loading . . . Pluralistic: Fingerspitzengefühl (08 Sep 2025)
# Today's links
* Fingerspitzengefühl: IP vs process knowledge.
* Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
* Object permanence: Buddhist hell theme-park; ORG launches; Yahoo spies for Beijing; Secret plan for border laptop-searches; BBC Creative Archive launches; Penn and Teller BBS; Immortan Trump; IP.
* Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
* 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.
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# Fingerspitzengefühl (permalink)
This was the plan: America would stop making things and instead make _recipes_ , the "IP" that could be sent to other countries to turn into actual _stuff_ , in distant lands without the pesky environmental and labor rules that forced businesses accept reduced profits because they weren't allowed to maim their workers and poison the land, air and water.
This was quite a switch! At the founding of the American republic, the US refused to extend patent protection to foreign inventors. The inventions of foreigners would be fair game for Americans, who could follow their recipes without paying a cent, and so improve the productivity of the new nation without paying rent to old empires over the sea.
It was only once America found itself _exporting_ as much as it _imported_ that it saw fit to recognize the prerogatives of foreign inventors, as part of reciprocal agreements that required foreigners to seek permission and pay royalties to American patent-holders.
But by the end of the 20th Century, America's ruling class was no longer interested in exporting things; they wanted to export _ideas_ , and receive _things_ in return. You can see why: America has a limited supply of things, but there's an infinite supply of ideas (in theory, anyway).
There was one problem: why wouldn't the poor-but-striving nations abroad copy the American Method for successful industrialization? If ignoring Europeans' patents allowed America to become the richest and most powerful nation in the world, why wouldn't, say, China just copy all that American "IP"? If seizing foreigners' inventions without permission was good enough for Thomas Jefferson, why not Jiang Zemin?
America solved this problem with the promise of "free trade." The World Trade Organization divided the world into two blocs: countries that could trade with one another without paying tariffs, and the rabble without who had to navigate a complex O(n^2) problem of different tariff schedules between every pair of nations.
To join the WTO club, countries had to sign up to a side-treaty called the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). Under the TRIPS, the Jeffersonian plan for industrialization (taking foreigners' ideas without permission) was declared a one-off, a scheme only the US got to try and no other country could benefit from. For China to join the WTO and gain tariff-free access to the world's markets, it would have to agree to respect foreign patents, copyrights, trademarks and other "IP."
We know the story of what followed over the next quarter-century: China became the world's factory, and became so structurally important that even if it violated its obligations under the TRIPS, "stealing the IP" of rich nations, no one could afford to close their borders to Chinese imports, because every country except China had forgotten how to make things.
But this isn't the whole story – it's not even the most important part of it. In his new book _Breakneck_ , Dan Wang (a Chinese-born Canadian who has lived extensively in Silicon Valley and in China) devotes a key chapter to "process knowledge":
https://danwang.co/breakneck/
What's "process knowledge"? It's all the intangible knowledge that _workers_ acquire as they produce goods, combined with the knowledge that their managers acquire from overseeing that labor. The Germans call it "Fingerspitzengefühl" ("fingertip-feeling"), like the sense of having a ball balanced on your fingertips, and knowing exactly which way it will tip as you tilt your hand this way or that.
Wang's book is big and complicated, and I haven't yet finished it. There's plenty I disagree with Wang about – I think he overstates the role of proceduralism in slowing down American progress and understates the role monopoly and oligarchy play in corrupting the rule of law. But the chapter on process knowledge is revelatory. Don't take my word for it: read Henry Farrell, who says that "[process knowledge] is the message of Dan Wang's new book":
https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/process-knowledge-is-crucial-to-economic
And Dan Davies, who uses the example of the UK's iconic Brompton bikes to explain the importance of process knowledge:
https://backofmind.substack.com/p/the-brompton-ness-of-it-all
Process knowledge is everything from "Here's how to decant feedstock into this gadget so it doesn't jam," to "here's how to adjust the flow of this precursor on humid days to account for the changes in viscosity" to "if you can't get the normal tech to show up and calibrate the part, here's the phone number of the guy who retired last year and will do it for time-and-a-half."
It can also be decidedly high-tech. A couple years ago, the legendary hardware hacker Andrew "bunnie" Huang explained to me his skepticism about the CHIPS Act's goal of onshoring the most advanced (4-5nm) chips.
Bunnie laid out the process by which these chips are etched: first you need to make the correct wavelength of light for the nanolithography machine.
Stage one of that is spraying droplets of molten tin into an evacuated chamber, where each droplet is tracked by a computer vision system that targets them to be hit with a highly specialized laser that smashes each droplet into a precise coin shape. Then, a second kind of extremely esoteric laser evaporates each of these little tin coins to make a specific kind of tin vapor that can be used to generate the right wavelength of light.
This light is then played over two wafers on reciprocating armatures; each wafer needs to be _precisely_ (as in nanograms and nanometers) the same dimensions and weight, otherwise the moving platters they slide back and forth on will get out of balance and the wafers will be spoiled as they are mis-etched.
This process is so esoteric, and has so many figurative and literal moving parts, that it needs to be closely overseen and continuously adjusted by someone with a PhD in electrical engineering. That overseer needs to wear a clean-room suit, and they have to work an eight-hour shift without a bathroom, food or water break (because getting out of the suit means going through an airlock means shutting down the system means long delays and wastage).
That PhD EENG is making $50k/year. Bunnie's topline explanation for the likely failure of the CHIPS Act is that this is a process that could only be successfully executed in a country "with an amazing educational system and a terrible passport." For bunnie, the extensive educational subsidies that produced Taiwan's legion of skilled electrical engineers and the global system that denied them the opportunity to emigrate to higher-wage zones were the root of the country's global dominance in advanced chip manufacture.
I have no doubt that this is true, but I think it's incomplete. What bunnie is describing isn't merely the expertise imparted by attaining a PhD in electrical engineering – it's the _process knowledge_ built up by generations of chip experts who debugged generations of systems that preceded the current tin-vaporizing Rube Goldberg machines.
Even if you described how these machines worked to a doctoral EENG who had never worked in this specific field, they couldn't oversee these machines. Sure, they'd have the technical background to be seriously impressed by how cool all this shit is, and you might be able to train them don a bunny suit and hold onto their bladders for 8 hours and make the machine go, but simply handing them the "IP" for this process will not get you a chip foundry.
It's undeniable that there's been plenty of Chinese commercial espionage, some of it with state backing. But in reading Wang, it's clear that the country's leaders have cooled on the importance of "IP" – indeed, these days, they call it "imaginary property," and call the IP economy the "imaginary economy" (contrast with the "real economy" of making stuff).
Wang evocatively describes how China built up its process knowledge over the WTO years, starting with simple assembly of complex components made abroad, then progressing to making those components, then progressing to coming up with novel ways to reconfiguring them ("a drone is a cellphone with propellers"). He explains how the vicious cycle of losing process knowledge accelerated the decline of manufacturing in the west: every time a factory goes to China, US manufacturers that had been in its supply chain lose process knowledge. You can no longer call up that former supplier and brainstorm solutions to tricky production snags, which means that other factories in the supply chain suffer, and they, too get offshored to China.
America's vicious cycle was China's virtuous cycle. The process knowledge that drained out of America accumulated in China. Years of experience solving problems in earlier versions of new equipment and processes gives workers a conceptual framework to debug the current version – they know about the raw mechanisms subsumed in abstraction layers and sealed packages and can visualize what's going on inside those black boxes.
Likewise in colonial America: taking foreigners' patents was just table-stakes. Real improvement came from the creation of informal communities built around manufacturing centers, and from the pollinators who spread innovations around among practitioners. Long before John Deere turned IP troll and locked farmers out of servicing their own tractors, they paid an army of roving engineers who would visit farmers to learn about the ways they'd improved their tractors, and integrate these improvements into new designs:
https://securityledger.com/2019/03/opinion-my-grandfathers-john-deere-would-support-our-right-to-repair/
But here's the thing: while "IP" can be bought and sold by the capital classes, process knowledge is inseparably vested in the minds and muscle-memory of their workers. People who own the instructions are constitutionally prone to assuming that making the recipe is the important part, while following the recipe is donkey-work you can assign to any freestanding oaf who can take instruction.
Think of John Philip Sousa, decrying the musicians who recorded and sold his compositions on early phonograms:
> These talking machines are going to ruin the artistic development of music in this country. When I was a boy…in front of every house in the summer evenings, you would find young people together singing the songs of the day or old songs. Today you hear these infernal machines going night and day. We will not have a vocal cord left. The vocal cord will be eliminated by a process of evolution, as was the tail of man when he came from the ape.
For Sousa, musicians were just the trained monkeys who followed the instructions that talented composers set down on paper and handed off to other trained monkeys to print and distribute for sale.
The exaltation of "IP" over process knowledge is part of the ancient practice of bosses denigrating their workers' contribution to the bottom line. It's key to the myth that workers can be replaced by AI: an AI can consume all the "IP" produced by workers, but it doesn't have their process knowledge. It can't, because process knowledge is embodied and enmeshed, it is relational and physical. It doesn't appear in training data.
