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“Frictionless, transparent access to the full suite of banking and investment products,” says Henry Muck, Oxford shirt slightly unbuttoned, his mouth literally frothing, in the most recent season of HBO’s Industry. “Demystifying the complex world of finance for all members of the Great British Public.” In grandiose terms, Henry Muck—full name, Sir Reginald Henry Ferrers de Chartley Norton Muck, 11th Baronet—is using the lexicon of logistics to describe the promise of his new company, Tender; it hardly matters that Henry Muck is a caricature, because the world that HBO’s Industry is pillorying is already a caricature of itself. Thanks to Tender’s unimpeded flows of capital and information, the Great British Public will finally end decades of stagnation through the unveiling of this new seamless banking app.
But, as we can rightly guess, that frictionless, transparent access is anything but. Previously, we learned on the show that the workings of Tender rely upon decentralized hubs of gig workers in the northeast of England who repackage transactions, hiding their monetary origins in illicit markets. Henry’s speech might sound like it’s advocating for transparency and connectivity. But in fact, the speech only highlights that this frictionless fantasy depends upon the company’s material friction and purposely obtuse financials. Friction and transparency are illusions. The muted liquid hues of the Tender app—an aesthetic ubiquitous in the era of Apple—look very different from the perspective of the gig workers compiling randomized data in Sunderland or the illegal mineral traffickers the company whitewashes in Accra.
Industry is a case study in the duplicitous logics outlined in Susan Zieger’s breathtaking history of contemporary logistics, Logistics and Power: Supply Chains from Slavery to Space. Across her book, Zieger details how supply chains are constituted by the inseparable interface of capital flows—the continual movement of ideas, people, things, and other commodities—and what Zieger calls the darkness, her operative metaphor for the illegal flow of those same goods. “Logistics,” warns Zieger, “reveals how the illicit economy is the legitimate economy: the nature of free trade prevents the two from ever being separated.”
Industry depicts the legal and illegal as indistinguishable, which makes the show a helpful shorthand for Logistics and Power. But it also, as Zieger herself would argue, reveals that the show’s seeming hyperbole is only an accurate reflection of the world at large.
Although prodigious in its grasp and articulation of our situation today, Logistics and Power is mainly concerned with how we got here. The term logistics may not have come into popular parlance until after World War I, the so-called “first war of logistics” that made “procurement and supply crucial to national security and identity.” Yet the “efficient movement of goods, people, and information for capital” inaugurates Western modernity itself, Zieger argues, from centuries-old colonialism (including Dutch, British, and American practices) to the current race by tech billionaires to Occupy Mars.
This may seem overwhelming in scope (indeed, it can be at times), but she pays careful attention to galvanizing tropes and metaphors that have structured the emergence of logistics, whether merchants and enslaved people or pirates and middle managers. Her book isn’t intended to be an exhaustive history. Instead, Logistics and Power, she contends, is “an interpretive provocation, more suggestive than provable, more narrative than argument.”
Central to her provocation is using key logistical metaphors, which are the focus of each of the chapters: “Flow,” “The Darkness,” “Nightmare,” “Shelf Life,” “Box and Chain,” and “Handling.” Some of these metaphors are obvious. Flow, for example, is a term that saturates our daily life, from workflow to flow yoga. As she writes, “Flow reveals how logistical power aligns the rhythm, pace, and movement of our lives with the seemingly impersonal headways of the global economy.” But even the terms that may not seem obvious at first blush cut to the core of how logistics have structured and sutured an immanent imaginary of connectivity.
Take her chapter on nightmare. “In colloquial parlance,” she writes, “logistical nightmare can refer either to an overwhelming task that requires a million pieces to fall into place or to the pandemonium that ensues when the pieces scatter. That very conceptual imprecision suggests why a stressful everyday life can feel like an ongoing nightmare. It also explains why there is no catchy term for logistical success.”
She goes on to detail how nightmare has turned into its own “social genre” while providing a wide-ranging historical and geographical itinerary. The chapter starts with Mary Seacole’s work setting up an ad hoc logistical enterprise during the 19th-century Crimean War (which eventually bankrupts Seacole) and moves on to the British deprivation of Ireland during the Irish famine. The chapter concludes with a rereading of Foucault’s final unfinished work and a coda about the structured disenfranchisement of Puerto Rico that was laid bare during Hurricane Maria (which, of course, includes a picture of Trump throwing paper towels).
This sort of agile and selective historicization demonstrates how Zieger reveals the asymmetries that underwrite logistics, as well as how the logistical enterprises of racial capitalism are always already bound up with the reproduction of white supremacist violence. “Imperial powers do not supply colonized people,” she writes, “but rather impoverish and abandon them.”
Zieger’s genealogy of logistical nightmare is a way of making the underpinning colonial violence of logistics legible. This method of tracing unexpected connections across time and space is what she describes as “supply chain stories,” which “formulate a new perspective on modern power as the capacity to move and be moved.” These stories reveal the often invisible and purposely obfuscated labor and racialization required to maintain logistics past, present, and future. Her history of “Shelf Life,” for example, traces the way Bram Stoker’s Dracula inaugurates an understanding of the undead, an ontological reorientation where Dracula himself is suspended between living and the dead and moves through the world thanks to new packing and shipping technologies that allow him to travel greater distances without being exposed to earthly elements. This becomes paradigmatic for how we understand the shelf life of perishable goods as they have been transported greater and greater distances in the course of the past century. This supply chain story points to how cooling technology like ice becomes a prerequisite for the transportation of goods, but Zieger’s genius comes into focus as she extrapolates to gesture toward an implicit biopolitical horizon of “logistical power’s imitation of life.” The seemingly innocuous transportation of goods like ice and perishables requires the exploitation and extraction of land and people and ultimately “finesses absurdities and normalizes destruction” as we click the “Buy Now” function on Deliveroo.
