The cursor blinks with a rhythmic, taunting frequency that feels personal. It is 2:19 AM, and the blue light of the monitor is beginning to feel like a physical weight against my retinas. I just spent 29 minutes on a rickety ladder in the hallway, wrestling with a smoke detector that decided to chirp its dying breath into the silence of the house. My hands still smell like old batteries and the metallic dust of the ceiling mount. Now, instead of sleeping, I am sitting here, refreshing a DHL tracking page for the 19th time. The status is a stagnant, unmoving block of text: ‘Customs clearance event – Anchorage, AK.’ It has been there for 69 hours. Somewhere in Alaska, there is a pallet-my pallet-and on that pallet is the inventory required for a launch that starts in 9 days.

We don’t talk enough about the existential dread of the ‘Refresh’ button. We live in an era where we are told that the world is transparent, that data has finally conquered the physical realm, and that uncertainty is a relic of the 19th century. We have these enterprise-grade dashboards that cost companies $99,999 a year, promising ‘real-time end-to-end visibility.’ They show us little digital icons of ships crawling across a pixelated blue ocean. They give us heat maps and predictive analytics. But when the smoke detector goes off at 2:19 AM and you realize your product launch is staring down the barrel of an empty warehouse, you realize the truth: you don’t have a supply chain. You have a prayer chain.

The Illusion of Tillage

I think of Sophie B.-L. often in moments like these. Sophie is a soil conservationist I met back in 2019, during a brief period when I thought I could escape the world of logistics by retreating into the study of organic systems. Sophie spent her days looking at dirt, but she didn’t call it dirt; she called it the ‘living skin of the planet.’ I remember her standing in a fallow field, holding a clump of earth that looked, to my untrained eyes, like nothing more than a brown smudge. She told me that the biggest mistake humans make-whether in farming or in industry-is the belief that we can optimize a system we don’t actually control. She called it the ‘illusion of the tillage.’ We stir the soil, we add 49 different chemical inputs, we map the moisture levels with 9 sensors per acre, and we think we are in charge. But a single week of the wrong temperature or a microscopic shift in the fungal network can render all that data useless.

Global logistics is exactly like Sophie’s soil. It is a biological, messy, human-driven organism that we have tried to dress up in the suit of a mathematical equation. We assume that because we can see a GPS ping from a truck in Nebraska, we understand the state of the system. We don’t. We are just looking at the skin. We aren’t seeing the exhaustion of the driver who has been awake for 19 hours, or the bureaucratic snarl in a customs office where 99 files are piled on a desk because a single printer ran out of toner. We aren’t seeing the fragile, human threads that are the only things actually holding the world together. When those threads fray, the dashboard doesn’t turn red; it just stops being true.

The Anxiety of Zero Control

This is the profound anxiety of our modern economy. We have traded resilience for efficiency, and in the process, we have ceded control to a machine that doesn’t actually exist. We have built a system that works perfectly 99 percent of the time, provided that nothing ever changes. But the world is defined by change. The world is defined by 2:19 AM battery failures and localized storms and human error. When the system breaks, it doesn’t break gracefully. It collapses into a series of frantic emails and desperate phone calls to people who aren’t answering because it’s 3:59 PM on a Friday in a different time zone.

“Visibility is often just a polite word for well-documented chaos.”

☰

I remember one specific failure back in the winter of ’19. We were moving 499 units of a high-end prototype. The software told us the shipment was ‘On Schedule.’ The account manager told us it was ‘In Transit.’ For 9 days, we operated under the assumption that the physical world was complying with the digital record. It wasn’t until I physically drove to a terminal-a bleak, grey expanse of concrete that smelled like diesel and wet cardboard-that I found our crates sitting under a leaky tarp. They hadn’t moved in a week. The digital record was a ghost. The ‘On Schedule’ status was just a default setting that nobody had bothered to change because the human responsible for the update was out with the flu. That was the moment I realized that ‘visibility’ is often just a polite word for ‘well-documented chaos.’

There is a specific kind of madness that comes from being a product manager in this environment. You are held responsible for the output of a system that you have zero authority over. You are the one who has to explain to the board why the $49,999 marketing campaign is currently advertising a product that is stuck in a container 99 feet below the surface of other containers. You are the one who has to look at the ‘Clearance Event’ message and decide whether to tell the truth or to offer another prayer.

Partnering with the Organism

When the chaos hits-and it always hits-you realize that your choice of manufacturer, someone like Kaitesocks, is the only thing standing between you and the void. It’s about finding people who treat the process as a craft rather than a transaction. You need someone who understands that if the yarn is delayed by 9 hours at the dyeing stage, it’s going to ripple through the next 29 steps of the process. You need a partner who sees the fragility and builds in the redundancy that the ‘efficiency experts’ would try to cut. You need a buffer against the prayer chain.

The Visceral Expertise We Ignored

We are currently obsessed with ‘de-risking,’ but most of our de-risking strategies are just more layers of digital paint on a crumbling wall. We add more tracking sensors, we hire more ‘logistics consultants’ who have never seen a cargo ship in person, and we buy more insurance. But none of that changes the fact that the world is a physical place. The world is made of heavy things that have to be moved by tired people through unpredictable weather. No amount of Python script is going to change the fact that a port in Ningbo might close because of a localized power outage, or that a single mistyped digit on a manifest can trap a shipment in a legal limbo for 19 days.

It’s now 3:09 AM. The smoke detector is silent, but I am still awake. I have stopped refreshing the DHL page. I have realized that the status will change when it changes, and no amount of digital observation will accelerate the molecules of that pallet in Anchorage. Instead, I am thinking about the next order. I am thinking about how to build a system that doesn’t rely on me being awake at 2:19 AM. I am thinking about how to move away from the ’tillage’ model of logistics and toward something more organic, more human, and more honest.

We like to pretend that we are the masters of our domain, but we are all just participants in a very large, very complicated dance. […] When the music stops and the lights go out, and your inventory is lost in a sea of 9,999 other containers, you don’t want a dashboard. You want a person who knows how to find the light switch. You want to know that the hands that made your product are the same hands that will help you pull it out of the fire. Anything else isn’t a strategy; it’s just a very expensive way to wait for a miracle.