In other words, elevating "IP" over process knowledge is a form of class war. And now that the world's store of process knowledge has been sent to the global south, the class war has gone racial. Think of how Howard Dean – now a paid shill for the pharma lobby – peddled the racist lie that there was no point in dropping patent protections for the covid vaccines, because brown people in poor countries were too stupid to make advanced vaccines:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/08/howard-dino/#the-scream
The truth is that the world's largest vaccine factories are to be found in the global south, particularly India, and these factories sit at the center of a vast web of process knowledge, embedded in relationships and built up with hard-won problem-solving.
Bosses would love it if process knowledge didn't matter, because then workers could finally be tamed by industry. We could just move the "IP" around to the highest bidders with the cheapest workforces. But Wang's book makes a forceful argument that it's easier to build up a powerful, resilient society based on process knowledge than it is to do so with IP. What good is a bunch of really cool recipes if no one can follow them?
I think that bosses are, psychoanalytically speaking, haunted by the idea that their workers own the process knowledge that is at the heart of their profits. That's why bosses are so obsessed with noncompete "agreements." If you can't own your workers' expertise, then you must own your workers. Any time a debate breaks out over noncompetes, a boss will say something like, "My intellectual property walks out the door of my shop every day at 5PM." They're wrong: the intellectual property is safely stored on the company's hard drives – it's the process knowledge that walks out the door.
You can see this in the prepper dreaming of the ruling class. Preppers are consumed by "disaster fantasies" in which the world ends in a way that they – and they alone – can put to rights. In _Dancing at Armageddon: Survivalism and Chaos in Modern Times,_ the ethnographer Richard Mitchell describes a water chemist who is obsessed with terrorists poisoning the water supply:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/22/preppers-are-larpers/#preppers-unprepared
This chemist has stockpiled everything he would need to restore order after a mass water-supply poisoning. But when Mitchell presses him to explain why he thinks it's likely that his town's water supply would be poisoned by terrorists, the prepper is at a loss. Eventually, he basically confesses that it would just be _really cool_ if the world ended in such a way that only _he_ could save it.
Which is a problem for a boss. The chemist has a lot of process knowledge, he knows how to do stuff. But the boss knows how to raise money from investors, how to ignore the company's essential qualitative traits (such as the relationships between workers) and reduce the firm to a set of optimizable spreadsheet cells that are legible to the financial markets. What kind of crisis recovery demands those skills?
As I posit in my novella "The Masque of the Red Death," the perfect boss fantasy is one in which the boss hunkers down in a luxury bunker while the rabble rebuild civilization from the ashes:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/14/masque-of-the-red-death/#masque
And once that task is complete, the boss emerges from his hidey-hole with an army of mercenaries in bomb-collars, a vast cache of AR-15s, gemstone-quality emeralds, and thumbdrives full of bitcoin, and does what _he_ does best – takes over the show and tells everyone else what to do, from the comfort his high-walled fortress, with its mountain of canned goods and its harem.
The absurdity of this – as I try to show with my story – is that the process knowledge of wheedling, bullying and coercing other people to work for you is actually not very useful. The IP you can buy and sell is an inert curiosity until it finds its way to people who can put it into process.
