The Floating Economy

Rose George fears that we suffer from “sea blindness.” She wants us to recognize the importance of and problems with the shipping industry, which brings us almost everything we buy:

Recently, Craig Martin looked into the history of the shipping container and how it revolutionized the industry:

From the nascent designs of the 1950s, through the roll-out phase of the 1960s, to the standardization of the 1970s, the container became central to the burgeoning growth of consumer capitalism, particularly the move of manufacturing to traditionally peripheral economies. The shipping container models the fundamentals of late capitalism even as it facilitates it: a standardized, reproducible structure that looks and functions the same everywhere. But just as much as it has amplified the practice of consumer capitalism, the shipping container also underwrote an aesthetics of capitalism as well. The geometric simplicity of the container’s design echoed the uniformity of high modernist architecture of the ‘50s and ‘60s, including the serial arrangement of tract housing, or in the standardized, modular architectural designs of Buckminster Fuller and Le Corbusier. What better way to fill the rows and rows of housing blocks in a booming suburbia than with baubles and gizmos delivered by rows and rows of shipping containers on a nearby dockyard?