Atmospheric conditioning: Airport automation, labour and the COVID-19 pandemic

This paper contributes to debates on human-technologies relations and labour geographies. It thinks through how the adoption of automation is mediated by the conditioning effects of atmospheres in space. Taking the occassion of the COVID-19 pandemic, the paper presents a case of how atmospheres are capable of determining the trajectories of automation, and providing the guiding backdrop for technological (un)development. Drawing on 40 semi-structured interviews conducted with airport labour in Singapore in 2020 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the paper offers an analysis of how airport workers variously and viscerally capitulate to, abandon, and/or desire to collaborate with automation, in ways that are both unstable and atmospherically implicated. To the extent that these affective responses have the potential to change the course of technological and labour futures in airport infrastructures, atmospheres - especially those deliberately advocated by the state and airport management - are also a political force to be reckoned with. The paper concludes with a discussion on how a focus on atmospheres can push geographic research on automation in productive and interesting directions. It views automation not just as a collection of abstract artefacts, but projects constantly subject to the conditioning effects of invisible atmospheres.