Published by Verso Books, Control Science traces the genealogy of labor control from seventeenth-century Caribbean plantations through contemporary Amazon warehouses, demonstrating how dominant classes have continuously developed techniques to subjugate workers while manufacturing ideological justifications. Snow examines how thinkers like Petty and Locke theorized humans as machines requiring control, how Bentham’s Panopticon exemplified this logic, and how nineteenth-century Japanese elites adapted European factory technologies alongside new political control theories. The book extends this analysis through postwar corporate propaganda (General Electric’s Reagan-era campaigns against unionization) to contemporary algorithmic control systems. Blending intellectual, economic, and labor history, Snow argues these frameworks constitute a fabricated “common sense” about work, economy, and human nature that demands critical challenge. The work engages materialism, critique of ideology, and labor struggle central to dark alternative intellectual culture.
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