delivery within three days, otherwise it's not their problem.

Another strategy of loss prevention is to simply make barely employed workers pay for their means to work. Deliveroo's employment contract makes it abundantly clear that you are not, in fact, employed:

It also requires you to pay a £150 deposit to cover the jacket that you have to wear, a deposit not guaranteed to be refunded.

But more than all that, despite not being employed by Deliveroo, it makes you liable for all "Losses" (defined as "any costs, claims, proceedings, damages, losses, expenses or other liabilities (including legal costs)") that result from the work, regardless of whether actually performed by you.

In logistics, Loss Prevention translates into Gain Facilitation through the shedding of responsibility and outsourcing of running costs to workers, a move that always leaves us worse off.

But to understand how other kinds of loss operate and are produced through logistics, its necessary to return to 1781, to a singular event in the ocean's history, and one that set in law so many of the violent mechanisms of loss, property and the codification of death by abandonment that we live in the wake of today: the Zong massacre of 1781, in which over 150 abducted africans were thrown overboard by the European crew in order to claim their insurance value. The legal case that followed this event, Gregson vs Gilbert, has been wrongly historicised as a stepping stone towards abolition in Britain. The text is also the basis for M. NourbeSe Philips book-length poem Zong!, composed entirely of excerpts and pieces from the text of the case. The work is, in the author's words, an attempt "to find a form to bear this story which can’t be told, which must be told, but through not telling". Here, other modes of loss are operative at an inconceivable scale; we'll try think through them, and some of the event’s ripples, in part two.

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If you're in London, I've started a study group around the new Moten and Harney book, All Incomplete. Our first session this week was a joy, come join us for the next this Wednesday (1st) at the Royal George, Deptford, 7PM. We'll be reading chapters 3 & 4: Usufruct and Use and Leave our Mikes Alone (download the book here, let me know if you want to join and i'll add you to the mailouts).

It's speculated that in 2050 the northern polar ice cap will have melted enough to enable passage through it on ships in the summer, so obviously US military-adjacent think tank RAND are already figuring out how to secure it and speculate on it. It's been called the Transpolar Sea Route (TSR) Here's a paper they wrote on it.

First off, this week I received this email.

Readers, I can only pray that this is of interest, and tell you that now is a good time to rig the Squishy Little Golden Dumpling market. I also want to say that there’s nothing novel or surprising about this; financial deregulation paved the way for the explosion of derivatives, and the ability to bet on pretty much anything is a huge part of the world finance system — many investment banks and exchanges effectively function as betting shops. Logistics, as I’ve already touched on, is one place where all this financialisation materialises, but its also fertile ground for speculation, such as the ability to speculate (bet) on popular trade routes and scarcity (I will do a deep dive into this sometime I promise). In some sense, MyBookie’s move to allow betting on supply chain crisis is a more honest and transparent version of how global trade works anyway. Rest assured I reached out to have a spokesperson comment on the odds, but no reply yet.

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MOVE 2021

This week I got a last-minute press pass to to 'MOVE 2021' at Excel London, a conference that bills itself as 'the world's most important mobility event'. It was unclear (and still is) what it was specifically about, which perhaps speaks to the overdiluted definition of logistics as the science of 'moving things' in a world where everything is (or could at any point be) on the move. All the same, EV providers, petrol giants, mapping platforms, insurance firms, autonomous car parts manufacturers, e-bike designers and app developers all descended on the conference centre to lay out their conflicting (and confusing) visions of how we're set to move things (including ourselves) around in the years to come. I don't know what I expected but the whole thing was weird — I was hoping to get a a lay of the land of the future of urban logistics, but I mostly just uncomfortable peered at the contortions that the world of privatised urban transport pulls to itself in the mirror in order to convince itself its doing good.

