Warehouse Labour Regimes

All art is prior art. Every invention, every image, every algorithm carries the trace of a precedent, the labour, struggle, and ingenuity on which it is built. Patent law names this debt, encoding a structural anxiety about originality into the very system designed to reward novelty. In the territorially divided world of AI invention, overlapping and competing patent claims accumulate into thickets or fogs not easily navigated by small players. Platform sovereigns unleash exploits to extend their reach into territories, labour markets, and imaginaries that states can neither claim nor control. Warehouses are the automated theatre of this geopolitical future present. They are saturated spaces—technical and shot through with labour power. Their automated vision generates worlds specific to the logistical circuit before any human interpreter arrives. These worlds are not representations of labour but its continuation by other means. Nothing in the image waits for confirmation. Prior Art cuts warehouses inside out, turning containment to contingency, formatted worlds to computational horror. Termination is not an alternative.