Between Fixity and Motion. Circuits of Capital, Labor and Automation in Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore

This essay discusses how AI semiconductor and cloud data center industries dominated by Global North firms are being offshored to ‘SIJORI IMS GT’ – a Cross Border Region (CBR) between Johor province in Malaysia, Riau province in Indonesia, and Singapore (Xiaodong, 2019) in order to achieve supply chain resilience in the contemporary geopolitical conjuncture (Mezzadra & Neilson, 2024). Based on ethnographic fieldwork at the Technological Parks of Nusajaya, in Johor, Malaysia, this study analyses how the offshoring of U.S. and Chinese hyperscale cloud data centers through a spatial-temporal fix (Harvey, 2014) is leading to an explosion of transit and precarious labor: a dialectic between fixity and motion at the dead-ends of the circuits of automation.

The first part introduces the ‘SIJORI IMS’ Cross Border Region (CBR) as the result of free trade agreements (FTA) between 1) Johor State in Malaysia and Singapore, 2) Singapore and the U.S., and 3) Singapore and the Riau Islands in Indonesia. Overall, the CBR is an attempt to realize the long structural-economic shift from low-value electronics hardware manufacturing to high-value software processing (Chong, 2016; Wong 2014). Then the article shows how migrant and transit labor complexifies the complementarity between the three states that see Johor as a resource for high-skill labor, land, water, and electricity; Riau as a low-skill labor-intensive workforce hub; and Singapore as financial and commercial capital. Conceptually, zones are infrastructural spaces (Easterling, 2015) that represent emergent formations of the global economy (Neilson, 2015); this article shows how the pursuit of supply chain resilience for the security of capital comes with the precarity of transit and migrant labor (Samaddar, 2018) at the dead ends of its circuits. Between fixity and motion (Brenner, 1998; 2019), these CBR laboratories provide crucial insight into the uneven development of capital and the future of AI and work.