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:
Douglas Adams wrote, "Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you’re 15 and 35 is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're 35 is against the natural order of things."
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
I think about this quote whenever I get angry at the technology around me. When I rail against the Great Enshittening, am I simply committing the sin of nostalgia ("Nostalgia is a toxic impulse" -J. Hodgman)? I am, after all, old.
I've written before how conservatives' yearning for "simpler times" is really just a wish to be a child again. The reason times seemed simpler during your childhood is that you were a child, and if your parents did their job, they shielded you from a lot of the complexity of their adulthood so you could enjoy your childhood:
That's where the "National Customer Rage Survey" comes in. It's been surveying a panel of 1,000 representative consumers every three years for a decade, continuing a research project that started in 1976. The survey measures respondents' attitudes towards the businesses they deal with, and as of 2025, it's fair to say, customers are pissed:
We're experiencing more problems with the products and services we use. Those problems are more severe, they make us angrier, and they produce lingering stress. More and more, we are seeking revenge on the businesses that piss us off.
So it's not just me, an old man yelling at the cloud. The world is getting shittier.
The latest Customer Rage Survey inspired The Guardian's Heather Timmons to launch a new investigative series looking at how fucked up everything is. Her inaugural installment is very good, and it's drawn a massive reader response:
I spoke with Timmons this week about the series. She told me she's been deluged with emails from readers who feel that the world is different now – and many of them cite my work on enshittification. Timmons wanted to know what advice I had for her readers. I told her that I don't think you can solve this as a consumer, because this isn't a market problem, it's a political problem, and shopping isn't politics:
Later, Timmons forwarded one of those emails to me. It gave an eloquent and evocative account of just how rancid the vibe is these days. The writer said that when they and their spouse encounter this rot, they cite Stephen King's Dark Tower novels, quoting the oft-repeated phrase from that series: "The world has moved on."
At this point, I should warn you that the following contains some Dark Tower spoilers, so if you're planning to read a decades-old (but very good) dystopian western/science fiction crossover series, and if spoilers bug you, this might not be the essay for you.
Spoiler alert!
Still with me? OK, then.
In the Dark Tower novels, we crisscross a fallen world in which decay is all around us. The buildings are rotten, the machines have stopped working and no one knows how to fix them, babies and livestock alike are frequently born with deadly congenital defects. Much of the world has fallen into wasteland, cracked and barren. An army of wreckers, led by the demagogue John Farson (who styles himself "The Good Man") are slowly but surely conquering the land, laying waste to those few remaining outposts of civilization and conscripting the young men in the conquered lands to march on their neighbors.
It wasn't always this way. There was a time when the world was defined by hope and virtue and light, when the machines were fixed and the crops were harvested. Life wasn't golden – there were still squabbles and sorrows and even wars – but life was good.
And then the world moved on.
For reasons that no one truly understands, the normal push/pull of decay and renewal turned into a one-way, irreversible process in which everything that crumbled or snapped or burned up couldn't be repaired or replaced or recovered. Our mysterious ability to beat back the Second Law of Thermodynamics – an absurdity we probably should have always treated as an aberration – has collapsed. The world has moved on.
The Dark Tower series is a long, long, long Bildungsroman, with many detours through the life-stories of the characters in the ensemble cast, as well as the biographies of many of the figures they meet along the road. It's mostly an adventure novel, as road-trip tales tend to be, but those character studies and the lore that they surface – from our world and theirs – creates an overwhelming, many-layered, richly textured sense of loss and worse, of despair. For the world has moved on, and despite the love and care and bravery of many of the people in that world, the world cannot be redeemed. Each terrible day of those people's lives is the best day of the rest of their lives. From here on in, it only gets worse.
When Timmons' reader and their spouse greet every fresh depredation in modern life – hours on the phone with customer service to resolve a billing error that the company repeats every month, say – with "the world has moved on," they are invoking something heavy. This isn't just a rancid vibe, it's the fucking end-times.
For all that the Dark Tower novels are a series of cracking adventures and thoughtful character studies, they are also a mystery. Over and over again, we are made to ask ourselves, why has the world moved on? Was it John Farson and his army? Was it the Man in Black, the evil wizard whom the book's protagonist has pursued across time and space? Was it the Crimson King, the evil force whom the Man in Black serves?
Well, yes – and no.
Midway through the novels, we learn that the Crimson King and his evil minions have laid siege to "the beams," vast ley-lines that span the universe and provide the force that pushes away entropy, creating breathing room where repair and care can live. "All things serve the beams," we're told. The beams are the organizing force of the universe, the answer to the riddle of how such pitiful things as we could have fought back remorseless entropy for so long. By attacking the beams, the villains of the series have all but snuffed out that force, and so the world has moved on.
When I read that email and the invocation of the Dark Tower, I was immediately struck by how apt this comparison is. Because, as I've written many times, there were always enshittifiers who would have plundered your data and money and treated you with naked contempt:
There were always enshittifiers, but those enshittifiers faced external forces that checked their wreckers' urge. They were held in check by competition, and regulation, and workers' sense of fairness and duty, and by the threat of new products and services that might pop up to correct the defects they deliberately introduced into their products by enshittifying them.
And the foundation – the Dark Tower upon which all the beams converged- was antitrust enforcement, grounded in the idea that we could not afford to let any company – not a "good" company, nor a "bad" company – get so large that it could no longer be regulated, lest its executives become "autocrats of trade":
The same people who laid siege to antitrust law would later come after all forms of checks and balances. These are the people who gave us the "unitary executive" and Project 2025, and the collapse of accountability that has allowed the worst people to commit the gravest sins they could imagine and still reap vast fortunes. These beam-breakers wanted kings, and they got them.
