In his 1958 essay “I, Pencil,” free marketeer Leonard Read adopted the persona of a writing utensil eager to recite the branches of its cosmopolitan family tree. Beginning with its origins at a logging site in the Pacific Northwest, the pencil lists the far-flung components of its unassuming physique—including graphite mined in Sri Lanka, clay dug up in Mississippi, wax derived from the candelilla shrub in Mexico, and rapeseed oil produced in Indonesia.
In this exercise, Read was updating Adam Smith, who concluded the first chapter of The Wealth of Nations (1776) by peering behind an ordinary object in his own time—a day laborer’s wool coat—to reveal the numerous parties that had a hand in its production, from shepherds to wool combers to spinners to weavers to fullers, all of whose contributions depend, Smith further observed, on the mediation of carriers and the antecedent labors of toolmakers.
Smith presented such collaborations between merchants and tradesmen—fruitful for so many, though driven only by participants’ self-interest—as an object of wonder, occasioning the normally staid philosopher to break out into exclamation marks (e.g., “how many ship-builders, sailors, sail-makers, rope-makers, must have been employed in order to bring together the different drugs made use of by the dyer, which often come from the remotest corners of the world!”). Read, no less prone to exclamations, sought to renew that wonder by emphasizing not only the breadth of a run-of-the-mill pencil’s genealogy but also the lack of a “master mind” behind it all. Each participant, Read stresses, contributes his or her “infinitesimal bit of know-how” without understanding the others’ techniques. “Not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me,” the pencil proudly declares. For Read, as for Smith, supply chains rank among commercial society’s greatest triumphs. The greater their reach, the more workers and materials pulled into their webs, the better.
Our own century would seem to fulfill the hopes of Smith and Read, and thus give reason to rejoice. Supply chains have become unthinkably extensive and intricate, even as the time between placing an order for almost anything and its arrival on our doorsteps has shrunk to days, even hours or mere minutes.
And yet in much recent popular nonfiction, those who gaze upon supply chains report experiencing not the salutary wonder of Smith and Read but a dizziness that Smith’s friend Edmund Burke taught us to call the sublime. In A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), Burke examined our curious fascination with phenomena that defy our sense of scale or present the mind with enigmas it cannot penetrate—things that are vast, obscure, unending, perplexing, loud, sudden, or noxious. The sublime is not so much a quality of things in themselves, Burke influentially argued, as it is a reflection of our psychology—a “delightful horror” we undergo when threatened, mystified, or boggled at a safe distance from the stimulus.
An early sign of the shift appears in Thomas Friedman’s award-winning book, The World Is Flat (2005), where the columnist names “supply-chaining” among the “flatteners” of the new global economic order. Undertaking a Smithian genealogical study of his Dell notebook computer, Friedman discovers not a pleasing array of tradesmen but a series of parts sourced from more than fifty suppliers, most being multinational corporations with factories strewn across the globe. Its microprocessor might have been manufactured in the Philippines, Costa Rica, Malaysia, or China, its memory board in South Korea, Taiwan, or Germany, its battery from Malaysia, Mexico, or China, etc. and etc. The number of “collaborators” is necessary because Dell operates on the “just-in-time” production model, ordering parts only as needed and often expecting delivery within ninety minutes of placing orders with suppliers. Friedman—not without misgivings—pronounces, “This supply chain symphony—from my order over the phone to production to delivery to my house—is one of the wonders of the flat world.”
While visiting Walmart’s corporate headquarters, Friedman also saw a modern supply-chain depot in action. Perched high up in a million-square-foot distribution center, he witnessed merchandise from thousands of suppliers flowing from the backs of trailers into a vast network of conveyor belts. “As the Wal-Mart [sic] river flows along,” he writes, “an electric eye reads the bar codes on each box on its way to the other side of the building. There, the river parts again into a hundred streams. Electric arms from each stream reach out and guide the boxes—ordered by particular Wal-Mart stores—off the main river and down its stream, where another conveyor belt sweeps them into a waiting Wal-Mart truck.” Notably absent from this account, of course, are humans.
But Friedman’s talk of rivers and symphonies now seems rather quaint. For one, supply chains have only grown longer and more convoluted. In Door to Door (2016), Edward Humes repeats the voyage-of-the-ordinary-good gambit, calculating the “transportation footprint” of his morning cup of coffee (beans from South America, Africa, and/or Asia + German-built coffeemaker) to 100,000 miles. “The logistics involved in just one day of global goods movement,” Humes boasts, “dwarfs the Normandy invasion and the Apollo moon missions combined.”
Not to be outdone, Ed Conway, economics and data editor at Sky News in Britain, goes into the earth in Material World (2023), tracing how not just one good but six raw materials—salt, oil, sand, lithium, copper, and iron—enter “a web of connections and reliances so complex they seem almost impossible to disentangle” on their way to becoming the gear and tackle of the high-tech world. Conway invites us to follow, for example, the “epic odyssey” of quartz rock mined in Spain that becomes silicon chips in Taiwan: “Along the way [the journey] involves two, maybe three or more treks around the planet.… It takes us into the furthest reaches of chemistry, physics, and nanotechnology, involving processes so far out, so seemingly implausible, that they sound like science fiction.”
