“In this powerful analysis of supply chain management, Miriam Posner shows how the drive towards real-time control of production and circulation rests on a cybernetic vision of self-regulating systems—a vision that renders goods as data, converges with the technologies of financialization, impels the integration of every digital-computational fad, and treats labor as nothing. Seeing Like a Supply Chain represents a vital contribution to the study of capitalism’s media.”—Seb Franklin, author of The Digitally Disposed: Racial Capitalism and the Informatics of Value


“Miriam Posner has written a deeply researched history of the backend systems, philosophies, and acronyms that keep the world spirit of capitalism in constant motion. Readers get a front row seat to the many lives of supply chains—from the early concepts of logistics to emerging complexities of automated control.”—Jathan Sadowski, author of The Mechanic and the Luddite: A Ruthless Criticism of Technology and Capitalism

“This deft and field-defining book brings supply chains into focus: as systems and software, as people and places, and above all as expressions (not just instruments) of capital. Indeed, one of the most trenchant narratives it supports is that supply chains have long been a form of de facto ‘AI’ in their totalizing and enclosing vision of the world as an extractable resource.“—Matthew Kirschenbaum, University of Virginia

Miriam Posner is associate professor in the Department of Information Studies and the Digital Humanities program at the University of California, Los Angeles.

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