I collect definitions of "conservatism," and one of my favorites comes from Corey Robin's book, The Reactionary Mind. Robins asks how it is that we can call so many disparate, irreconcilable ideologies – various ethno-nationalisms, imperialism, financialism, patriarchy, Christian nationalism, libertarianism, white supremacy, etc – "conservative"? What binds all these views together?
Robin's answer: the foundation that all these otherwise disparate views share is that some people are born to rule, while others are born to be ruled over. When these lesser people are elevated to positions of power, their inferiority creates a system of misrule, by which we all suffer. The best outcome for everyone is for us all to know our place and defer to our social betters.
That's why conservatives are obsessed with affirmative action, DEI, and any form of anti-racism. For them, the discriminatory outcomes we see in the wild are natural, reflecting the in-born defects in the people at the bottom of the social order. That's why, after every plane crash, every collision between a cargo ship and a bridge, every spectacular corporate bankruptcy, conservatives race to uncover the race, gender, religion and sexual orientation of the captain, the pilot or the CEO.
If the person who oversaw the catastrophe has anything remotely resembling a marginalized identity, then this is loudly trumpeted as confirmation that "diversity hires," promoted above their station, are ruining our society and wrecking our bridges. Naturally, if the person in charge was a wealthy, well-born, straight white guy, that's just proof that shit happens – it definitely doesn't prove that white straight guys, as a class, should be removed from positions of power.
For conservatives, virtue is "whatever the people who are born to rule desire." Hence Frank Wilhoit's definition of conservativism, "exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect." It's not a crime if the president does it. It's also not a crime if your boss does it, or if a monopolist does it, or if ICE does it. It's not a crime if the IDF do it, or if the Epstein Class do it. "Taxes are for the little people":
The attack on antitrust law was part of the attack on the rule of law, the campaign to put everyone back in the their place. It's a piece of the effort to establish a new hereditary aristocracy, and every hereditary aristocracy requires heredity serfs (that would be us):
The ideology of economism – which says that market outcomes are the only way to govern a society – cashes out to "the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must." If we interfere with mergers, or labor practices, or commercial conduct, we "distort the market," which is literally going against nature:
That's why Trump dismantled the consumer protection agencies, the antitrust agencies, the labor protection agencies, the environmental protection agencies. When someone in power cheats the system, that's not a crime, no matter how many people they rob, maim or kill. As Trump told us on the debate stage in 2016, that kind of cheating "makes me smart":
That's why Elon Musk (almost) got to force every pension saver in America to bail out his money-incinerating AI business and his failed social media takeover – because the rules that protect everyday investors are "for the little people." Musk's mistake was trying to get a bunch of billionaires to hold the bag, too. The one form of systemic violence our society will not tolerate is trillionaire-on-billionaire violence:
The world has moved on. 50 years of neoliberal rule has weakened and snapped the beams – the rule of law, consumer and labor rights, civil rights – that radiated from our Dark Tower – antitrust law, which blocked the emergence of the "autocrats of trade." The people who besieged these beams had the same motives as the Crimson King and John Farson and the Man in Black: they were willing to pay any price for a world free from consequences for people like them. They knew they were born to rule, and that the rules were "for the little people," that breaking those rules "made them smart."
They wanted "bossism." Or, as rendered in the original Afrikaans, "baasskap," which means, "the social, political and economic domination of South Africa by its minority white population":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baasskap
Not for nothing, baasskap is the foundation of Muskism, the ideology that Elon Musk epitomizes, even if he can't articulate it:
In "The Utopia of Rules," the late David Graeber described how neoliberal deregulation produced exactly the kind of state that we were warned we'd get under communism. Thanks to monopolies, all the stores were the same and they all sold the same goods. Thanks to the dismantling of labor protection and unions, no one had enough money to get by. Thanks to elite impunity, we were ruled by monsters who committed crimes in the open and thrived as a result. Thanks to unchecked greed, we paid everything we had for healthcare, only to be denied treatment when we needed it. Thanks to the dismantling of the welfare state, more and more of us had to wait in long lines to fill out absurdly long forms in triplicate. Thanks to the intrinsic instability of such a terrible system, more and more of us ended up in prison, and protest became more and more illegal:
Graeber pointed out that the rise of the web made it seductively easy for people in authority to force us to fill in forms. When analog bureaucracies impose paperwork costs on us, they also impose paperwork costs on themselves, because processing and filing those forms requires substantial effort, even if filling in those forms requires even more effort from us.
When it comes to virtual paperwork, the asymmetry is even more pronounced. Sure, it takes some admin to set up an online form and write the scripts to process its outputs, but that's a one-off. The form-giver can perform a very little admin and still impose a giant, repeated admin burden on the rest of us.
AI has only made this worse. Now, thanks to vibe coding, everyone can produce a form and its associated processing and analytics back-end with prompts, which creates a grave moral hazard. The kinds of activities that I used to fill in a single short form to accomplish now requires ten lengthy forms, created by different people in the same organization, all asking for variations on the same information. Through AI, we have democratized bureaucracy. It's Kafka-as-a-service.
