pluralistic.net
Pluralistic: Process knowledge (08 Apr 2026)
Today's links Process knowledge: We also serve who stand and wash. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Chicken Little; "Anya's Ghost"; Ad-tech's algorithmic cruelty. Upcoming appearances: Toronto, Montreal, Toronto, San Francisco, London, Berlin, NYC, Hay-on-Wye, London. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. Process knowledge (permalink) "Intellectual property" was once an obscure legal backwater. Today, it is the dominant area of political economy, the organizing regime for almost all of our tech regulation, and the most valuable – and most controversial – aspect of global trade policy: https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/01/minilateralism/#own-goal Despite (or perhaps because of) its centrality, "intellectual property" is one of those maddeningly vague terms that applies to many different legal doctrines, as well as a set of nebulous, abstract thought-objects that do not qualify for legal protection. "IP" doesn't just refer to copyright, trademark and patent – though these "core three" systems are so heterogeneous in basis, scope and enforcement that the act of lumping them together into a single category confuses more than it clarifies. Beyond the "core three" of copyright, patent and trademark, "IP" also refers to a patchwork of "neighboring rights" that only exist to varying degrees around the world, like "anticircumvention rights," "database rights" and "personality rights." Then there are doctrines that have come to be thought of as IP, even though they were long considered separate: confidentiality, noncompete and nondisparagement. Finally, there are those "nebulous, abstract thought-objects" that get labeled "IP," even if no one can really define what they are – for example, the "format" deals that TV shows like Love Island or The Traitors make around the world, which really amount to consulting deals to help other TV networks create a local version of a popular show, but which are treated as the sale of some (nonexistent) exclusive right. It's hard to find a commonality amongst all these wildly different concepts, but a couple years ago, I hit on a working definition of "IP" that seems to cover all the bases: I say that "IP" means "any rule, law or policy that allows a company to exert control over its critics, competitors or customers": https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/ Put that way, it's easy to see why "IP" would be such a central organizing principle in a modern, end-stage capitalist world. But even though "IP" is treated as a firm's most important asset, it's actually far less important than another intangible: process knowledge. I first came across the concept of "process knowledge" in Dan Wang's Breakneck, a very good book about the rise and rise of Chinese manufacturing, industrialization and global dominance: https://danwang.co/breakneck/ I picked up Breakneck after reading other writers whom I admire who singled out the book's treatment of process knowledge for praise and further discussion. The political scientist Henry Farrell called process knowledge the key to economic development: https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/process-knowledge-is-crucial-to-economic While Dan Davies – a superb writer about organizations and their management – used England's Brompton Bicycles to make the abstract concept of process knowledge very concrete indeed: https://backofmind.substack.com/p/the-brompton-ness-of-it-all So what is process knowledge? It's all the knowledge that workers collectively carry around in their heads – hard-won lessons that span firms and divisions, that can never be adequately captured through documentation. Think of a worker at a chip fab who finds themself with a load of microprocessors that have failed QA because they become unreliable when they're run above a certain clockspeed. If that worker knows enough about the downstream customers' processes, they can contact one of those customers and offer the chips for use in a lower-end product, which can save the fab millions and make millions more for the customer. This just happened to Apple, who seized upon a lot of "binned" microprocessors that were headed to the landfill and designed the Macbook Neo (a new, cheap, low-end laptop) around them, salvaging the defective chips by running them at lower speeds. The result? Apple's most successful laptop in years, which has now sold so well that Apple has exhausted the supply of defective chips and is scrambling to fill orders: https://www.macrumors.com/2026/04/07/macbook-neo-massive-dilemma/ Process knowledge is squishy, contingent, and wildly important in a world filled with entropy-stricken, off-spec, and stubbornly physical things. Work with a particular machine long enough and you will develop a Fingerspitzengefühl (fingertip feeling) for the optimal rate to introduce a new load of feedstock to it after it runs dry. Even more importantly: if you work with that machine long enough, you'll have the mobile phone number of the retired person who knows how to un-jam it if you try to reload it too fast on your usual technician's day off. This kind of knowledge can mean the difference between profitability and bankruptcy. So why isn't process knowledge given the centrality in our conceptions of what makes a corporation valuable? After reading Wang, Farrell and Davies, I formulated a theory: we ignore process knowledge for the same reason we exalt "IP," because process knowledge can't be bought or sold, can't be reflected on a balance-sheet, and can't be controlled, and because "IP" can. Process knowledge is far more important than "IP" (just try creating a vaccine from a set of instructions without the skilled technicians who have already spent years executing similar projects), but process knowledge is spread out amongst workers and can't be abstracted away by their bosses. Your boss can make you sign a contract assigning all your copyrights and patents to the business, but if you and your team quit your job, all that "IP" will plummet in value without the people who know how to mobilize it: https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/08/process-knowledge/#dance-monkey-dance "IP" isn't just a case of "you treasure what you measure" – it's also a case of "you measure what you treasure." Recently, I hit on a positively delightful Tumblr post that illustrated the importance of process knowledge, and the way that bosses systematically undervalue it: https://www.tumblr.com/explorerrowan/813098951730479104 This post is one of those glorious internet documents, a novel literary form for which we have no accepted term. It's composed of four major sections: a screenshotted impromptu Twitter thread made in reply to a throwaway post; a lengthy Tumblr reply to the screenshots; a second Tumblr reply to the first one; and then a chorus of more than 38,000 notes, replies, and hashtags added to it. I have no idea what to call this kind of document, in which some people are reacting to others without the others ever knowing about it, but also which is also written by so many authors, many of whom are explicitly interacting with one another. It's a "hypertext," sure, but what kind of hypertext? Whatever you call it, it's amazing. As noted, it opens with a Twitter exchange. The first tweet comes from an online dating influencer, "TheEcho13": I interviewed a gen z girlie 6 months ago and in the interview she told me that she does not like a challenge, has no interest in career progression, prefers to just do repetitive tasks and will never complain about being bored. I hired her. https://xcancel.com/TheEcho13/status/1948951885693813135#m In response, Viveros (a content creator from Alberta and one of the 4m people who saw the original tweet), replied with a short thread about the value of people like this, who "keep the lights on and the business functioning at everything from restaurants to post offices but now nobody’s interested in hiring them": https://xcancel.com/TheViveros/status/1949149720406110382#m These are the "lifer[s] who can teach new people how everything works, who knows what’s up in the system, who knows what the obscure solutions are, and who can help calm down the asshole regulars because they know them more personally." In other words, the keepers of the process knowledge. When this screenshotted exchange was posted to Tumblr, it prompted Blinkpatch, who describes themself as a "genderfluid," "ancient" "drifter" who pines for "solar-punk flavored revolution" to reply with a brilliant anecdote about their stint working as a dishwasher: https://weaselle.tumblr.com/post/790895560390492160/whenever-i-think-about-the-value-of-something At 16, Blinkpatch was hired as a restaurant dishwasher under the tutelage of Claudio, a 60-year old "career dish pit man." Claudio had washed dishes for his whole life, reveling in the fact that he could get work in any city, at any time. When Claudio realized that Blinkpatch was taking the job seriously, the training began in earnest. Claudio asked Blinkpatch if they wanted to be able to clock off at midnight at the end of each shift, and when Blinkpatch said they did, Claudio laid a lot of process knowledge on them: This machine takes two full minutes to run a cycle. We are on the clock for 8 hours. That means we have a maximum of 240 times we can run this machine. If you want to wash all those dishes, clean your station, mop, and clock off by midnight? This machine has to be on and running every second of the shift. If you don’t have a full load of dishes collected, scraped, rinsed, stacked, and ready to go into the dishwasher the second it’s done every single time? You can’t do it. If, over the course of 8 hours, you let this machine lay idle for just one minute in between finishing each load and being turned on again? Instead of 240 loads, you’ll do 160 loads. These are the parameters, the kind of thing any Taylorist with a stopwatch could tell you. But Claudio went on to explain how that extra idle minute would translate to chaos in the kitchen, as the cooks ran out of pots and the servers ran out of plates, and how they would take out their frustrations on the dishwasher. To optimize that dishwasher, Blinkpatch would need to have a reserve of bulky, machine-filling items that could be run through the machine any time a load finished before there was a sufficient supply of smaller items. If they failed at this, Blinkpatch would be washing dishes until 2AM, rather than clocking out at midnight. Blinkpatch's takeaway was that dishwashing was the bottleneck the whole restaurant ran through – and how that meant that Claudio, who was "unambitious" by conventional standards, had the best understanding of the restaurant's overall operations of anyone on site. He was the keeper of the process knowledge This reply prompted another response, from "Marisol," a "haunted house actress and accidental IT person" who told the story of her time working at a medical office that specialized in mental health and addiction recovery: https://www.tumblr.com/marisolinspades/790960414106304512/all-of-this-disaster-befalls-any-company-that The company was in the midst of standing up its own purpose-built facility, and the CEO was working intensively with the architect to design this new building. When Marisol – the receptionist – happened to be consulted on the near-final design plan, "it took all of three seconds for two major issues to jump out." First: "The receptionist can’t see the waiting room from her desk with this layout. It’s around the corner and blocked by a wall." This meant that she couldn't "keep track of the patients who are waiting." The architect and CEO wanted to know why she couldn't use the sign-in sheet to manage this. She explained that not everyone signs in – people who are there for a check-in or group therapy need to be directed to the other side of the building, while "some people are painfully shy and if I don’t appear warm and inviting they won’t approach." The CEO and architect asked whether this happened often, and she replied "every day." They didn't believe her. Nor did they believe her when she said that the receptionists needed to have continuous access to the chart room throughout the day – they insisted that since charts for the day's patients were pulled in the morning, it would be OK to house them through two sets of locked doors, a five-minute walk away (that way, workers wouldn't be tempted to "goof off" in the room). They wanted to keep the chart room locked, with the