If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
"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 â and most controversial â aspect of global trade policy:
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 â 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 â 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:
While Dan Davies â a superb writer about organizations and their management â used England's Brompton Bicycles to make the abstract concept of process knowledge very concrete indeed:
So what is process knowledge? It's all the knowledge that workers collectively carry around in their heads â 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:
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 FingerspitzengefĂŒhl (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:
"IP" isn't just a case of "you treasure what you measure" â 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:
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.
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 nobodyâs interested in hiring them":
These are the "lifer[s] who can teach new people how everything works, who knows whatâs 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:
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 donât have a full load of dishes collected, scraped, rinsed, stacked, and ready to go into the dishwasher the second itâs done every single time? You canât 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, youâll 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 â 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:
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 â the receptionist â 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 canât see the waiting room from her desk with this layout. Itâs 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 â 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 donât appear warm and inviting they wonât 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 â 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 â 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 wasnât convinced closets were worth it."
This is doubtless true â 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.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
â Live Streamingâ Interactive Chatâ Private Showsâ HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch âą No registration required âą HD streaming
ITHACA and NYC! I'm heading your way for a zillion events from Sept 11-17. Here's a list of open-to-all CORNELL activities including two major keynotes; a movie night with dinner and discussion; and a public event at CORNELL TECH in NYC. I'm also appearing at BUFFALO STREET BOOKS on Sept 11 and at AUTUMN LEAVES BOOKS on Sept 13. I'll also be at the BROOKLYN BOOK FESTIVAL on Sept 21:
The most ENSHITTIFICATION-PROOF way to get the Enshittification audiobook, ebook and hardcover is to pre-order them on my Kickstarter! Help me do AN END RUN around the AMAZON/AUDIBLE AUDIOBOOK MONOPOLY and DISENSHITTIFY your audiobook experience in the process.
Trump's stolen a lot of workers' wages over the years, but this week, he has become history's greatest thief of wages, having directed his FTC to stop enforcing its ban on noncompetes "agreements," a move that will cost American workers $400 billion over the next ten years:
The argument for noncompetes is this: modern industry is IP-intensive, and IP-intensive businesses need noncompetes, otherwise workers will take proprietary information with them when they walk out the door and bring it to a competitor. Who would invest in an IP-intensive firm under those circumstances?
I'll tell you who would: Hollywood and Silicon Valley. These are two most IP-intensive industries in human history, both of which were incubated in California, a state whose constitution prohibits noncompetes and has done so through the entire history of those two industries.
Indeed, we wouldn't have a Silicon Valley if California had noncompetes. Silicon Valley was founded by William Shockley, who won the Nobel Prize for his role in inventing the silicon transistor (hence Silicon Valley). Shockley was a paranoid, virulent racist who couldn't produce a working chip because he was consumed by eugenic fervor and spent all his time on the road offering shares of his Nobel prize money to Black women who would agree to have their tubes tied.
Lucky for (literally) everyone (except William Shockley), California doesn't have noncompetes, so eight of his top engineers ("The Traitorous Eight") were able to quit Shockley Semiconductor and start the first successful chip business: Fairchild Semiconductor. And then two of Fairchild's top engineers quit to found Intel:
It's not just Silicon Valley that's rooted in wresting IP away from asshole control-freaks: that's Hollywood's story, too. Ever wonder how it was that movies were invented at Edison Labs in New Jersey, but the film industry was incubated in California, literally as far away from Edison as you could possibly get without ending up in Mexico?
In short: California got the motion picture industry because Edison was an asshole who used his patents to control what kinds of movies could be made and to suck rents out of filmmakers to license those patents. So the most ambitious filmmakers in America fled to California, where Edison couldn't easily enforce his patents, and founded Hollywood:
And Hollywood stayed in Calfornia, a place where noncompetes couldn't be enforced, where "IP" could hop from one studio to another, smuggled out between the ears of writers, actors, directors, SFX wizards, prop makers, scenepainters, makeup artists, costumers, and the most creative professionals in Hollywood: accountants.
Empirically speaking, the function of noncompetes is to trap good workers and good ideas in companies controlled by asshole bosses who can't get anything done. Any disinvestment that can be attributed to the absence of noncompetes is completely swamped by the dividends generated by good workers and good ideas escaping from control-freak asshole bosses and founding productive firms. As ever, money talks and bullshit walks.