What's more, when you're dealing with a monopoly, you have no choice but to complete whatever paperwork they throw at you. And when the vibe-coded back-end scripts shit the bed and lose or misinterpret your data, you have no choice but to endure an infinite telephone hold queue (if you're lucky) or get shunted to a customer service bot (if you're unlucky):
It's entirely possible to build webforms that are thoughtful, fast, respectful of our time, and well-processed. The problem is that fielding these forms requires that the form-giver undertake some intensive, moderately expensive work (once), while skipping this step merely requires that we all perform intensive, time-consuming work (over and over and over again):
https://mohkohn.co.uk/writing/html-first/
This is how we end up with government forms that require you to list every trip you have ever taken to the USA, since your infancy, with every flight number, which you can only get help with by talking to a chatbot that emails you an out-of-date PDF no matter what question you ask of it:
This is how we end up with massive customer service queues, long lines at tills, and no one at the gate to answer your questions when your flight is canceled. Understaffing is a form of enshittification, one that shifts value from shoppers to owners, and shifts consequences from owners to workers:
This is how we end up with broken machines that no one can fix. Firing workers and replacing them with chatbots or contractors means incinerating their process knowledge – the precious, inchoate, unrecorded understanding that keeps everything working:
This is how companies that make products we love suddenly decide to wreck those products: when the only consequences for shitty products is angry customers with nowhere to go and no one to vent their rage upon except workers who have no labor rights and can't afford to quit, why not do a mafia bust-out for every business?
The world has moved on. Nothing works. Everything costs too much. No one can help. No one knows how to fix anything. The beams were broken by the Crimson King and his economism-crazed minions. The Dark Tower might fall.
So what consumer advice do I have for people who are angry about this? I don't have any consumer advice, I'm afraid. You can't shop your way out of a monopoly. Once again, shopping is not politics.
What I have for you is political advice. To restore the beams and beat back entropy again, we need a better system, not more virtuous individuals. If you feel – as I do – that "the world has moved on," then to wrench it back, you will have to join a polity. Support activist groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the digital rights group I've been at for the past 25 years:
https://supporters.eff.org/donate/join-eff
Join a union. If there's no union at your jobsite, start a union. If you work in tech, you start this process by talking to techsolidarity.org and the techworkerscoalition.org. In the UK, get in touch with United Tech and Allied Workers:
https://utaw.tech/
Get involved in party politics. Find a political party whose local organization supports your values (even if the national version of that party sucks) and then work with your fellow grassroots activists to drag or replace the party leaders. Get involved in local politics: if there's one thing Moms For Liberty has taught us, it's that unregarded, seemingly unimportant local offices have enormous potential to change facts on the ground for the people where you live. Those changes don't have to be change for the worse.
Doing politics is hard. Hell, after all, is other people. It would be great if we could make change by changing ourselves, but that's not how any of this works. The world has moved on, and you can't save it. But together, we can restore the beams and beat back entropy. Hell is other people, but only because other people are so great but it's so hard to figure out how to work together. We can do it, though. We did it with the post-war settlement, the 30 glorious years when we built the welfare state, regulated polluters and bosses, and kicked off the civil rights movement. We did it then, and we can do it again. We must. All things serve the beams.
My next book is The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI, out next month. Pre-order it now, including as a DRM-free audiobook or ebook, at my Kickstarter, and help me continue to prove that DRM-free isn't just the right way to reach an audience, it's also the best way to reach them.
Yesterday, I attended a Brian Eno talk about the nature of creativity and art based on What Art Does, the short book he published with Bette Adriaanse last year:
I haven't read the book (yet – I just ordered a copy), but the talk really got me fizzing. The subject matter (not just what art does, but also what art is) is one I've given a lot of thought to, and Eno's characteristic mix of gnomic koans and deceptively plainspoken assertions brought me along to some realizations of my own.
For Eno, art is "everything you don't have to do." You have to wear clothes to protect yourself from the elements, but you don't need to adorn those clothes. You need to speak to make yourself understood by the people around you, but you don't have to sing or write poetry or make up stories.
This is a really critical point, and I think it can be further refined by this: "Art is intended to make other people feel something." This distinguishes "art" from "beauty." A sunset can be beautiful, but no one intends anything by it. An artist who takes a photo or paints a picture of a sunset does so in the hopes that it will make you feel something, but the sun and the atmosphere and the Earth's curvature and rotation don't hope anything, because they are inanimate.
This distinction has lately become far more significant, thanks to the rise of images and words that have the seeming of intent, but who don't have an intender. When you paint a painting, every brushstroke conveys an intent, even if you can't point at an individual brushstroke and articulate its purpose. The same is true of prose: every word and punctuation mark is there for a reason, and "being good at writing" (like "being good at painting") is how we describe someone who has practiced so much that these reasons can be infused into each micro-decision on a near-totally subconscious level.
Contrast this with AI: when you prompt an AI to generate words or pixels, you are conveying some intent about the feeling you want the people who experience the model's output to experience. The problem is that the AI doesn't have any intent of its own – it just has statistical predictions, based on other people's intent, which it has analyzed through its training data.
So when the AI expands the three sentences in your prompt into 100,000 words or 1,000,000 pixels, it isn't adding any of its intention to the finished work, it's diluting the intention you fed to it. Three sentences divided by one million pixels yields an image that has an average intentionality that's so low that it's practically homeopathic.
Until recently, we weren't accustomed to encountering coherent strings of words or polished images that had no intender, so we imputed the existence of that intender to them, and we did what we always do when we encounter a work of art: we tried to mentally materialize a facsimile of the feeling the artist experienced while creating the work.