The room was big. In the middle, Diamond Sponsor™ shell did its thing, with green stands saying 'Let's Decarbonise the Roads. Together.' The first guy I spoke to was from a company that made parts for autonomous vehicles. He had a screen showing ghostly pointcloud figures with classification boxes appearing around them. It was a demo of a LIDAR sensor, with a live feed showing the crowd walking round. After a while I asked him why only about half were labelled with green boxes for 'pedestrian' and the rest were labelled 'misc' with irregular grey boxes, he kind of laughed and said 'I guess it doesn't have enough data, maybe it thinks they're dogs or something.' Cool!

I stopped to watch a video of corporate inspopasta: architectural renderings of Singapore with fast cuts to speeding through tunnels at night and casually suited dudes drinking elaborate coffees in glass skyscrapers, like a trailer for Fast and Furious: Entrepreneur or something. One bit stuck with me: "Where we’re going doesn’t need a driver. or even a road." A guy came over and we got talking. The video was for a company called Dassault Systems, and after ten minutes of chatting I have absolutely no idea what they do other than produce digital twins of cities, for unclear purposes. When I asked what the digital twins are used for, he said 'You can crash a car into a wall and have a 98% accuracy of what it would actually be like’ (hell yeah where we're going doesn't need a driver), then directed me to another fast-cut youtube video that we awkwardly watched about a minute of on his phone.

I won't go into every interaction with everyone I had at all the various stalls, but two buzzwords that kept cropping up in the same sentence were 'MaaS' (or, 'Mobility as a Service') and 'Multimodality'. MaaS is basically the streaming of urban transport — it consolidates transportation options, both public and private, and packages them up in one cost. 'Multimodality' basically means 'getting somewhere using more than one means of transport', ie taking a train and a bus, pretty standard practice in cities. There seems to be a race amongst developers for the next big app in urban transportation, a kind of transport super-app that lets you plan journeys (ie CityMapper or Google Maps) with integrated, bundled ticket-buying for the whole journey, or even a subscription model. The attraction of this for developers is obvious: a way to profit off what little publicly-owned transport is left, whilst also taking a cut of (and managing access to) private infrastructures such as Uber, Bolt and e-scooter providers: platform capitalism squared.

Most seem to still work on a pay-as-you-go model, but there was talk of subscription services. The implications for this could be big, with the city's choreography yet more determined by shareholder-returns, governing what services are included in the app. Subscription services also point towards access to the city on hierarchised lines. What would 'premium' or 'queue jump' access to the city look like (more so than already)? Achille Mbembe talks about the proliferation of technological platforms as constitutive of a "a segmented planet of multiple speed regimes." Anna Tsing tries to move away from the metaphor of 'flow' when thinking about the movement of people, preferring instead to talk of 'carving' global channels, drawing attention to the way that people don't just float downstream across the world but that they move (or are moved) through intensely constructed, securitised, politicised, enterprised corridors. What would a city of further gradated speed regimes constituted by channels carved by VC startups feel like?

I'll leave it here because I'm hitting 1000 words and have a raging cold, but here's three more miscellaneous takeaways:

• The busiest panel discussion, by a long long margin, was this one, ‘How micromobility companies are innovating to become more profitable.’

• Someone, when speaking about accessibility and e-scooters versus e-bikes, said that 'some people don't want to get sweaty so e-scooters are a good way around that'.

• A CEO of Gorillas talking about how 'worker safety is their priority' and that they differ from other food startups because they 'hire workers' (as mentioned last week, they have a history of inadequate safety measures, illegally overloaded riders, and no sick pay for the inevitable bike accidents that are the cost of getting everything in ten minutes or less whilst turning a profit for investors). In response to some guy from Just Eat talking about how their best rider goes over 100km a day, he bragged about having the local Gorillas record for 'riding' (working) — apparently doing 200km over 12 1/2 hours in a publicity stunt. A quick LinkedIn search shows his first job was at a Rothschild investment bank, belying his attempt at being One Of The Lads).

