The Organic Network: Information Flows on American Rivers in the Long Nineteenth Century

• In Event: Markets & the Environment II: Markets in the Land

Abstract

Historians acknowledge that value and freedoms were taken from workers during the transition to industrial production but this paper examines what was taken from producers during the transition to industrial logistics. In this paper I focus on how rivers were used as infrastructure for the flow of goods and information related to the lumber industry. I argue that state power, labor, and nature combined on rivers to create networks for the speedy movement and processing of information and commodities. I call these rivers “organic information networks” because information—abstractions of labor and nature that took the form of an elaborate coding system called “log marks”—became the most valuable thing that moved on these currents. This paper shows one part of a long history of unjust treatment of labor that came about as a result of capitalism’s tendency to move goods and information at ever increasing speeds.

Author

• Jason Newton, Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations