Control Science

Whether on Caribbean plantations in the seven­teenth century or in Amazon warehouses today, the powerful have constantly developed new techniques to control workers—and new justifications for doing so. Ideas of control perfected on the factory floor have expanded to dictate our personal lives, polit­ical rights, national policy, and the global economy.

Seventeenth-century intellectuals such as William Petty and John Locke argued that human beings were selfish machines who had to be controlled for their own good. A century later, Jeremy and Samuel Bentham tried to do exactly that with their infamous Panopticon prison. When nineteenth-century Japa­nese elites imported European factory technologies, they came up with new theories of political control to justify this development. After the Second World War, the General Electric Corporation created an in­ternal propaganda department to fight unions, then pitched that propaganda to the country with the help of an actor, the future President Ronald Reagan. Ex­tending these practices, billionaires today dream of extending the algorithmic control of Amazon ware­houses into every corner of our lives.

Blending intellectual, economic, and labor history, Control Science is a thrilling and lucid work of his­tory. Henry Snow reveals how common sense about work, the economy, and human nature was fabricated and must now be challenged.