Today, one in 18 US workers is trapped by a noncompete, and those aren't the knowledge workers of Silicon Valley workers or Hollywood. So who is captured by this form of contractual indenture? The median US worker under noncompete is a fast-food worker stuck with the tipped minimum wage, or a pet groomer making the regular minimum wage. The function of the noncompete in America isn't to secure investment for knowledge-intensive industries â it's to stop the cashier at Wendy's from getting an extra $0.25/hour working the fry-trap at the McDonald's across the street.
Noncompetes are an integral part of the conservative project, which is the substitution of individual power for democratic choice. As Dan Savage puts it, the GOP agenda is "Husbands you can't leave [ed: ending no-fault divorce], pregnancies you can't prevent or terminate [ed: banning contraception and abortion], politicians you can't vote out of office [ed: gerrymandering and voter suppression."
Add to that: jobs you can't quit.
It's not just noncompetes that lock workers to shitty bosses. When Biden's FTC investigated the issue, they revealed a widespread practice called "training repayment agreement provision," (TRAPs) that puts workers on the hook for thousands of dollars if they quit or get fired:
A TRAPped worker â often a pet-groomer at a private equity-owned giant like Petsmart â is charged $5,500 or more for three weeks of "training" that actually amount to one or two weeks of sweeping up pet-hair. But if they leave or get fired in the next three years, they have to pay back that whole amount:
These fees trap workers in dead-end jobs by forcing anyone who hires them away to pay massive fees to their former employers. It's just another way to lock workers to businesses.
The irony here is that conservatives claim to worship "voluntarism" and "free choice," and insist that the virtue of markets is that they "aggregate price signals" so that companies can respond to these signals by efficiently matching demand to supply.
But though conservatives say they worship free choice as an engine of economic efficiency, they understand that their ideas are so unpopular that they can only succeed if people are coerced into adopting them, hence voter suppression, gerrymandering, noncompetes, and other heads-I-win/tails-you-lose propositions.
Noncompetes aren't about preventing the loss of IP â they're about preventing the loss of process knowledge, the know-how to turn ideas into products and services. Bosses love IP, because it can be alienated, hoarded and sold, while process knowledge is ineluctably vested in the bodies, minds and relations of workers. No IP law can keep employees from taking process knowledge with them on their way out the door, so bosses want to ban them from leaving:
FTC economists estimated that killing noncompetes would result in $400b in wage gains for the American workforce over the next decade, as good workers migrated to good bosses.
Of course this was challenged by the business lobby, which sued to get the rule overturned. Trump's FTC has not only declined to defend the rule in court, they've also decided to stop trying to enforce it.
Trump is now the king of wage-theft, and MAGA is a relentless engine of enshittification. After all, the thesis of enshittification is that companies make their products and practices worse for suppliers, users and business customers only when they calculate that they can do so without facing punishment â from regulators, competitors, or workers.
Trump's regulators are all either comatose or so captured they wear gimpsuits and leashes in public. They're not keeping companies in line. And his antitrust shops have turned into pay-for-play operations, where a $1m payment to a MAGA influencer gets your case dropped:
Trump neutered the National Labor Relations Board and now he's revived indentured servitude nationwide, formalizing the idea of government-backed jobs you can't quit.
If you can't quit your job or vote our your politicians, why wouldn't your boss or your elected representative just relentless fuck you over? Not merely for sadism's sake (though sadism undoubtedly plays a part here), but simply to make things better for themselves by making things worse for you? It's exactly the same logic of platform lock-in: once you can't leave, they don't have to keep you happy.
Formalizing the legality of noncompetes will only lead to their monotonic spread. When Antonin Scalia greenlit binding arbitration waivers in consumer contracts, only a tiny number of companies used them, forcing customers to sign away their right to sue them no matter how badly, negligently or criminally they behaved. Today, binding arbitration has expanded into every kind of contract, even to the point where groovy, open source, decentralized, federated social media platforms are forcing it on their users:
Same for noncompetes: as private equity rolls up whole sectors â funeral homes, pet groomers, hospices â they will stuff noncompetes into the contracts of every employer in each industry, so no matter where a worker applies for a job, they'll have to sign a noncompete. Why wouldn't they? If workers can't leave, they'll accept worse working conditions and lower pay. The best workers will be stuck with the worst employers.
And despite owing their existence to bans on noncompetes Silicon Valley and Hollywood will happily cram noncompetes down their workers' throats. If you doubt it, just read up on the "no poach" scandal, where the biggest tech and movie companies entered into a criminal conspiracy not to hire away each others' employees:
The conservative future, folks: jobs you can't quit, politicians you can't vote out of office, husbands you can't divorce, and pregnancies you can't prevent or terminate.