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# Hey look at this (permalink)
* Statement on discourse about ActivityPub and AT Protocol https://github.com/swicg/general/blob/master/statements%2F2025-09-05-activitypub-and-atproto-discourse.md
* A message from Emily James, director of the upcoming documentary Enshittification: The Film. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/enshittification-the-drm-free-audiobook/posts/4478169
* The story of how RSS beat Microsoft https://buttondown.com/blog/rss-vs-ice
* Ideas Have Consequences The Impact of Law and Economics on American Justice https://academic.oup.com/qje/advance-article/doi/10.1093/qje/qjaf042/8241352
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# Object permanence (permalink)
#20yrsago BBC Creative Archive pilot launches http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4225914.stm
#20yrsago Gold Rush-era sailing ship ruin excavated in San Fran https://web.archive.org/web/20050910151416/https://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2005/09/06/state/n154446D61.DTL
#20yrsago iTunes phone gratuitously crippled by DRM https://web.archive.org/web/20051001030643/http://playlistmag.com/weblogs/todayatplaylist/2005/09/hiddengoodies/index.php
#20yrsago My photos from the Buddhist hells of the Singaporean Tiger Balm themepark https://memex.craphound.com/2005/09/07/corys-photos-from-the-buddhist-hells-of-the-singaporean-tiger-balm-themepark/
#20yrsago Online Rights Group UK launches https://web.archive.org/web/20051120005155/http://www.openrightsgroup.org/
#20yrsago Yahoo rats out Chinese reporter to Beijing, writer gets 10 years in jail http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4221538.stm
#15yrsago Secret copyright treaty: USA caves on border laptop/phone/MP3 player searches for copyright infringement https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2010/09/acta-enforcement-practice-chapter/
#15yrsago Login screens from Penn and Teller BBS, 1987 https://www.flickr.com/photos/davidkha/4969386169/
#10yrsago Antihoarding: When “decluttering” becomes a compulsion https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/09/ocd-obsessive-compulsive-decluttering-hoarding/401591/
#10yrsago NZ bans award-winning YA novel after complaints from conservative Christian group https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/07/new-zealand-bans-into-the-river-teenage-novel-outcry-christian-group
#10yrsago Immortan Trump https://imgur.com/gallery/relevant-donald-trump-cos-play-OQe2rU5
#5yrsago Antitrust trouble for cloud services https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/08/attack-surface-kickstarter/#reasonable-agreements
#5yrsago FTC about to hammer Intuit https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/08/attack-surface-kickstarter/#tax-fraud
#5yrsago IP https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/08/attack-surface-kickstarter/#control
#5yrsago My first-ever Kickstarter https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/08/attack-surface-kickstarter/#asks
#5yrsago David Graeber on Spectre TV https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/07/facebook-v-humanity/#spectre
#5yrsago Facebook's foreseeable election consequences https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/07/facebook-v-humanity/#zuck-off
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# Upcoming appearances (permalink)
* Ithaca: Enshittification at Buffalo Street Books, Sept 11
https://buffalostreetbooks.com/event/2025-09-11/cory-doctorow-tcpl-librarian-judd-karlman
* Ithaca: AD White keynote (Cornell), Sep 12
https://deanoffaculty.cornell.edu/events/keynote-cory-doctorow-professor-at-large/
* Ithaca: Enshittification at Autumn Leaves Books, Sept 13
https://www.autumnleavesithaca.com/event-details/enshittification-why-everything-got-worse-and-what-to-do-about-it
* Ithaca: Radicalized Q&A (Cornell), Sept 16
https://events.cornell.edu/event/radicalized-qa-with-author-cory-doctorow
* Ithaca: The Counterfeiters (Dinner/Movie Night) (Cornell), Sept 17
https://adwhiteprofessors.cornell.edu/visits/cory-doctorow/
* Ithaca: Communication Power, Policy, and Practice (Cornell), Sept 18
https://events.cornell.edu/event/policy-provocations-a-conversation-about-communication-power-policy-and-practice
* Ithaca: A Reverse-Centaur's Guide to Being a Better AI Critic (Cornell), Sept 18
https://events.cornell.edu/event/2025-nordlander-lecture-in-science-public-policy
* NYC: Enshittification and Renewal (Cornell Tech), Sept 19
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/enshittification-and-renewal-a-conversation-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1563948454929
* DC: Enshittification with Rohit Chopra (Politics and Prose), Oct 8
https://politics-prose.com/cory-doctorow-10825
* NYC: Enshittification with Lina Khan (Brooklyn Public Library), Oct 9
https://www.bklynlibrary.org/calendar/cory-doctorow-discusses-central-library-dweck-20251009-0700pm
* New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12
http://www.contraflowscifi.org/
* Chicago: Enshittification with Anand Giridharadas (Chicago Humanities), Oct 15
https://www.oldtownschool.org/concerts/2025/10-15-2025-kara-swisher-and-cory-doctorow-on-enshittification/
* San Francisco: Enshittification at Public Works (The Booksmith), Oct 20
https://app.gopassage.com/events/doctorow25
* Madrid: Conferencia EUROPEA 4D (Virtual), Oct 28
https://4d.cat/es/conferencia/
* Miami: Enshittification at Books & Books, Nov 5
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1504647263469
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# Recent appearances (permalink)
* Nerd Harder! (This Week in Tech)
https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1047
* Techtonic with Mark Hurst
https://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/155658
* Cory Doctorow DESTROYS Enshittification (QAA Podcast)
https://soundcloud.com/qanonanonymous/cory-doctorow-destroys-enshitification-e338
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# Latest books (permalink)
* "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 (the-bezzle.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
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# Upcoming books (permalink)
* "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025
* "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/
* "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026
* "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026
* "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026
* "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026
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# Colophon (permalink)
Today's top sources:
**Currently writing:**
* "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE AND SUBMITTED.
* A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
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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.
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