• This notebook:

  

Logistics companies love to emblazon fantasies of frictionless transit all over their websites, vans and brochures. Stuff like this:

Or something like this, hand-of-god type shit:

In this visioning, logistics is an infrastructure (and management philosophy) of smooth, lossless transit: a Lego-space of seamless connection, nothing still, nothing wasted, finance made flesh. This year, the brittle realities of the world’s supply chains became visible when a megaship carrying over 20,000 containers got wedged in the Suez canal.

This, amongst other things (pandemic, labour shortages, rocketing lockdown demand for building materials and household goods) caused a backup in the world’s supply chains, a backup that is proving to be a cash cow for logistics companies as they hike the price of berths. What logistics really looks like today is something like this:

Or, more precisely, like this:

That’s the view of LA Port on marinetraffic.com, taken last monday. Each of those green dots is a megaship waiting to berth. Here’s a closer view of the port from a satellite image I pulled the week before:

Some ships are abandoned altogether, because docking them (and paying the workers their salary) is deemed no longer profitable. The affordance to do this comes from the way logistics companies have so thoroughly derisked themselves — shedding off liabilities — and the wateriness of maritime law for ships registered in countries with deliberately lax rules (Panama is a real hit). The responsibility of dealing with abandoned vessels, and their constituent crew and cargo, is slippery: states tend to take a ‘not in our waters, not our problem’ approach. The ammonium nitrate that caused the Beirut port explosion came from a ship that docked for ‘technical reasons’ before being abandoned, leaving the port authorities to begrudgingly (and inaedquately) store 2,750 tonnes of the explosive.

Cases of abandoned cargo ships are rising in tandem with logistics’ ongoing expansions into its own volatility. This Wall Street Journal piece details how cases of abandoned ships more than doubled from 40 to 85 last year, and 2021 is on track to be worse.

1. Abandoned ship — paint on side reads ‘Help us. No food. No Salary’. 2. Wrecked cargo ship abandoned at sea, torn in two. 3. Stranded workers grow herbs and an onion in a bucket on deck.

Workers on stranded ships complain that the hardest thing is the total, unending boredom. Lost time, and the endurance of uncertainty, seems to be a constant of the global circulation workforce, whether on sea or land. Logistics posits to be an assault on time through the elimination of distance: everything where it needs to be as quickly as possible*. Logistics doesn’t so much eliminate time as distribute and displace it; the surplus of time falls on the shoulders of workers in ever more precaritised conditions.

Logistics seeks to streamline everything it touches, to chip away at anything that could hinder the flow of capital — including (or especially) workers on the supply chain. This is achieved through relentless precaritisation, which is to say relentless circulisation (or circulabilisation). It is no coincedence that the leaders of the platform economy — the business model of outsourcing running costs to barely paid and barely contracted workers — are all, at their heart, logistics operations: Amazon, Deliveroo, Uber. The Liverpool Dockers Strikes pretty much all revolved around the casualisation of labour, and the loss of a baseline pay recieved for turning up to the union hall for work each day — regardless of whether or not you were called on to go out on the docks. I don’t think its too much of a stretch to think of this as a kind of prototype of a zero hours contract, and the image of dockers waiting (unpaid) at work to find out if they have work is not too dissimilar from the familiar sight Deliveroo riders waiting outside Mcdonalds for an order to come through.

Unions like IWGB have started chapters for platform economy workers — when I spoke to someone who worked there last spring, they said that one of the main challenges for organising is that most Deliveroo riders don’t know other Deliveroo riders, and the only time they are in contact is when they are waiting (unpaid) outside a place for an order, basically all in competition with each other. In response, IWGB were putting on Deliveroo barbecues, to create the conditions of sociality that could precipitate organising.

1.‘You are now entering Liverpool Scabport’: Picket line at Liverpool Dock. 2. Delivery workers Picket line at McDonalds in Dalston earlier this month: workers were picketing over (amongst other things) not having access to toilets, and not having a space to wait for orders (leading to routine £65 parking fines).