Because the intention of these works was so dilute, we ended up hallucinating an intent. We made up an imaginary artist who meant something by every choice in the work, and experienced an emotional affect that we ourselves had created out of (nearly) whole cloth.
As a species, we've been through this before. Think back to those sunsets. There was a time when we all thought of sunsets as being explicitly created by another being, who was in communication with us through the natural environment (some people still believe this). Looking at a sunset was an exercise in asking yourself, "If I were God, what would I be trying to say to me with this sunset?" just as looking at one of my photos of a sunset would be an exercise in asking yourself, "If I were Cory, what would I be trying to say to me with this photo of a sunset?"
The rise of materialism and scientific rationalism is sometimes called a "disenchantment" and indeed, there's a sense in which a sunset that we know to have no intender is no longer "enchanted." The experience of a sunset becomes something like, "Those colors and their interplay with the physical world is very beautiful." It might even be, "How could I capture that beauty in a painting or a photo or a description so that I could communicate it to someone else?" But it's not, "I wonder what God wants me to feel when I look at this sunset?"
So for many of us, the experience of AI "art" went from, "Wow, there's a person in the machine that's trying to tell me something," to "Wow, that is an impressive feat of software design, but it doesn't say anything to me." Maybe some of us think, "Huh, I could take some element of this, refine it with my own brushstrokes or words, and make something out of it." That's like thinking about turning a sunset into a painting: the sunset is striking and maybe beautiful, but it doesn't become art until you work at it, in order to make it communicate something:
Mark Fisher describes the "seeming of an intent without an intender" as "eerie." It's true: when the door slams in the night and there's no one else in the house, it's eerie. But eeriness is easily dispelled: once you locate the open window that's creating the draft that's blowing the door closed, the eeriness regresses swiftly to the mean:
Banishing eeriness may be straightforward, but preventing eeriness is much harder. We are prone to imputing intent to the things we see in the world. In "Genesis," an essay from EL Doctorow's (no relation) collection The Creationists, Doctorow describes the origins of the Babylonian creation story (which the Hebrews ripped off for Genesis 1:1-29 – Genesis is Babylonian fanfic). The Babylonians made up this story about how God created the heavens and Earth and so forth, and this story was so cool that they couldn't believe that they had just made it up, so they concluded that God must have put it in their minds:
Back to Eno: central to his talk was the "theory of mind." To have a theory of mind is to be able to impute someone else's intent. It's when you ask yourself, "What does that person mean by the thing they just said or did?" Because art is a process by which an artist tries to get you to feel something, it requires that the artist have a theory about your mind. And because experiencing art is a process of trying to figure out what the artist wanted you to feel when you experienced their work, experiencing art also requires a theory of mind.
From time to time, I teach fiction writing workshops, and one of the lectures I always give is about how stories are a "fuggly hack":
It's very weird that storytellers can trick our brains into experiencing emotions based on empathy for "people" whom we know to be imaginary. Romeo and Juliet are made up, they never lived, they never died, and so, objectively speaking, their deaths are less tragic than the death of the yogurt you ate for breakfast. That yogurt was alive and now it's dead, after all. And yet, we weep for Romeo and Juliet.
Our automatic "theory of mind" processes create empathy for stuff even when we know that stuff is inanimate. But the purpose of narrative isn't getting you to experience empathy with an imaginary person. The purpose of narrative is to get you to experience that empathy so that you will feel something. In other words, the storyteller who describes a character who is swept away by the beauty of a sunset is trying to get you to feel "swept away" not "empathy for someone who is swept away."
There's lots of art that skips the step in which you are asked to first experience empathy for an imaginary person in order to arrive at some feeling. A lot of music, visual art, dance, and poetry seeks to evince that feeling in you directly.
When this works, it's profound. I think about this a lot in terms of built environments, specifically Disney themepark rides. When I started hanging around with Imagineers (the multidisciplinary artists who design and execute these rides), I noticed that they made frequent reference to the role of narrative storytelling in their ride designs, which was weird, because the very best Disney rides do not use narrative to evince a feeling.
Think of two Disney rides: Snow White's Enchanted Wish (1955); and The Little Mermaid: Ariel's Undersea Adventure (2011). In Snow White, riders follow a track through a series of animated vignettes with UV-fluorescing painted backdrops and an orchestral soundtrack. There are almost no words spoken in the soundtrack. The ride's vignettes recreate scenes from the 1937 animated film, but they don't make any attempt to explain the plot of the movie.
A rider who'd never seen Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs could not recount the plot of the movie to you. However, that rider could absolutely convey the emotional affect of every scene in the film. It is a near-perfect transmission of the feelings evinced by the movie, notwithstanding that it bypasses recounting the film's narrative.
By contrast, The Little Mermaid ride is what's sometimes pejoratively called a "book report ride." The scenes are full of dialog, and they explicitly re-create the storyline of the 1989 film. These scenes are well-executed, with lots of clever mechanical effects and skillfully painted and sculpted scenes and robots. A rider who never saw the film could give you a scene-by-scene breakdown of it – but they could not tell you about any of the emotional beats of the film. For all that the ride faithfully recreates the story of the film, it does so at the expense of the purpose of the film, the feeling the film is designed to evince from its audience.
As a novelist, I find it natural that someone trying to build a Little Mermaid ride would start from the premise that it should explicitly retell the story of the film. If you want an audience member to experience a feeling, narrative gives you the opportunity to explicitly describe the feeling you want the audience member to experience. You can situate a character on a lonely beach at sunset and tell the reader how that character feels.
The problem is that while this has an increased likelihood of being high-fidelity way of transmitting a feeling, it also has an increased likelihood of being a low-intensity way of conveying that feeling. When you tell someone about what's going on in another person's mind (including an imaginary person's mind), it doesn't fire up the theory-of-mind machine in the way that asking someone to infer the state of someone else's mind from implicit cues does.
This is why fiction writers are exhorted to "show, not tell." Dramatic, implicit evocations of an emotion are intrinsically more interesting than explicit statements about emotions. That's not to say that exposition can't evince an emotion – it can and does. It's just harder to do this with exposition than it is to do it with dramatization:
In his talk yesterday, Eno discussed abstract art, and the way that it evinces feelings in the viewer directly, without ever telling you what to feel. This is in keeping with much of Eno's own art (he recently told me that when he writes lyrics, he never uses the words "I," "me," "you," or "love").
In this theory I'm developing here, we could say that the more abstract a work is, the harder it is to evince a specific feeling with high fidelity, but the more likely it is that the feelings it does evince will be intensely felt. When your aesthetic sense resonates with a Henry Moore bronze or an Eno ambient track, the thrum is deep and strong.
Key to this theory is that it's about how hard it is for an artist to evince a feeling and how hard it is for the artist to make that feeling intense. Abstract art is more likely to be misunderstood (or not understood) than explicit narratives, but lots of abstract art is very well understood by people for whom it resonates. Explicit narratives are more likely to have a flatter affect than work that attempts to skewer your emotions directly, but plenty of explicit narratives make you feel the most profound emotions you're capable of feeling.
Imagine a 2×2 grid with "intensity" on one axis and "fidelity" on the other. It's easier to evince an intense feeling when you are more abstract, but it's harder to control what that feeling will be. These are works that operate on an implicit theory of mind ("I think I know what you'll feel when you see this"). It's easier to control the feeling you're evincing when you are more concrete, but it's harder to make that feeling an intense one ("I will tell you what someone else is feeling using this work").
None of this is to establish a hierarchy of art. As Eno says, the value of art is in whether it makes you feel something and what it makes you feel – not how that feeling is drawn forth. In What Art Does, Eno describes both art and science as an extension of our natural, in-born tendency to play. The difference is that we judge the success of science based on whether we can validate its conclusions, while we judge the success of art based on whether it excites us:
'Excitement' is to art as 'falsifiability' is to science.
(With thanks to Brian Eno.)
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:
She got the idea for the study while walking with her advisor at Stanford to discuss her thesis topic, and the paper she eventually published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2014 is sharp enough that it should have ended the seated meeting on the day it came out.
She ran 4 experiments on 176 people. Same person tested twice. Once sitting, once walking. The creativity tasks were the standard ones psychologists have used for decades to measure how good a brain is at generating novel useful ideas.
81% of participants in the first experiment produced more creative ideas while walking than while sitting. In the second experiment, 88%. In the third, 100%. Every single person walked into a more creative version of themselves. On average, people generated 60% more novel useful ideas the moment their legs started moving.
The skeptical question is the obvious one. Maybe it was the fresh air. Maybe it was the scenery passing by. Maybe it was the change of environment doing the work, not the walking itself.
Oppezzo killed every one of those explanations with one experimental decision. She put people on a treadmill facing a blank wall. No scenery. No fresh air. No environmental change. Just legs moving in place while staring at white drywall. The 60% boost held.
Then she ran the experiment that closed the case completely. She took participants outside in two conditions. Half of them walked through a Stanford courtyard. The other half were pushed through the exact same courtyard in a wheelchair. Same outdoor stimulation. Same scenery passing at the same speed. The only difference was whether the legs were moving.
The walkers produced dramatically more novel high-quality ideas than the wheelchair group. The outdoors did almost nothing on its own. The walking did everything.
She also tested the opposite kind of thinking. Convergent thinking. The kind where there is one right answer and you have to narrow down to it. Word puzzles where 3 words share a hidden fourth word that connects them. The seated participants did slightly better on these. Walkers got slightly worse.
Walking is not a general intelligence enhancer. It does one specific thing. It opens up the divergent search inside your brain. The part that generates options. The part that produces unexpected connections. The part that takes a problem and finds five ways into it instead of one.
When you need to converge on the single right answer, sit down. When you need to find the answer in the first place, get up.
The mechanism is now well understood. Walking selectively activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network, the system inside your brain that runs when you are not consciously focused on anything. The DMN is where mind-wandering happens. Where memories cross-reference each other. Where ideas that have been sitting in separate folders inside your head finally bump into each other.
When you sit at a desk and force yourself to concentrate, you suppress the DMN. When you walk at a natural pace, the executive part of your brain gets just busy enough handling the walking that the DMN comes online and starts doing the work that focus was blocking.
The most useful finding in the entire paper is the one almost nobody quotes. The boost did not turn off the moment people stopped walking. Participants who walked first and then sat back down stayed elevated. Their next round of seated creativity work was still significantly better than people who had been sitting the whole time. The rest lingered for at least several minutes after the legs stopped moving.
You do not need to do creative work while walking. You need to walk before the creative work. The brain holds the state.
Gadzooks, this is The Gates of Firestorm Peak (1996) and what a mess!
