Henry Snow
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henrysnow.bsky.social
Henry Snow
@henrysnow.bsky.social
2.7K followers 490 following 1.3K posts
Labor historian | they/them | political economy, maritime work, ships and shipbuilders | CONTROL SCIENCE out with Verso 5/26/26 | currently an adjunct at UConn

words at buttondown.com/anotherway
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henrysnow.bsky.social
hmmm
There are two kinds of politicians,’ he said: ‘insiders and outsiders. The outsiders prioritize their freedom to speak their version of the truth. The price of their freedom is that they are ignored by the insiders, who make the important decisions. The insiders, for their part, follow a sacrosanct rule: never turn against other insiders and never talk to outsiders about what insiders say or do. Their reward? Access to inside information and a chance, though no guarantee, of influencing powerful people and outcomes.’ With that Summers arrived at his question. ‘So, Yanis,’ he said, ‘which of the two are you?’
November 12, 2025 at 4:58 PM
henrysnow.bsky.social
preparing a research talk. this is the kind of art you don't get in the book
On the left, an image of "the Zodiac Man", a popular anatomical image genre dividing body parts into different astrological affinities, from an almanac in 1750. On the right, a stick figure on a gallows with various insulting 18th century phrases indicated as written on different body parties, including "the only Filial Pen," "that Fawning Insidious Miscrean and Parricide Martinius Scriblerius" and "What tho I boast of Independence Posterity will Curse my Memory." The gallows itself has jokes about the figure (an effigy) having a right to be hanged and having encouraged the cultivation of hemp, which was used in rope.
November 10, 2025 at 7:26 PM
henrysnow.bsky.social
now this is some convincing marketing copy, I want to learn from a guy with an ardent Thirst for Astronomic Knowledge (from the cover of a 1775 almanac series published by Solomon Southwick in Newport, RI)
I might boast that, while most of my Readers have been involved in profound Sleep, I have been assiduously employed in my nocturnal observations, with my Telescope penetrating far into, and examining the nice Order, Regularity, and amazing Splendors of meridian MIDNIGHT, partly to render my Works as useful as possible, and partly to gratify my ardent Thirst after Astronomic Knowledge. . . .
November 7, 2025 at 8:51 PM
henrysnow.bsky.social
Text from the video game disco elysium 1- (whisper) "are women bourgeois?" 2- oh God, that's bad. Surely I can think of something better
November 6, 2025 at 2:51 PM
henrysnow.bsky.social
coming May 26; I think this is the first high-quality image I've been able to share of the cover
A book cover. The top reads Control Science. The subtitle in the middle of the page is How Management Made the Modern World. These and the author's name at the bottom (Henry Snow) are placed within a stylized white and yellow office floor plan.
November 3, 2025 at 7:25 PM
henrysnow.bsky.social
read theory (this one's old but it's a great overview and the kind of thing I mean when I say reading transnationally can do a lot for you conceptually even if your work doesn't always cross national boundaries)
Political Change and Industrial Development in Japan: Government Enterprise, 1868-1880 by Thomas C. Smith
October 31, 2025 at 8:27 PM
henrysnow.bsky.social
Oppenheimer in the hit movie Oppenheimer saying "I'm a New Deal Democrat"
October 29, 2025 at 5:56 PM
henrysnow.bsky.social
teacherbot shouting ON PROGRAM at kids who look away from the screen

www.wired.com/story/ai-tea...
At Alpha, the guides’ support and oversight is meant to supplement the technology—and not just the personalized learning system the school has dubbed an AI tutor. Alpha can also use an array of management surveillance tools, which it calls “basic and extended capabilities,” to flag “incorrect usage” of the learning apps. These “anti-patterns” can “help detect engagement and focus issues.” The school may record students’ screen activity and their mouse and keyboard usage. Alpha may employ eye-tracking programs. Using what it calls a “pro sports analogy,” Alpha compares these tools to “game film.” Star Wars characters Cassian Andor and Kino Loy in an "on-program" pose in prison, in white jumpsuits
October 27, 2025 at 8:39 PM
henrysnow.bsky.social
It's happening! Coming this May!
