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Paper short abstract

Platformized lockage systems promise transparency, efficiency, and safety, but they generate blind spots and new risks. Based on fieldwork at a canal lock in China, the paper shows how dispatchers and ship operators keep lockage workable through care, improvisation, and embodied judgment.

Paper long abstract

Digital modernization and smart governance agendas often frame waterways as fully knowable and controllable through data, automation, and platform governance. Drawing on long term ethnographic fieldwork at a canal lock on China’s Grand Canal, this paper examines how these promises collide with the material realities of a working lock. It follows waterway ETC and the Easy Lockage app as semi-automated infrastructures that translate lockage into standardized steps, data fields, and accountability chains, while reconfiguring how lock operation is coordinated, supervised, and justified.

This paper argues that platform transparency produces partial vision and new blind spots. Here, standardization and governance can generate an illusion of control, while digital traces multiply records and yet mask what matters in practice, including shifting wind, water levels, vessel positioning, and informal negotiations in anchorage zones. Near misses, queuing disputes, and routine manual cross checks show that safety is not secured by the system alone, but through continual repair work, improvisation, and embodied judgment that remain essential yet are often rendered peripheral as exceptions. Efficiency becomes a black box in which risk and uncertainty do not disappear but are redistributed and frequently backgrounded as long as throughput remains high and accidents are rare, leaving invisible threats to accumulate through everyday loopholes and obscured uncertainties.

By foregrounding maintenance and embodied expertise, this paper shows how platformized lockage is lived in between technological utopias and operational realities, and how repair becomes an ordinary way of keeping infrastructure workable under technological uncertainty.