It’s not Bruce Cordell’s fault, really. This scenario was commissioned as a showcase for the 2.5E Player’s Option Rules (Combat & Tactics, Skills & Powers and Spells & Magic) and it’s a compelling argument to never use them. Amusingly, the villain is a wizard corrupted by outré forces, expressed by the fact that his spellcasting uses magic points. I don’t think that’s intended as commentary, but I’m taking it as such anyway. Thankfully, all this stuff is optional and can be completely ignored. It takes up a ton of space, though.
Without all that bunk, you’ve got a pretty solid, lengthy and icky dungeon crawl. The idea is that the titular gates only open once a generation when a particular comet is in the sky. The father of one of the player characters went in 27 years ago and never came out, so, well, go and get him. The outer reaches are a pretty standard, if very dangerous, slice of the Underdark populated primarily by duergar. Deeper, the party finds horrors from the Far Realm have seeped in. In fact, this is the first published appearance of the Far Realm and some of its nasty, Lovecraftian inhabitants. It would go on to become a key locale in later D&D editions, and particularly for the Eberron setting. Aside from extradimensional monsters, there’s some more conventional horrible stuff in dungeon as well. I particularly dislike [complimentary] the fountain, which Arnie Swekel illustrated just to drive home how disturbing it is.
Swekel was a good choice of artist for this, he is like a latter-day Russ Nicholson who excels at illustrating player character types in their death throes without making it too disturbing. The Jeff Easley cover ties the action to the Player’s Option books, but feels somewhat out of step for the more horror-oriented tone inside.
In a weird bit of packaging design, the adventure book came packaged in an identically fronted file folder, which contained counters and a battle map as well. My second-hand copy was missing those, but the folder…is unusual! A couple of the later Planescape modules had a similar folder, but I don’t know of any TSR products that were configured quite like this.
watching james bond is fun because its always a mix of "this display of late colonial masculinity is as repulsive as it is compelling" and "this is fucking siiiiiiiick i love globe trotting adventure when I grow up I wanna be a spy"
Honestly, as a German I can not quite understand the obsession of the English speaking world with the question whether a word exists or not. If you have to express something for which there is no word, you have to make a new one, preferably by combining well-known words, and in the very same moment it starts to exist. Agree?
Deutsche Freunde, could you please create for me a word for the extreme depression I feel when I bend down to pick up a piece of litter and discover two more pieces of litter?
ver = prefix to indicate something difficult or negative, a change that leads to deterioration or even destruction that is difficult to reverse or to undo, or a strong negative change of the mental state of a person
der Müll = garbage, trash, rubbish, litter
-ung = -ing
die Vermüllung = littering
ver- = see before
zweifeln = to doubt
-ung = see before
die Verzweiflung = despair, exasperation, desperation
@shiplocks-of-love I don’t think that will happen. The words make perfect sense. I think if German is your mother tongue you get a feeling for combining words, like a
• irren = to become lost (also: to err, to be mistaken; to wander, to stray)
• der Garten = garden
der Irrgarten = maze, knot garden
• be- = prefix with a variety of functions: ¹as part of a compound word, it denotes a processing or change of state; ²as part of a compound word, it denotes a touch; ³as part of a compound word, it denotes a more intensive preoccupation with or thematization of something; ⁴it forms from a noun an adjective with a pseudo-participle form because the corresponding verb does not exist; ⁵as a prefix, it forms a transitive verb from a previously intransitive verb; ⁶as a prefix of a verb, it shifts the focus and thus changes the sentence structure
• lustig = funny
• -ung = suffix turning an adjective/adverb into a noun
die Belustigung = amusement, entertainment, merriment
der Beitrag = contribution, article in a newspaper or magazine, posting on social media, input to a discussion
The thing is, since in German you have to decline/conjugate many words in relation to the noun they are refering to those monster words actually serve a purpose of making the language simpler.
A common example is a (as in any) red wine (ein roter Wein) as compaired to the compound a red wine (ein Rotwein). If rot is an adjective it has to be conjugated: der rote Wein - des roten Weins - die roten Weine - and many more. But it if rot is part of the noun you only have to decline Wein: der Rotwein - des Rotweins - die Rotweine.
So, die Verzweiflung über die Vermüllung der Umwelt is way longer than Umweltvermüllungsverzweiflung and you would have to know three grammatical genders and the words’ respective declinations. Whereas for Umweltvermüllungsverzweiflung you only need to know that Verzweiflung is grammatically feminine (die) and its deklinations.
i love this, but this isn’t the german i am exposed to in day to day life, as a filthy berlin Ausländer.
When i try to make words, most germans look at me confused, as if i have committed some transgression.
Tell me, am i doing it wrong?
I came up with the humble word: “Spaßgier / spaßgierig” to describe the intense, good but also clearly bsd for you condition of being torn apart by too many fun things to do. A common berlin problem.
Example: “Heute gibt’s zu viele coole Events - aber ich will sie alle genießen!!! Es wird stressig aber ich bin zu spaßgierig!”
Did i do it wrong? Is it just not complex and long and overthetop enough for the german mind to appreciate?
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:
We're a diverse species, cognitively speaking – different ways of thinking come more easily to some of us than others. I'm good at a lot of things, but I have terrible spatial sense. I can't parallel park or catch a ball, and I get lost so easily it's almost comical (it's a running joke in my family).
Luckily, I'm married to a woman with incredible spacial sense. My wife Alice can sit at one end of a basketball court and look at the scoreboard at the other end and say, "It's 1" off-center to the right and 1° off true clockwise." She'll be right. She's also a crack shot and an extremely proficient gamer (she was the first woman to play e-sports internationally, on the English Quake team).
