"A smile. An arrow. A smarrow". Whether delivered by Amazon, FedEx or whoever, the cardboard box signifies both plenty and waste
Tina Zimmermann, Amazon Tsunami, installation at the European Cultural Center Venice, April-November 2022, Palazzo Mora, Venice, Italy.
The giant essays written by Shannon Mattern for Places Journal are always worth watching out for - rich assessments of the everyday designs and tools of our lives. Mattern opens out the power and politics that brings them to us (see our previous citations of her work, from forests to community plumbing).
Here’s some extracts to lead you into her latest topic - the cardboard box. In our daily lives and broader economies, it’s an ambivalent indicator - both of commercial fluidity and planet-destroying over-consumption. Mattern begins with a pandemic scene, where boxes accumulate in her locked-down street.
AMID [pandemic] confusion, there was a friendly sign. A smile. An arrow. A smarrow. Stacked up between street trees along the service road behind my Manhattan apartment were thousands of cardboard boxes standing on end — Chewy, Blue Apron, Peloton — the rising stars of internet commerce in the early months of the pandemic.
And, of course, Amazon. Every third box was Amazon’s, instantly recognizable, with that famous logomark connecting two letters in the company name, promising to deliver with alacrity everything from A to Z. This was essential work, or legally constructed as such.
Almost overnight, East 23rd Street became a curbside distribution hub, where workers unloaded trucks and moved boxes by handcart, bringing shampoo and socks, meal kits and milk-bones, stationary bikes and sourdough starter kits to the 30,000 or so humans, plus a few thousand pets, holed up in Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town.
We extracted our wares, carefully flattened and stacked the boxes, sent the cardboard back to the curb, ready for reincarnation at a recycling center. There was comfort in this ritual — or at least familiarity, which passes for comfort in difficult times. The smarrow points the way forward.
It was a boom time for cardboard. Amazon leased a new warehouse in Hunts Point. Another in Red Hook. One on Staten Island, at the Matrix Global Logistics Park. Nationally, the company doubled its real-estate footprint (before scaling back a bit).
But as delivery trucks proliferated, so did tent cities. Homelessness in the United States rose to levels not seen since the Great Depression. On any given night last year, more than 650,000 people were homeless, and more than a third of those lived outdoors, shielded by tarps and tents and cardboard sheets.
Oakland, California, September 2020. [Nick Shere, via Flickr under license CC BY-NC-SA 2.0]
Here the smarrow smirks from a leaky paper roof. New York City has a new Homeless Bill of Rights affirming the right to sleep outside, but other cities have petitioned for permission to clear encampments, making little distinction between cardboard scraps and personal treasures.
As historian Maria Rentetzi writes, “the cardboard box — the waste of our commercial world — is recycled in such a way as to make visible the disorder in our societies, the faults of capitalism.” It is an abject object that touches all parts of the city, from the granite kitchen island to the sewer grate.
And for many of us, the cardboard box is our closest touchpoint to globalized trade, structuring our relations with people in distant places. It brings the logistics chain to our doorstep. The magnificently ripped metal freight container may get the Economist cover shot, but the plain brown box delivers messages to our homes. Its very existence in our homes, Marshall McLuhan would say, is the message.
In the immortal words of Walter Paepcke, founder of the Container Corporation of America, “packages are not just commodities; they are communications.”
Let’s unpack that, shall we? Boxes are media in multiple senses of the word. They’re lithographed surfaces designed to be read, and they’re dimensional containers that mediate between outside and inside worlds. They’re “media of transport and information, shapers of public opinion and consumer desire, and means of targeting attention.”
And they’re “logistical media” that “arrange people and property into time and space,” that “coordinate and control the movement of labour, people, and things situated along and within global supply chains.” 12
The cardboard box is a minimalist form with maximalist ambitions, an arboreal apparatus made from one of the world’s most abundant renewable resources, then filled with plastic and moved around by copious quantities of oil. It doesn’t just coordinate and control landscapes; it transforms them. 13
Cardboard’s ubiquity rests on simple claims: I can hold that, and I can go there…
“Multicolor packages produced by the folding carton factories of the Company,” from the 1950 annual report of the Container Corporation of America. [Walter P. Paepcke Papers, Special Collections, University of Chicago Library]
…IN his 1946 book Paperboard and Paper Containers, Harry J. Bettendorf extolled the civilizational gifts of the cardboard box: “Out of the piles, confusion and dirt of the earlier period came the cleanliness, order, precision and efficiency of mass production goods through the employment of mass production packages of paperboard.”
In this moment, in the pause after World War II, after the Container Corporation had sent its boxes into battle, but before it endeavored to shape civic discourse through Aspen elites, here is a historian who believed cardboard boxes could deliver us to a better future.
Little did he know what piles of waste, ideological confusion, and environmental destruction would be generated by the whole box-powered system of mass production and hyper-capitalism. Bettendorf’s box was a Trojan horse. A smarrow. A promise of progress that delivered not only order, precision, and prosperity, but also waste and exploitation.
This medium, in its most rudimentary form, has six faces, with two liners — an inside and an outside surface — each of which tells a different story about its journey, and ours. A package appears on our doorstep. Its printed exterior graphics identify and emblematize the sender.
Its interior graphics constitute an intimate form of address. The mailing label on top documents, in terms intelligible to the humans and machines that constitute a delivery service, the route by which which its contents have reached us.
What terrains and portals has it passed through? Who has scanned its barcode, and where? The seal on the bottom chronicles the box’s journey from paper roll through three-dimensional form awaiting fulfillment and activation. That seal, a story, has an unwritten preface, too: it tells of trees and forests, of land as yet another subject of mass production.
It also has a tacit postscript: reincarnation as a placard, a plea, as cartonera, as a wish that its own future conditions of production and distribution express and enact a world better than the one we have now. A box that treads more lightly on the landscapes from which it derives and through which it travels.