Control Science How Management Made the Modern World Henry Snow A thrilling intellectual history of workplace control – from the birth of capitalism to the modern tech giants (Also a cover image, with the title and subtitle and author name superimposed over a stylized yellow office floor plan) Control Science reveals the centuries-long, contested history of the struggle between workers and capitalists for control of their work and of their lives. Moving from colonial America and the enclosure of common land in early modern England, via Josiah Wedgwood’s Etruria and Jeremy and Samuel Bentham’s attempts to transform labour and governance in Russia and Britain, to the vast Amazon warehouses of today, Henry Snow demonstrates how bosses have thought about control in the workplace and how those ideas have been both implemented and contested. And Snow reveals how bosses have shaped not just economies, but lives, identities and entire societies. Blending intellectual and economic history, Control Science is a thrilling and lucid work of history that will show the true story behind the pursuit of efficiency and productivity – power.
October 6, 2025 at 5:48 PM
henrysnow.bsky.social
Happened to notice this exciting project by @tomcutterham.bsky.social in Verso's Spring 2026 catalog-- can't wait to see the dockyard I'm so familiar with through new (arson-interested) eyes!
Empire Ablaze The American Revolution and the Atlantic Working Class Tom Cutterham The story of how one British rebel set out to bring the Empire down from within Empire Ablaze follows the extraordinary journey of James Aitken– a house painter turned escaped servant and highwayman – as he roamed the American colonies in the 1770s; then returning to Britain with a dangerous mission: to destroy the Empire’s naval power by burning Portsmouth Dockyard and Bristol Harbour to the ground. Through Aitken’s dramatic story, we see how ordinary working people across the Atlantic world lived through the collapse of Britain’s eighteenth-century empire. We watch as Enlightenment ideas about rights spread from philosophers to the citizenry, fueling their anger against imperial authorities. Tom Cutterham is an Associate Professor of United States History at the University of Birmingham and the author of Gentlemen Revolutionaries: Power and Justice in the New American Republic. He has written for Jacobin, the Nation, and the New Republic.
October 6, 2025 at 1:55 PM
henrysnow.bsky.social
couldn't help myself, i added the appropriate music
October 6, 2025 at 12:12 AM
henrysnow.bsky.social
minor prison reform section is going into the manuscript (peer reviewer's "talk more about Wilberforce's religion" has sent me down a rabbit hole) and I am really appreciating this book; the author worked in prisons for decades and concludes with a blistering epilogue criticizing incarceration
The Intolerable Hulks - British Shipboard Confinement, by Charles Campbell. The book has a picture of a prison hulk on the cover.
October 3, 2025 at 7:32 PM
henrysnow.bsky.social
His Majesty's subjects know the government shutdown is Parliament's fault. They welcome his Personal Rule! Really the government shutdown plays right into the hands of the Duke of Buckingham, who can now cut whatever programs he wants.
King Charles I of England, who appears here with long hair and a beard
October 1, 2025 at 8:17 PM
henrysnow.bsky.social
bringing out my "Alfred Sloan was the worst" lecture once again
Spongebob holding a box labelled "Ol' Reliable"
September 25, 2025 at 6:00 PM
henrysnow.bsky.social
A graph of "difficult of giving elevator pitch or summary" over "how far along you are in your research." It begins with a low-value minimum labelled "i'm working on the history of the thing in the place," moves rapidly up to a local maximum labelled "ah but the thing is actually several things and I've complicated it and it's also in different places and..." Then it goes down to a local minimum, again a low value, that is labelled "the thing evolves because of changes in the post-event political economy of the place. knowing this..." before finally going off the page/image with a final label that's unreadable and in Wingdings
September 22, 2025 at 5:53 PM
henrysnow.bsky.social
in practice this can mean things like this. in an early 1970s Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers strike against a Koch-owned refinery.... (from Christopher Leonard's book Kochland)
Next, Paulson put a wedge between the Teamsters union, which handled trucking and shipping at the refinery, and the OCAW. The Teamsters still refused to cross the picket line, so Paulson arranged a cunning system that allowed the Teamsters to work with Koch Refining anyway. Paulson used a small parking lot near the refinery as a transit point. The Teamsters pulled into the lot and got out of their trucks. Nonunion truck drivers who worked for Koch Oil in the South were waiting for them there, and as the Teamsters got out of their trucks, the Koch Oil drivers got in. The Koch Oil drivers then took the trucks down the road and into the refinery, past the gauntlet of the picket line where men beat on the truck windows and threw their jacks beneath the wheels. Thanks to this arrangement, the Teamsters did business with Koch without technically violating the picket line. The oil was flowing in, the gasoline was flowing out, and support for the OCAW was ebbing away by the day.
