When it comes to the promise and perils of workplace surveillance and automation, long distance trucking is the canary in the coal mine. Uniquely positioned as a highly regulated, supposedly easily quantifiable workplace, the mandated rollout of electronic logging devices in trucks has significantly transformed the industry. Through rigorous ethnographic analysis Levy pulls open the curtain on this critical but oft-overlooked industry, exposing the issues with technological solutionism and the problems with focusing workplace measurement and improvements on the easy to measure rather than more systemic issues.

For folks in the people analytics field especially this is required reading, as long distance trucking almost certainly makes these more systemic problems easier to detect than in most other workplaces. While I would've liked a bit more economic analysis here, overall I highly recommend this book