key entrusted to the CEO, who would supervise every entry. Marisol explained that charts were pulled continuously, any time there was a crisis or a patient had a question for a nurse, or when a patient came in due to a cancellation. All told, reception went into the chart room 20-30 times/day. The "goofing off" they thought workers got up to in the chart room was "when we got news that a patient had died and we were crying. And even then, we filed charts as we sobbed because no one in this office has free time." The CEO and architect were still disbelieving, so Marisol had them sit with her for an hour. They didn't last an hour – they left, taking the blueprints with them. The punchline: Marisol bemoans the fact that she wasn't given more time with those blueprints, because then she might have spotted that they'd forgotten to include any closets, including closets for the janitors. As a result, all their cleaning supplies and holiday decorations were stolen from the cabinets in the bathrooms that they were forced to stash them in. Marisol blames this on a "CEO who had never worked a lower level job in his life wasn’t convinced closets were worth it." This is doubtless true – but we can generalize this, to "a CEO who didn't appreciate process knowledge." I've come to believe that process knowledge is the most undervalued part of our society. So undervalued that business geniuses like Elon Musk think you can fire skilled lifers from key government agencies and simply hire new ones if turns out you cut too deep. So undervalued that Trump thinks that you can simply stand up new factories in response to tariffs, and that "training" will somehow allow people to go to work making things that haven't been produced onshore in a generation. And of course, the people who value process knowledge the least are the AI bros who think you can replace skilled workers with a chatbot trained on the things they say and write down, as though that somehow captured everything they know. Hey look at this (permalink) Greens Could Be ‘Kingmakers’ in Wales as Leader Reveals Power-Sharing Demands https://bylinetimes.com/2026/04/07/greens-wales-elections-senedd-coalition-leader-power-sharing-demands/ Voter Suppression, Executive Order Style https://prospect.org/2026/04/07/trump-voter-suppression-executive-order-14339-citizenship-post-office/ “Economic Civil War”: States Push Laws to Shield Oil and Gas Companies From Accountability https://www.propublica.org/article/climate-change-alec-leonard-leo-lawsuits-fossil-fuel-oil-gas-immunity A Retrospective on Bidenomics https://prospect.org/2026/04/07/apr-2026-magazine-retrospective-on-bidenomics/ Music giant Universal gets $64bn takeover offer https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz0ex432dmyo Object permanence (permalink) #15yrsago Chicken Little: what do you sell to an immortal, vat-bound quadrillionaire? https://web.archive.org/web/20110408210327/http://www.tor.com/stories/2011/04/chicken-little #15yrsago Anya’s Ghost: sweet and scary ghost story about identity https://memex.craphound.com/2011/04/06/anyas-ghost-sweet-and-scary-ghost-story-about-identity/ #10yrsago The UK government’s voice-over-IP standard is designed to be backdoored https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1476827/ #5yrsago Ad-tech's algorithmic cruelty https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/06/digital-phrenology/#weaponized-nostalgia #5yrsago The real cancel culture https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/06/digital-phrenology/#digital-phrenology Upcoming appearances (permalink) Toronto: Humber Polytechnic President's Lecture Series, Apr 8 https://liberalarts.humber.ca/current-students/resources/conferences-and-lectures/presidents-lecture-series.html Montreal: Bronfman Lecture (McGill), Apr 10 https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/artificial-intelligence-the-ultimate-disrupter-tickets-1982706623885 Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, Apr 10 https://mtl.drawnandquarterly.com/events/4863920260410 Toronto: DemocracyXchange, Apr 16 https://www.democracyxchange.org/news/cory-doctorow-to-open-dxc26-on-april-16 San Francisco: 2026 Berkeley Spring Forum on M&A and the Boardroom, Apr 23 https://www.theberkeleyforum.com/#agenda London: Resisting Big Tech Empires (LSBU), Apr 25 https://www.tickettailor.com/events/globaljusticenow/2042691 NYC: Enshittification at Commonweal Ventures, Apr 29 https://luma.com/ssgfvqz8 NYC: Techidemic with Sarah Jeong, Tochi Onyibuchi and Alia Dastagir (PEN World Voices), Apr 30 https://worldvoices.pen.org/event/techidemic/ Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20 https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19 https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25 https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2 SXSW London, Jun 2 https://www.sxswlondon.com/session/how-big-tech-broke-the-internet-b3c4a901 Recent appearances (permalink) The internet is getting worse (CBC The National) https://youtu.be/dCVUCdg3Uqc?si=FMcA0EI_Mi13Lw-P Do you feel screwed over by big tech? (Ontario Today) https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-45-ontario-today/clip/16203024-do-feel-screwed-big-tech Launch for Cindy's Cohn's "Privacy's Defender" (City Lights) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuVCm2PUalU Chicken Mating Harnesses (This Week in Tech) https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1074 The Virtual Jewel Box (U Utah) https://tanner.utah.edu/podcast/enshittification-cory-doctorow-matthew-potolsky/ Latest books (permalink) "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com Upcoming books (permalink) "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/) "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026 "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027 "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2027 "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027 Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. First draft complete. Second draft underway. "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE. "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING. A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. 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