September 19, 2025 at 3:51 PM
henrysnow.bsky.social
back on my bullshit
A stack of four volumes of the correspondence of Jeremy Bentham, on a desk
September 17, 2025 at 5:48 PM
henrysnow.bsky.social
longtermist abundance
An animated man (Chairman Rose, a Pokemon villain) with dark hair, slightly graying, in front of a cracking huge egg with unearthly light behind him.
September 4, 2025 at 5:58 PM
henrysnow.bsky.social
this doesn't sound familiar at all
To be a useful assistant in the running of a totalitarian state, therefore, a man must be prepared to break every moral rule he has ever known if this seems necessary to achieve the end set for him. In the totalitarian machine there will be special opportuni- ties for the ruthless and unscrupulous. Neither the Gestapo nor the administration of a concentration camp, neither the Ministry of Propaganda nor the SA or SS (or their Russian counterparts) are suitable places for the exercise of humanitarian feelings. Yet it is through such positions that the road to the highest positions in the totalitarian state leads
August 22, 2025 at 8:51 PM
henrysnow.bsky.social
transcription challenge 1800 threatening poem edition:

An example there is put before your eyes
It is the pride of your heart to see the poor starving
You that have got a plenty do not care a farthing
As for the horse likewise the Carter
It is high time they were taken the head shorter

(cont'd)
A scan of a poem in 18th century handwriting. The text is in the actual posts here. This is a reproduction (someone copied this from a publicly posted threatening letter) that includes a gallows image on the top right.
August 18, 2025 at 11:09 PM
henrysnow.bsky.social
google needs to stop harassing me for this. this just means i'm efficiently using my resources
A warning reading "STORAGE IS LOW" - 191.44 of 200GB used, with an offer for a discounted rate for 2TB of storage.
August 14, 2025 at 9:43 PM
henrysnow.bsky.social
certainly many of its greatest advocates would argue it has neither (this is their favorite thing about it!)
Text from Leonard Read's essay "I, Pencil" "Here is an astounding fact: Neither the worker in the oil field nor the chemist nor the digger of graphite or clay nor any who mans or makes the ships or trains or trucks nor the one who runs the machine that does the knurling on my bit of metal nor the president of the company performs his singular task because he wants me. Each one wants me less, perhaps, than does a child in the first grade. Indeed, there are some among this vast multitude who never saw a pencil nor would they know how to use one. Their motivation is other than me. Perhaps it is something like this: Each of these millions sees that he can thus exchange his tiny know-how for the goods and services he needs or wants. I may or may not be among these items."
August 12, 2025 at 8:28 PM
henrysnow.bsky.social
gut-wrenching economic mismanagement here (Zambia in the early 70s)
Text reading: But the most damning aspect of the government’s folly was that it paid $231 million when it could have bought the bonds on the market for just $110.88 million, thus saving the country $120.12 million instead of making a present of it to Rowland and his friends, and possibly to some residual bondholders who had held on to the bonds they bought when they were placed on the market. (It was mentioned at the time that one of the major British universities was amongst those buyers.) I calculated the residual value of the bonds as follows: as the total Kwacha value of the bonds issued in 1970 was K209 million and the cost of the redemption was K149.4 million, it follows that the government had already paid instalments totalling 59.6 million or 28.52 ngwee per bond leaving a balance of 71.48 ngwee as the full redemption value. This means that converted to American dollars at the rate of K1 = $1.55 reported by the Bank of Zambia as the rate of the period, the government paid $1.10 per bond outstanding while their market price was 48 American cents. In other words it could have bought the bonds at 48 American cents each but was bluffed by Rowland and paid $1.10! I have not been able
July 31, 2025 at 4:46 PM
henrysnow.bsky.social
in case you're on the wrong device and the thumbnail comes out wrong
the Heritage Foundation's logo-- ordinarily a blue bell with the words 'The Heritage Foundation"-- but parodied in red, with a black background, a cracked bell, and blood dripping from the d in 'foundation'
July 30, 2025 at 6:24 PM
henrysnow.bsky.social
my book CONTROL SCIENCE is coming out next spring. i am still learning how to do publicity. for now here are some guys who appear in it
Portrait of 17th-century philosopher John Locke, a gray-haired man in a loose dark brown outfit with a white shirt beneath. Black and white photo of a balding man with a round face: Lemuel Boulware. Okubo Toshimichi, a mustachioed man in a thick black jacket, mid-late 19th century style. He has a dramatic mustache that extends downward into a beard that does not cover his chin. Char Aznable, an animated character with gold epaulettes connected to a cape with an eagle design, white gloves, a silver helmet, and a half-mask covering his eyes. His outfit is red.
July 29, 2025 at 5:32 PM