Capitalism, time and space

Over the last two months I've been reading the first volume of Marx's Capital. Today I was reading, among other things, about the compression of time and space in manufacturing, how divided tasks are brought together into a close space (the factory, for instance) and how the time between separate stages of an article are shortened so that the "establishment and maintenance of a connection between the isolated functions requires that the article be transported incessantly from one hand to the other, and from one process to another" (Ch. 14).

Talking about the division of labor Marx also mentions the specialiazation of instruments and tools and how in Birmigham, for instance, 500 different hammers were made for all sorts of different processes. I'm curious about how these two different issues, compression of time and space and specialization of instruments, play out in the archive.

What's curious to me here is the excessive nature of the archive, the lack of utility for all sorts of different records and collections. The factory compresses space and time while the archive expands it, constantly requiring more space for more entries, keeping things stored that will, probably, never be accessed or used. Of course criminal records are used be prospective employers, credit records or used by landlords and lenders, driving and medical records are accessed by insurance companies, but I suspect that these utilize the minority of records and statistics being kept and compiled all the time (especially taking into account, for instance, records of dead people). Part of what was interesting about working in a library was how much of the collection is never touched, the thousands of books and records that are never looked at and probably never will be looked at until someone finally decides to throw them away.

Which shows the reverse for the specialization of tools: that the specific and potential uses for an instrument disguise all the situations for which its totally useless. Prime examples just in the home are kitchen appliances and garage tools.

I'm also interested in time and space in reference to work and home, or the degree to which the workspace is identical with home. Isn't part of the point of factory work, or archiving and office work, that it cannpt take place at home? In other words, part of the point is an expansion of time and space. Not that no one works from home anymore, a lot of the shops in Thailand have either a back room or upper living quarters, and certainly there are sections of the underground economy that operate out of homes. But then there are other spheres of work that seem entirely impossible to conduct at home, like large varieties of scientific research and experimentation, the tools for which are expensive and rare enough that they won't be owned individually. A curious contrast to, say, Darwin who worked almost entirely at his own house, or to the early and mid 19th century in general, where amateur science was not equivalent to incompetent science...

the only reason I would resist the legalization of drugs...

...is that it would mean the gentrification of an entire industry. Other than that things seem good.