Control Science

What are the rules that govern our workday? Who made them? And how do these rules dominate the rest of our lives? 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.