A Model for Humanity: Shipping Containers

• Peter Lorenzi review of The Box
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcom_McLean
• The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger
• John Robb blog: The Resilient Community: Malcom's Platform

Over at John Robb's blog he is musing on what a "Resilient Community", existing in a chaotic 21st century world, would look like. He brings up the abstracted platform of containerized shipping as a design inspiration for such communities.

Yes, yes, yes! Robb has hit upon something great.

I see the containerized shipping platform as a way to explicitly state the friction points in society. By friction points I mean any point where objects/people/information must pass through a "checkpoint". A checkpoint is any point of observation labor and judgement -e.g. "is this package legal or safe?", "is this person a terrorist?", "is it safe to invite this person in my house?", "should I marry him?", "are these pesticides safe? ", "is this email a virus ","is this email for joe_user@example.org","is that child tall enough to ride this rollercoaster?","are these tomatoes ripe?". Humans, as well as all animals, need these friction points. Why am I calling it a "friction point"? Because the flow of objects slow or stop at that threshold. The threshold is sometimes all physical, sometimes all semantic.

Shipping containers created a revolution by tidying up the transport and trade of goods. Before containers, goods were handled by dock workers at several transition points. This took time, the workers stole some of the goods, and the dock workers were a part of the union, socialist, mafia, and often Catholic culture. A southern trucker, with typical contempt for such working class northerner culture, saw these dock workers performing their trade on a dock and dreamed up how box the cargo up so the producers and consumers of goods could save money, and the vermin culture wouldn't have their livelihood. It worked, and now that vermin culture is long gone.

Switching gears a little here, there has emerged an orthodoxy in the countercultural schemes for a platform. These orthodoxies tend to want no friction points, or simply place all friction in the semantic distinction between their alternative society and mainstream society (Mainstream is always judged bad, alternative is a frictionless zone of no judgement). It is interesting to note the Burning Man culture as maturing through this, from wide open to needing security.

Back to John Robb's "Resilient Community" musings, and a platform. Humans need civilization, and it is time we containerized it for safe passage through time, by maturing to a point where all are conscious of the flow, and where/when the free flow points and friction points should appropriately exist. Not a police state with police judging people's validity of movement, but a people state policing with a precision, decisiveness, violent intervention, wealth and innovation protection that makes police states of the past look like what they really were: weak, pathetically poor and stupid.

A little about the non-philosophical. Sealand rocks! I was once the bookkeeper that did all the bill of ladings for cargo loaded on Sealand ships in Akutan, Alaska. The captains were really smart and cool. It was also something I liked about coastal Alaska . I remember watching a steady stream of cargo ships passing by while moored in Southeast Alaska, and thinking how densely commercial and modern in a truly contemporary sense the shipping corridor of Alaska is. Its the perfect mix of wilderness, high bandwidth flow of trade, big transport infrastructure things like ships and planes, and no farms and few roads. Most of America is a mix of rural farm-culture politics and old urban-culture politics. Alaska was neither. Those big Sealand ships, along with airline travel, are what enables modernity in Alaska, and that (with no rural farm ethos to corrupt it) felt more cutting edge than anything in the lower 48. No wonder I love Alaska.