I'm good at stuff she's not good at. I don't mind wading through personal admin and bookkeeping processes, while she finds these excruciating (and interestingly, it's reversed when it comes to work-related admin, which I find torturous and which she excels at). I love listening to audiobooks, which she can't focus on at all. She loves instrumental music, which I broadly find tedious; while I find it much easier to work while listening to music with great lyrics.
This is great. As a couple, we make up for one another's deficits and complement one another's strengths. Obviously, this is also true as a species: we all like doing different stuff in different ways, and that's good, because there is a lot of stuff to do, and it's pretty damned heterogenous. A complex, dynamic world demands a complex, dynamic response.
This is a bedrock of cybernetics, the study of systems control. The "law of requisite complexity" states, "in order to be efficaciously adaptive, the internal complexity of a system must match the external complexity it confronts":
Cyberneticians and systems designers understand that their job is partly to design a set of controls that are as complex as the system they modulate, and partly to simplify that system to make it possible to control. Think of how you can make a database search run faster by confining it to one field in records from the past year, or how you can hold down the shift key to constrain a rectangular selection tool so it draws perfect squares.
This happens cognitively, too. Pretty much anyone can track their expenses from a work trip, but the company bookkeeper needs to have a certain "head for figures" that lets them do this all day long, for everyone's expenses, so we limit the kinds of bookkeeping we ask normies to do, and reserve the heavy lifting for specialists.
As a freelancer, I hire a bunch of people who have cognitive strengths that I lack. My accountant isn't just a person who knows more about tax law than I do – he's also someone who can manage the reconciliation of all my bookkeeping spreadsheets better than I ever could, and without the psychic trauma I experience when I try to do this on my own.
Likewise, my publisher employs copyeditors and proofreaders who find the typos that my brain just doesn't see, and when they send me back my marked-up manuscripts for review, I ask my mom to give them a pass, because she finds the typos they miss.
Sitting between me and my publishers are my agents (I have several of these, one for English-language literary deals, another for foreign rights, another for media, and yet another for speaking engagements). I love these folks, partly because the better they are at their jobs, the easier it is for me to pay my mortgage, but especially because they really enjoy doing things I hate doing: a) asking for money, and; b) haggling.
For me, haggling is (at best) embarrassing. At worst, it's humiliating. It's always exhausting. But for my agents, it's invigorating. Many's the time I've gotten on a video call with my agents after they've concluded a successful deal and they're glowing. Call it what you will: cognitive diversity, emotional diversity, neurodiversity…my agents and I have it, and it's good for all of us.
And here's the thing that makes these world-class hagglers great: they can switch it off. They're competitive as hell, they love to bargain hard, but they understand that they're playing an iterated game, and if they crush the publishers' representatives they're up against, then they'll ruin my good name.
More: when the bargaining's done and we're having a nice chat about everyday things, or getting together for dinner, they're not on. They're just normal, not wrestling over every detail. Bargaining is what they do, it's not who they are.
That doesn't just make them bearable as human beings, it also makes them better at their jobs. There's an old pal with whom I've done some creative work, and at one point I needed to pay them for their part in a project. They asked me to route the payment through their manager, and this manager assumed I was just another production hiring my buddy, and let loose with his full power at me over this payment, haggling for paperwork that would make Creative Commons releases impossible, as well as other (normal but not appropriate in this case) conditions. I emailed my pal, who emailed their manager to stand down and treat this as a friendly negotiation, whereupon Mr Hyde became Dr Jekyll and we wrapped things up in about ten minutes.
These haggler types do very well in our society, which is organized around the idea of efficient markets, where everyone is always bargaining to the last breath in order to "maximize their utility."
This ideology isn't just an observation ("society is a market"), it's also a demand ("society should be a market"). People who find aggressive haggling invigorating have taken over the operations of our civilization, and they are determined to convert everything to a marketplace, from waiting on hold for the IRS to looking for a parking place:
The people running this game are so invigorated by haggling that they can't not haggle. They make putting a price on everything into a virtue. They want to be able to sell their kidneys. More importantly, they want to buy your kidneys.
In Sarah Wynn-Williams's Careless People, there's a memorable incident in which Sheryl Sandberg is shocked to the roots of her hair when she is told that she can't go to Mexico and buy a kidney if her child gets sick. Her child isn't even sick! She's just offended that this hypothetical situation wouldn't be resolved by bargaining:
For these people, cheating is just bargaining by another means. They embrace bizarre concepts like "revealed preferences," the idea that if you say you're dissatisfied with a bargain, but you accept it anyway, you have a "revealed preference" for the deal. In other words, if someone sells their kidney to Sheryl Sandberg in order to make the rent, they have a "revealed preference" for having only one kidney – and if they sell their privacy to Sheryl Sandberg in order to stay in touch with the people they love, they have a "revealed preference" for having their data extracted and exploited by Facebook:
Trump is the apotheosis of this. The true "art of the deal" is just cheating. That's why he stiffed his workers, stiffed his suppliers, stiffed his backers and stiffed his base. If you can cheat and get away with it, it's not even cheating: "that makes you smart":
Running the world on "caveat emptor" isn't just a transfer from workers to the wealthy, it's a transfer from people who are exhausted by bargaining to people who are invigorated by it. It's a way of transforming just one of the many differences in how humans think into the single most important success criterion, the major determinant of your life's chances. It's a way for the invigorated to utterly dominate the exhausted. It's the elevation of "stop hitting yourself" into political ideology.
