The hidden networks that drive the global economy

Sean Brenner | October 12, 2026

A few years ago, Miriam Posner had an idea for a new assignment for the UCLA class she was teaching on digital labor. She would ask students to trace the supply chain of an electronic device of their choosing — that is, to document the origins of each of the device’s components and to determine how those components eventually came together to form the final product.

In her new book, “Seeing Like a Supply Chain,” to be published Oct. 20 by Yale University Press, Posner writes that she soon abandoned the idea: “Thankfully, I had the sense to attempt the assignment myself before I asked my students to take it on, because I quickly discovered that the task was close to impossible.”

That observation led Posner, a professor of digital humanities and of information studies, to dive into the unimaginably massive global impact of a field called supply chain management, which she describes as the invisible code running the global economy.

In an interview on the eve of the book’s publication, Posner spoke about the interesting connection between supply chain management and modern computing and her realization that corporations themselves know surprisingly little about where components for their products come from — a fact they can use to their advantage when labor or environmental issues arise.

In your research, what was the most surprising revelation about supply chains?

The main thing that stands out for me is that supply chains are so critical and so fast that I assumed that companies exercise a lot of control over them. It took me a long time to get my head around the fact that they don’t know what’s happening, and that that’s actually why they work so quickly.

Did you find that companies’ lack of knowledge about their supply chains is by design, or just the way things evolved?

That’s a really good question, and I spend a lot of time going back and forth about how to talk about it. If you ask anyone in the profession, they call that “visibility problem” a huge issue. They hate it, they want to get rid of it, they want to be able to see what’s happening.

But at the same time, it provides a bunch of benefits for them, like that they don’t need to be held responsible for poor working conditions in their supply chains, or their environmental impact. So I think they’re always wrestling with that tension.

I came up with a phrase — advantageous agnosis — to describe the idea that companies are not lying when they say they don’t know what’s happening in their supply chains, but, at the same time, they have made a series of deliberate decisions to shield themselves from knowledge of the harms that are occurring.

Would it even be possible for companies — even those as sophisticated as Apple — to know where every single component of their products comes from?

I think it really would be impossible. If we consumers want our stuff as fast and as cheap as we get it, I don’t think companies could really know.

What do you hope people will be inspired to think or do when they read your book?

When some people learn about labor inequity or environmental tragedy, their first impulse is to say, “We have to fix this, and I’m going to stop buying clothes from H&M, and I’ll make sure everything I buy comes with a certificate of fair trade.”

I would hope the book gives people a better understanding of how deep these problems go within the supply chain, and I hope they come away from this realizing that it’s not something you can you can fix on a case-by-case basis. It’s the whole apparatus that needs to be reconsidered. I also think it might be a good time for us to think about how much we consume and whether the tradeoffs we’ve made without knowing it are worthwhile.

In the book, you write that to understand supply chain management is to understand what happens when we operate as though the world is a computer. How do you mean that?

I always say to my students that you can’t just push the entire world into a computer, which is something we talk about in digital humanities. People have to do things to make the world computationally legible. When supply chain managers model the world, they’re making decisions about which units of measure matter to them. Meaning, they’ll record data about cost and speed, but choose not to track other data — like whether someone had to neglect their kids in order to make a deadline, or whether someone on the assembly line went hungry. Those things get left out because our system can only accommodate the data we make room for.

It’s easy to understand how the supply chain touches all of our lives as consumers. But you found out that supply chain management has had an outsized impact in another aspect of our daily lives.

People probably wouldn’t be surprised to learn that computers affected the way that supply chains were built — what computers could do informed how companies set up their logistics or logged their data. But I was surprised to learn that the reverse was also true: that the concerns of logistics and warehouse management in many ways influenced what computers could do. Every early database model, it turns out, was an inventory management system. That was really the first task of a database. So, much of what we see in computing today is an outgrowth of early versions of supply chain management.