The pandemic accelerated the platform economy’s reorganisation of the city’s supply chains, with affordable fruit and veg markets shut down but Gorillas/Getir/Amazon Fresh/ Weezy all gaining ground. Gorillas have been particularly awful, firing workers for striking over conditions such as being illegally overloaded with cargo, and not having sick pay for when they sustain injuries due to riding on bad bikes on cobbled streets with said cargo. Questions of labour, time and precaritisation on sea and land is something I’m going to return to, so I’ll leave this here for now. But shout out to the Gorillas copywriting team for coming up with perhaps the best formulation of logistics’ all-pervasive, violent, expropriative logic I’ve read to date: Faster than You.

* not to get too into it now but ‘fast’ doesn’t necessarily equal ‘good for business’ or profitable, a dynamic i’ll probably do a write-up on at some point in the near future.

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I’m reading Laleh Khalili’s Sinews of War and Trade, a history and political economy of shipping and capital expansion in the Arabian peninsula — it’s good. Charmaine Chua did a good write-up of it for the Boston review (everything she writes absolutely slaps). Next up is probably Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake. I’m also still going through the new Moten and Harney, All Incomplete, taking it slooow. If you have/want to read any of this stuff and want to talk through/read it together, let me know.

“All property is loss because property is the loss of sharing.”

— Fred Moten & Stefano Harney, All Incomplete

I want to think about the production of loss — of lost means, lost time, lost capacity for sharing — that rises from logistics and its endless attempt at reducing all things to bare circulability.

I’m starting this as the global logistics system is reaching breaking point. From Oakland to Shenzhen the ports are backed up, with hundreds of dawdling ships anchored out at sea, waiting for a free berth to unload. The ships can’t unload because there’s no more room on the ports for containers, the containers can’t be moved out because there are no trucks with free chassis, the trucks aren’t free because they’re taken up with (empty) containers that can’t be moved back to factories, and the containers can’t be shipped back to wherever — because the boats are full. None of this matters much to the logistics companies, because the situation has skyrocketed demand for shipping, leading to them getting away with massively inflated prices. The Baltic Dry Index, a benchmark for the cost of moving goods at sea, is the highest it’s been since 2009. (Future, always future) business is booming.

Container ships waiting to dock at Long Beach port, taken from marinetraffic.com/ Sentinel Satellite, 25/10/21

I’ll probably do a bigger thing at some point that goes into the logistical turn of the 80s and the rise of circulation as a mode of production, but for now I’ll just set the scene a little. There’s a particular idea of what logistics is that is communicated by shipping companies, a vision of the frictionless passage of goods to where they need to be. Logistics is cast as something that connects, that reduces distance, that distributes. Inane diagrams — in brochures, plastered on the side of vans, adorning the banners of websites — reinforce this fantasy of seamless, on-demand movement:

This is based on the idea that all goods need to get somewhere, to where they are needed, in the shortest possible amount of time. There are multiple errors in this: the assumption that all goods produced are needed, the assumption that where they go is where they need to be, and the assumption that getting them there fast (or getting them there at all) is in the interests of logistics. In other words, its based on an idea of use value, which our economies are so far decoupled from.

It pretty much goes without saying that the priority of privatised logistics is to make money for shreholders. To do this, the shipping companies have thoroughly de-risked themselves and are always ready to move on any situation that could be taken advantage of. This means that events that appear as breakages, as accidents, or challenges to logistical systems (such as the Ever Given blocking the Suez Canal, the pandemic, changes in demand) aren’t obstacles but cracks that logistics can expand into. Take the Ever Given for example — it created a ripple effect disruption in commodity flows worldwide, with ships backed up all through the Mediterranean and Red Sea. The lateness of goods (especially time-sensitive stuff like food) doesn’t matter to the logistics companies  — the insurance providers deal with that. But it does raise demand, which means shipping prices can rise. A spot on a ship that cost $2000 to ship a few months ago can now go for $25,000. It’s all windfall.

