China has embraced AI and aims to explore the history of data-driven governance, from the launch of ‘ChatCCP’ as a first-of-its-kind generative system based on a state-sanctioned moral codex to the interest in creating global standards governing such systems as part of its ‘China Standards 2035’ initiative. One way to understand the ubiquity of cybernetics as a dominant mode of governance within data capitalism is in terms of what I call the logistical episteme. The logistical episteme operates as a grammar of organization, calculation, and movement designed to service capital accumulation. In this paper I consider how logistical infrastructures organize space as cybernetic laboratories of governance, with a focus on the case of automated warehousing in Malaysia. I argue that an analysis that begins with the logistical episteme arrives at a considerably different comprehension of geopolitical formations at historical junctures that distinguish the variations of capital in epochal terms. In short, I propose a media theory of geopolitical formation.

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