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Material Texts: Adrian Johns (University of Chicago), "Looking for Labels: The Science of Safety and the Defenders of Information"

  • Monday, January 26, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm

Class of 1978 Pavilion, sixth floor of Van Pelt-Dietrich Library


We are excited to welcome Adrian Johns (University of Chicago) for a talk titled “Looking for Labels: The Science of Safety and the Defenders of Information."

 

Professor Johns writes:

 

“In early twentieth-century Chicago, a group of electrical engineers devised a new venture to help citizens navigate the chaos of industrial society. They called it Label Service. The idea was that they would subject goods to scientific tests for safety, and award each one that passed a material text – a label – certifying as much. It proved a spectacular and lasting success. The labels were soon being mass-produced in enormous quantities – exceeding 20 million per year by about 1920, and 20 billion per year a century later. They became the lynchpin of a comprehensive enterprise of surveillance and discipline that undergirded the integrity of goods, first across America’s economy and then the world’s. The implicit trust that we all place in the things that we buy and use every day, which is so characteristic of modern life, rests on this largely unacknowledged enterprise. But labels themselves proved troublingly insecure: they could be misread, misapplied, even outright counterfeited. Sustaining them became a major operation in its own right. And this operation had consequences. It helped launch an “information defense industry” that today promises to sustain social trust amid an environment of digital deepfakery, reinventing to this end both the label and its surveillance regime. Recognizing the problems that Label Service posed – problems at once social, political, and epistemic – may help us face up to the compromises that this new industry demands.”

Adrian Johns is Maclear Distinguished Service Professor of History at the University of Chicago. Originally educated at Cambridge, he taught at Caltech and UCSD before arriving in Chicago in 2001. He is the author of The Nature of the Book (1998), Piracy (2009), Death of a Pirate (2010), and The Science of Reading (2023), as well as co-editor of Beyond Craft and Code: Human and Algorithmic Cultures, Past and Present (2024). He is currently working on a history of the policing of information since the Middle Ages.