Baltic Dry Index 2017-now, basically an index of how much stuff costs to move around by sea (this is kind of sus though in the way that all indexes are sus, as they are assembled by people with vested interests in facilitating particular kinds of speculation, maybe i’ll do a deep dive into the BDI and other maritime financial instruments/derivatives at some point, let me know if this is in any way interesting to you).

Logistics is not about responding to a demand, but about carrying out a continual, churning, global choreography of ownership. In the world that logistics creates, everything is — or could at any point be — on its way somewhere, to wherever its passage can generate the most financial gain. Moten & Harney say it best, when they say that logistics is about the degradation of means, the degradation of the capacity to share (with) each other, the drive for individuation and privatisation in all things. “It is the science of lost means advanced with every act of loss prevention.”

Logistics and the colossal infrastructures it depends on is finance made flesh. There’s a tendency to think of finance as something that is purely abstract, an incomprehensible acrobatics of property that happens in bank accounts, in spreadsheets, in virtual stock exchanges. But all this commodity speculation and property acrobatics materialises somewhere. If the port, the warehouse and the depot are finance’s body, then logistics is its nervous system, or something like that. I want to figure out how people are getting caught up in this — who they are, where they are — and think towards how me might begin to account for all that logistics forces us to lose.

Abandoned container ship — the workers can’t come ashore because they lack visas, or the means to get home. This is happening more and more.

What I’m interested in is the specific conditions, situations and lost means that this approach to the organisation of the planetary movement of goods makes. Who does this land on, where does it land? What is lost, for who? How do we account for it, when accounting is about demonstrating potential, not loss? How do we get it back?

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In class this week we wrote vignettes, short snapshot introductions to our research field. Thinking through some of the stuff above, I wrote this — three clips from around the world of people caught in the cogs of logistics. Most of it comes from news clips — in the last one, the quote about the gravestone really happened, it comes from an interview I did for a film I never ended up making about the eventual arrival of the Ever Given in the UK.

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Colombo, Sri Lanka. July 9, 2021. Ship: X-Press Pearl. Capacity: 2,756 Containers.

When the wind is quiet you can hear the scuttle of crabs over fresh mounds of plastic pellets. The warm sea deposits another cold turtle on the beach. It's been six weeks now and still it churns them out. "You can't fish there right now", say the authorities. The sea is no longer to be trusted. In houses up and down the coast the fishermen wait, and wait. The dolphins that wash up have turned green from heavy metal poisoning. Reports say that the fire started because of badly packaged cases of nitric acid. By the time the news of the fire made it across the ship, it was too late to put it out. For days people watched it burn on the horizon from the shore, a sunset nailed to the sea. Sailfish, Dolphin, tuna, sodium dioxide, copper, lead.

Mumbasa, Kenya. May 7, 2021. Ship: MV Dinan. Capacity: 8,122 Dead Weight Tonnes.

Once a week the priest makes the one-kilometre trip out to sea, bringing with him essential provisions. He's been doing this since they first got stranded — 18 months ago, after the ship's owner stopped picking up the phone. The crew don't have the visas to come ashore, or the means to make it home to Syria, and so they wait. It's Ramadan, but the food they break fast with is the same the priest brings each week: wheat, potatoes, rice, sometimes meat. The hardest thing is the boredom. It is believed that the situation may change. 'Soon', they say to each other, repeating it like a prayer.

Felixstowe, UK. August 3, 2021. Ship: Ever Given. Capacity: 20,124 Containers.

The foghorn booms across the waves and a swell of clapping rises to meet it from the shore. All evening they have waited in congregation, to witness the arrival of a ship one hundred and nineteen days late. It moves in slowly, lumbering, glacial. It's clear now but around 3am the North Sea mists are set to roll in. Binoculars, camping chairs, telephoto lenses, flasks of tea. "My brother's wife died back in March, but the headstone is still on the ship. Got it made in China, you see. I know he'll be relieved now."