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Short abstract

Drawing on the case automated river navigation, I reconceptualise waste not as a material residual but as a necessary temporal-discursive construct for automation. Reading automation through the lens of waste elucidates why so many speculative technologies create the problems they profess to solve.

Long abstract

This paper draws on the case of Rhine river navigation to examine how efficiency discourses are bound up in particular spatio-temporal constructs of ‘waste’. While 19th century river engineers saw as their economic and moral mission to tame the unruly river through rectification projects that rationalized space, the contemporary development of remote navigation is similarly couched in twin discourses of productivity and environmental sustainability but seeks instead a rationalization of time. My paper departs from dominant notions of waste as material residual downstream from production to instead conceptualise waste as a temporal construct that forms the discursive starting point for automation technology. The very idea of remote navigation, I argue, arises from – and only makes sense through - a particular construction of the shipping labour process as wasteful. Remote navigation envisions screen-mediation as an abstraction technology to make skippers’ labour power spatio-temporally interchangeable and distributable across fleets, allowing a recuperation of ‘wasted’ labour power through digital re-embodiment. Automation in this sense seeks not to eliminate labour but to recuperate labour time perceived as wasted. Drawing on three months of ethnographic field work at a remote navigation center, I then show how the attempt to abstract a collective labour process creates new forms of compensatory labour as remote skippers negotiate the reconfigured sociality required from the spatial severance of the ship as a social body. Ultimately, I argue that reading automation through the lens of waste helps elucidate why so many speculative technologies create the problems they profess to solve.