Whatever else it was, the boat story was funny. The global economy often feels like a subject of forbidding complexity; its operations seem opaque even though they have so much sway over our lives. Here was an economic problem with an incongruously simple cause: a big boat got stuck, and 12 percent of global trade came to a halt. Even with the ship now finally on the move, billions in costs will continue to accrue; some ships are driving up fuel costs by detouring around the southern tip of Africa while the ships that waited to sail through are now expected to cause major traffic jams as they arrive in port close together.

One reason the jokes and memes hit home is because the Ever Given illustrated the gap between the rhetoric and reality of neoliberal markets. We’re offered breathless paeans to the magic of efficient markets and the dazzling speed and scale of global supply chains. Pundits like Thomas Friedman compare efficient supply chains to symphonies and supply chain managers to genius conductors. Milton Friedman went even further, calling neoliberalism “a new faith” and attributing the manufacturing of a pencil not to the labor of real people but “the magic of the price system.” It can be genuinely uncanny to look at your iPhone and think that it was assembled from components in forty-three countries spread across every continent except Antarctica; the brands that coordinate these global supply chains can appear like sorcerers, summoning materials from around the globe to create a single seamless, ubiquitous commodity.

Yet the Ever Given cuts through these mystifications. It dramatizes the mundane material reality of global supply chains, which are much more about drudgery and exploitation than magic or symphonies. The same factories “magically” assembling all those components into electronics for Apple can be awful to work in. Employees infamously jumped off the factory roof rather than continue toiling away; factory management responded not by improving wages and working conditions but by installing nets on the side of the building. While pundits tout the neoliberal global economy as a site of innovation, sweatshop conditions for many workers are the same as a century ago; clothes for export are still far more likely to be sewn by women in their own homes being paid piece rates than manufactured by robots.