> What's not to like? Is it because they're not produced by a bearded artisanal blacksmith within cycling distance? The article seems to be searching for a prob

> What's not to like? Is it because they're not produced by a bearded artisanal blacksmith within cycling distance? The article seems to be searching for a problem. Really? That's what you get after reading this? > "This kind of vertiginous horror in the face of a seemingly cruel and infinite supply chain is reflected on a larger and more academic scale in the recent rise of critical logistics and supply chain studies. “If the corporate goal is to build a supply chain so seamless that its existence barely registers with consumers, such researchers seek to turn this process inside out, exposing the human and environmental costs obscured by slick design and packaging,” writes Jackie Brown in her recent essay surveying the field of supply studies. From mapping projects that follow the chemical, digital, material and labor inputs used in an Amazon Echo device upstream to their points of origin to genealogies of logistics that trace out the links between globalized production to militarization and collective violence, these projects seek to chart out small parts of a system so complex and flexible that it’s impossible for any individual to grasp. > [...] people are driven to distraction trying to reverse-engineer a system that is purposely obscured, piecing together clues to see who’s behind the curtain and how we’re being screwed. This mode of paranoid reading, the “highly compelling tracing-and-exposure project” as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick describes in her famous essay, is a “position of terrible alertness,” of trying to uncover hidden connections and cruelty whose existence are assumed, if unseen. Emily Apter describes this paranoid orientation to logistics and globalization as “oneworldness,” referring to “a delirious aesthetics of systematicity; to the match between cognition and globalism that is held in place by the paranoid premise that ‘everything is connected.’”" In summary: today's obscured global capitalist production system mangles many of the working class' minds and bodies (in the global south especially: hence the focus on supply chains, since they go on past the borders of our daily lives and the communities in which we live; into the horizon), creating an extremely uncomfortable, fear-inducing unavoidable sense of culpability (even though of course as working class people we're all stuck inside this capitalist hellhole) in the minds of global north knowledge workers. I'm relieved to know that others share this feeling.