Zieger’s methodology in telling these supply chain stories is just as capacious as her archive. She borrows from history, literature, and occasionally (and wonderfully) from ethnography. She includes interviews with her students from the University of California, Riverside who have worked in the logistical gig economy, from fulfillment warehouses to delivery jobs. It’s the unexpected and sometimes counterintuitive collage that formalizes how logistics itself operates: once you start looking for supply chain stories, you realize that the connections between Moby-Dick, the Wet’suwet’en Pipeline protests, and memories of her deceased brother are not only possible but necessary to provide the first contours of a contemporary cartography of logistics.
Terms that may not seem obvious at first blush cut to the core of how logistics have structured and sutured an immanent imaginary of connectivity.
Zieger is equally invested in moments of counter-logistics where she can “tell, retell, and reinterpret supply chain stories.” These aren’t ways of envisaging our current logistical nightmare as such but techniques for identifying what she describes as “incremental tweaks” that helps us begin the process of extracting ourselves from the churn of flow. These counter-logistical moments are myriad and appear in each chapter, ranging from the Degrowth movement that seeks to purposely contract our connections across the globe to how last mile delivery services (i.e., deliveries to your house) proffer possibilities for alternative socialities to emerge when consumers are forced to engage with delivery drivers.
In this beginning of a political roadmap, the book doesn’t attempt to imagine that individual resistance is possible, or wholesale interruption of contemporary racial capitalism (her reading of Henry “Box” Brown, who famously mailed himself to freedom from the South, for example, points to the adaptability of white supremacy to incorporate and spectacularize even the most insurgent moments of logistical cooptation). But she does think about how to scale up from individual to policy-level actions and collectivities. Logistics, that is, attempts to flatten difference and liveness for homogenous patterning of automation that reproduces racial capitalism. But this is always a mirage and, as she details with the current pitfalls of robotics, an impossibility. There are still furtive moments of connectivity that might arise when you enter an Uber or workers organize in an Amazon warehouse, as they did during the Black Friday Strike of 2022. Returning to Anna Tsing’s work throughout, Zieger fashions a political countermeasure of noticing as the first step in redistributing and reimagining existing supply chains.
Zieger first came to my attention as part of the recent infrastructure turn in the humanities. This book sits nicely with an emergent crop of contemporary work on infrastructure, but also increasingly logistics. Michael Shane Boyle’s excellent The Art of Logistics, for example, shares with Zieger an interest in the logistical life of culture (not to mention a cheeky stylistic irreverence). Similarly, Kay Dickinson’s Supply Chain Cinemas is an exercise in the type of supply chain stories that Zieger details. But Zieger’s book differs in its sheer, near magisterial scope. This scope, though, lends a sense of vertigo to reading Logistics and Power.
While watching Industry, I felt a disturbing realization in not just what I was seeing but also how I encountered the episode. I stumbled across the above scene while cooking lunch and taking a break from reading Zieger’s book. In fact, I wasn’t even watching Industry in the way that any Boomer might think of it. I was in the kitchen listening to the show through my AirPods. My laptop, where I was streaming the show from dopebox.to, an illegal streaming site, was in the living room, and next to the stream, I still had the .pdf of Zieger’s book open. I had to occasionally retreat from reheating leftovers to click off the onslaught of PornHub and Polymarket pop-ups that are the lingua franca of these sites. As if this wasn’t distraction enough, I was also trying to clean up the mess my toddler had made during breakfast and thumbing through the New York Times Cooking app to figure out which variation of bland, tomato sauce pasta my kids might eat for dinner (this was unsuccessful; they ate frozen fish sticks).
In effect, I was just as implicated as Henry in the inseparability of the licit and illicit flow of goods that constitutes logistical modernity. That is, my ability to watch on-demand television was entirely contingent upon the complex web of illegal streaming sites and their underpinning illicit infrastructure. What feels innocuous at a local level (Why should I have to subscribe to HBOMax?), was only further buttressing the extractive underside of a logistical economy that props up the darkness of these sites. There is a sense of panic in this realization. My watching was another moment where flow was facilitated by the illicit. And not only that, I was also turning my watching into a moment of self-optimization. I could catch up on a show I like while also taking care of other tasks whose mundanity often bores me.
The fact that this sparked a revelation about the book speaks less to me as a cultural critic and more to the pervasiveness of Zieger’s thesis. Her central argument is about how immersed we are in the world of logistics. We live in a world defined by the nebulous patterning of logistical pathways, and her goal is to help us to identify how these networks and the metaphors we use to describe them are isomorphic to a contemporary dictated by “the violence normally hidden within capitalism’s banal procedures.”
In other words, when we start reading the world through its logistics, we become aware of just how consumptive those logistics are. I’m sure it would have been just as easy to cull an anecdote from another prestige television show, podcast, audiobook, Spotify playlist, or any other medium that I could have in the background while eating my lunch.
Once you start looking for them, supply chain stories are everything, everywhere, all at once. And that’s precisely the telos of the smoke-and-mirror shows promised by a world of immediacy. Or rather, as the famous UPS advertisement puts it, “That’s logistics.” 
This article was commissioned by Nicholas Dames.