Click here to pre-order my next book, ENSHITTIFICATION: WHY EVERYTHING SUDDENLY GOT WORSE AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
ITHACA and NYC! I'm heading your way for a zillion events from Sept 11-17. Here's a list of open-to-all CORNELL activities including two major keynotes; a movie night with dinner and discussion; and a public event at CORNELL TECH in NYC. I'm also appearing at BUFFALO STREET BOOKS on Sept 11 and at AUTUMN LEAVES BOOKS on Sept 13.
The most ENSHITTIFICATION-PROOF way to get the Enshittification audiobook, ebook and hardcover is to pre-order them on my Kickstarter! Help me do AN END RUN around the AMAZON/AUDIBLE AUDIOBOOK MONOPOLY and DISENSHITTIFY your audiobook experience in the process.
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 â 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 "FingerspitzengefĂŒhl" ("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 â 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":
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 â 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" â 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 â 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:
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 boyâŠin 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 â now a paid shill for the pharma lobby â 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:
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 â 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 â and they alone â 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:
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:
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 â 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 â as I try to show with my story â 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.
Click here to pre-order my next book, ENSHITTIFICATION: WHY EVERYTHING SUDDENLY GOT WORSE AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
#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 Anyaâs 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 governmentâs voice-over-IP standard is designed to be backdoored https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1476827/
When you think about what makes a business competitive, youâll probably focus on things like products, pricing, marketing, and so on, and itâs true that those things are going to count for something, but the fact is everyone can see them, so are they all that much of a competitive advantage? What can be a lot more valuable, and less obvious, is knowing what happens behind the scenes, and with that in mind, keep reading to find out more about why process knowledge is a competitive advantage.
Knowing The How Save Time and Money
When teams understand the processes properly, work tends to be a lot easier and smoother, and thereâll be fewer mistakes, and less time spent fixing problems, which means more time working on whatever it is the business does and sells. Plus, decisions can be made more quickly because people know whatâs involved from the start.
In manufacturing businesses, for example, understanding how materials behave, how equipment works (and when it doesnât), and where problems can occur is going to massive improve efficiency, and thatâs especially true in specific areas like plastic sheet extrusion, where small adjustments can absolutely affect the quality of the output, and production speed.
Better Processes Mean Better Decisions
When you know your processes inside out, youâre going to be much better equipped to make good, sensible decisions - thatâs because you can see which changes are worth making and which ones will probably just cause more disruption in the end. So instead of having to guess or doing lots of time-consuming research, youâll already know the answers so you can move forward more quickly and confidently.
Having the knowledge is also something that can make planning easier because your timelines will be more accurate, youâll be able to use your resources in the most efficient way, and thereâs going to be fewer surprises as well.
Consistency Builds Confidence
Good process knowledge is also going to create good consistency in your business, and thatâs crucial, even though it can be overrated. When results are predictable, it means you can keep standards up, and thatâs going to make customers trust you more, but itâs also going to mean that your employees have more confidence in the business, which leads to better work and more productivity.
Your competitors might see how consistent you are, but they wonât necessarily know how you do it, so theyâll find it hard to copy what youâre doing - and it all comes from being consistent with your processes, which in turn comes from having good knowledge of them.
It Makes Training and Scaling Easier
Businesses that understand their processes well find it a lot easier to train new staff for one thing, and for another, they find it easier to grow. Thatâs because clear, well-understood processes and systems mean everyone has the same knowledge, so itâs not just something one person knows.
Why is that important? Imagine if that one person was sick, on holiday, or even left the company altogether - their knowledge would be lost, and youâd have to start all over again. By sharing the information and training everyone to know it all, even if itâs not their direct job, youâre a lot safer, and growth is a lot more possible.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
â Live Streamingâ Interactive Chatâ Private Showsâ HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch âą No registration required âą HD streaming
Processor knowledge | Do not come to anyone's talk, choose yourself the best processor
Processor knowledge | Do not come to anyoneâs talk, choose yourself the best processor
Technologyhas developed at a very rapid pace, and especially smartphone technology has developed even faster. Today, the smartphone is no longer a commodity but it has become a part of our lives. At such a time, you take a smartphone, you are not able to do good gaming in that smartphone, the app is taking time to open, or if an app is crashing or is not opening, then such a phone Not useful,âŠ