The antidote to this is something Dan Davies calls "The Club Med theory." He argues that while mostly we sneer at inclusive holiday resorts as a way to go on vacation without having to engage with another country's culture and people, that the original value of these resorts (still present today) is the way they let you go on vacation without participating in markets:
Club Med was founded by an Olympian named Gérard Blitz whose insight was that "what people seek from a holiday is not luxury or material comfort, but happiness." For Blitz, the value of an inclusive resort wasn't the open bar and the buffet, "it’s the relief from participation in the everyday economy."
As Davies points out, class differences (between guests, at least) are erased at inclusive resorts. The richest person at the resort eats and drinks the same food, goes on the same excursions, and participates in the same activities as the poorest person at the resort (yes, this is less true of today's inclusive resorts, which are full of "up-charges," representing the triumph of people who are invigorated by bargaining over people who are exhausted by it).
For Davies, the beauty of an inclusive resort is that it removes the "cognitive demands" of a market economy, which are inherently stressful: "Every transaction is a decision, and decisions cost energy."
Davies proposes that "this is quite difficult for people to understand if they have an economics degree." Why would the resort restaurants improve their food quality if they're not competing for your business? Why would servers hustle to make you happy if they're not competing for tips?
But this is not what happens. Resort-goers love the bartenders at the swim-up bar, and they are frustrated to the point of fury with the people selling necklaces, sunglasses and massages on the beach. These sellers "live or die by their ability to persuade people to part with money in exchange for goods and services." It's exhausting to be them, and it's exhausting to be approached by them.
Davies says that the best strategy to get someone to part with their money isn't necessarily to provide good service. As he learned in his stockbroker days, you can also "pester them mercilessly until they pay you to go away." In an unregulated market, you don't get a single vendor who comes around and offers you sunglasses once a day. The equilibrium of that market is to be woken from your nap or interrupted from your book every five minutes by someone who's hustling to make the rent. The economy doesn't "price in the externality" of your plummeting satisfaction with your holiday.
Davies isn't the first person to observe this. As he points out, in 1963, Galbraith wrote:
Total physical and mental inertia are highly agreeable, much more so than we allow ourselves to imagine. A beach not only permits such inertia but enforces it, thus neatly eliminating all problems of guilt.
I read Davies's short post last week and it stuck with me. The more I thought about it, the more I liked it – and the more I thought that there was something missing from it: the idea that there are some people who hate a life without bargaining. These people are invigorated by bargaining and exhausted by "total physical and mental inertia." They need to be hustling.
The people who turn up their noses at an inclusive resort aren't just people who want to have the "authentic experience" of a distant land – some of them are people who want to spend all day hustling and being hustled. People who need that energy.
Those people have a place in the world. I don't want those people trying to sell me a timeshare or trying to rope me into their MLM, but I'd love to have them negotiating on behalf of my union:
But even then, I'd want them to be like my agents, capable of stepping back from constant bargaining and to cease their remorseless seeking of advantage. I wouldn't want them to be Sandbergian would-be buyers of kidneys, full of self-serving tales of revealed preferences, caveat emptor and "that makes me smart."
As with anything, the dose makes the poison. I know lots of hustlers who are fun as hell to hang around, whom I'd trust with my life or at least my password. A lot of libertarians fit this mold: people who are truly committed to voluntarism and intrinsic generosity.
But libertarianism, like any movement, is a coalition, and within that coalition is a large group of people – people who are invigorated by bargaining – who are committed to dominating others by exhausting them. For them, bargaining isn't a cognitive demand, it's a cognitive invigorator. To the extent that they understand this, they think it's just a sign that they are born to rule. Caveat emptor. Revealed preferences. That makes me smart.
What's more, for people on the losing side of this trade, losing the bargain means being poorer, and being poorer means more cognitive demands – rationing out your pennies and eeling through the impossibly narrow gaps between payday and the day the bills are due. This produces a winner-take-all dynamic in which the losers of the bargaining game have less energy and wherewithal to bargain the next time around.
This is beautifully unpacked in (what else) a science fiction novel, Naomi Kritzer's Liberty's Daughter, a young adult novel about the teen daughter of a libertarian cult leader who is growing up on a seastead:
Kritzer's novel beautifully plays out the "stop hitting yourself" justifications that eventually allow her libertarians to enslave others – after all, in a truly voluntaristic society, why wouldn't you have the freedom to sell yourself into slavery? And if you claim later that you're unhappy with this arrangement, tough shit – you've got a "revealed preference" for being a slave.
Caveat emptor. If you're the kind of person who gets charged up by bargaining, then you were born to rule.
If bargaining means cheating, well, "that makes you smart."
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 – and most controversial – 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 – 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:
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:
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:
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:
"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:
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 nobody’s interested in hiring them":
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:
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:
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.
THIS is an important post about a fundamental principle of the working environment that is well-known by every one except upper management - those who actually design and control the workspace.
Process Knowledge is almost impossible to monetize and cannot be directly owned by a company or a government. It BELONGS to the workers, which is one reason why a well-run corporation takes good care of its staff
Showcasing art from some of my favourite artists, and those that have attracted my attention, in the field of visual arts, including vintage; pulp; pop culture; books and comics; concert posters; fantastical and imaginative realism; classical; contemporary; new contemporary; pop surrealism; conceptual and illustration.
The art of Peter Andrew Jones.
A Hymn of Nauseating Banality @hymnsofnauseatingbanality - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