Conway, too, is a model sublime spectator of the machines that make it all happen. “I was standing on the edge of a precipice looking down into the deepest hole I had ever seen,” Material World begins. That hole would be Nevada’s Cortez Mine, owned and operated by Barrick Gold Corporation. Conway continues: “The scale, for one thing, was mind-boggling. As I looked down into the pit I could just about make out some trucks on the bottom, but only when they emerged at the top did I realize that they were bigger than three-story buildings.” The “astonishingly large equipment” trope applies to nearly every stage of the supply chain.
Indeed, container ships are so often given this “oversize” treatment that in How the World Ran Out of Everything (2024), Peter Goodman (whose pencil replacement is a glowing children’s toy) can mock his fellow writers’ “near pornographic fascination” with them: “This ship was larger than four football fields; that one used more steel than the Chrysler building.”
Yet even Goodman—would-be demystifier of supply chains—can’t help being briefly awestruck by the Port of Savannah’s “nearly eighty thousand containers […] stacked along the shore in various configurations,” which he likens to “giant Legos strewn from the heavens.”
Meanwhile, in Arriving Today (2021), Christopher Mims tracks a computer charger over land and sea to the fully automated TraPac terminal at the Port of Los Angeles—which can store ten thousand containers per acre—to find “a bewilderingly dense thicket of shipping containers made possible only by the complete absence of humans.” These are, Mims explains, the most gigantic robots he’s ever seen: “TraPac’s railroad gantry crane looks like both an enormous, angular aircraft in flight and a signature building by Rem Koolhaas.”
The question, of course, arises as to why so many sublime encounters with supply chains—of which my examples give you only a taste—have been reported in relatively short order. (And it’s not just nonfiction. The English poet and critic Hugh Foley has noted “supply-chain sublime” experiences in recent fiction by Sally Rooney, Ben Lerner, Lucy Ellmann, and Daisy Hildyard.) Certainly, part of the interest at the moment lies in the breakdown of the global supply chain amid the pandemic, which Goodman dubbed the “Great Supply Chain Disruption” back in 2021.
Yet nearly all the titles I’ve cited were already in progress, if not published, prior to the coronavirus outbreak. We need a deeper motive, then, and it is not hard to discern one, since several of the writers make this point directly: They were struck by how much stuff, apparently from halfway around the world, passed through their neighborhoods, and then were astonished by what they found once they did some digging. Modern logistics is anything but boring. Operated at an unthinkable scale and impossible speeds, using gargantuan machines, supply chains are at once tours de force, fragile ecosystems, black holes, and environmental disasters.
Certainly, the scope and furniture of supply chains have grown considerably in the past half century. Yet their scale is especially staggering for those whose daily lives are now focused on palm-size screens. Thus, whether authors say so directly or not, all of these accounts, including Read’s, turn on the contrast between daily life in the realm Conway labels the “ethereal world”—the domain of ideas, services, apps, and money transfers—and the “Material World” in which ores, petrochemicals, and biomasses are extracted from the earth, refined, and transformed into products, a chain of events that is, as you are now tired of hearing, linked by lots and lots of long-distance shipping.
These sublime encounters reflect how successfully the ethereal world shields its residents’ view of the Material World, save the occasional disruption by a pandemic-fueled run on masks, or a Neopanamax (four-football-field length) container ship slamming into a commuter bridge.
For the most part, the authors in question do not portray this collective myopia as a corporate plot. Rather, they reveal that the Material World is no place for humans. Its blasts are too forceful, its temperatures too high and too low, its scale too grand and too miniscule, its tunnels too deep, its chemical residues too poisonous, its rhythms at once too demanding and too tedious. To trace supply chains is to encounter realms remade by and for technology. The Material World might be justly called Machineland.
Sixty-six years ago, Read held up the humble pencil as a symbol of the invisible hand’s benevolent provision. Today’s encounters with supply chains are, by contrast, ambivalent. Peering down the chain now reveals not only astonishing technological progress but also environmental degradation, hazardous working conditions, and questionable economic policies.
Many authors present the Material World’s practices as unsustainable. Surely, something must be done! And yet, none of the authors can imagine a world without vast supply chains. Even now, no one knows how to make every component of a pencil, much less those of a computer or a car. Even if we did, we would have to import supplies from many other places to assemble the pencils, as well as rely on the help of others to ship them to customers.
The problem isn’t just with production. The Amazon economy has unquestionably changed consumption. Today’s consumers, Mims would show us, have been incorporated into a global on-demand factory: “When any one of us orders something online and has it delivered to our door, we are making ourselves the end point of a conveyance system pioneered by, among others, Henry Ford.”
Just as [Ford] optimized the flow of parts and automobiles through his factories, we have all optimized the flow of goods, both necessary and aspirational, into our homes and lives.” It’s all so fast and convenient. Having tasted next-day delivery, who would be willing to live without it? Who would be willing to wait?