Logistics remains a magical art of the ‘black box,’ a mechanism or object whose stimulus and response are visible, but whose internal operations remain opaque. Stage magicians’ trick boxes furnished the original concept of the ‘black box’ to cybernetics in the 1940s and 50s; the term now more widely…

Anyone who has tracked a package from a fulfillment center will recognize the logistical plot of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula (1897). The count packs himself in one of fifty boxes of Transylvanian soil, shipping them all to Whitby, where the Russian consul pays the wrecked Demeter’s harbor dues, and…

The early 2020s commonplace that everything seems a bit unreal is a material truth. Not only our shoes and handbags, but our makeup, phone chargers, glassware, and medications; our oven mitts and bike helmets and airplane parts; the components in our intravenous drip machines and defibrillators, the…