Digital twins and the logistical mode of prediction

Digital twins—virtual representations tied to material objects, processes, or environments via two-way flows of information—are hyped as the backbone of a new industrial revolution. We argue that digital twins propose and pursue a logistical mode of prediction that seeks to operationalize simulated futures and in doing so subordinate human labor, decision-making, and governance to computational systems tied to material environments. Even when digital twins fail to work or maintain frictions in underlying systems, their value is tightly bound to the question of who can own, control, coordinate, and capitalize on the logistical architectures of data and computation that anticipate as-yet unrealized returns from future probabilities. Following a genealogical examination of twinning techniques, the article examines Alibaba’s City Brain platform in Xiong’an, China, and the predictive capabilities of Palantir’s Foundry platform to show how digital twins seek the preemptive capture of futures in the present.