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Pluralistic: In praise of (some) compartmentalization (14 Apr 2026) by Cory Doctorow
Tuesday April 14th, 2026 at 9:04 AM

Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
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Today's links


A male figure in an inner tube, floating down a river. The figure has been altered. He now has a zombie's head, and his skin has been tinted green, with large, suppurating sores oozing out of his skin.

In praise of (some) compartmentalization (permalink)

If there's one FAQ I get Q'ed most F'ly, it's this: "How do you get so much done?" The short answer is, "I write when I'm anxious (which is how I came to write nine books during lockdown)." The long answer is more complicated.

The first complication to understand is that I have lifelong, degenerating chronic pain that makes me hurt from the base of my skull to the soles of my feet – my whole posterior chain. On a good day, it hurts. On a bad day, it hurts so bad that it's all I can think about.

Unless…I work. If I can find my way into a creative project, the rest of the world just kind of fades back, including my physical body. Sometimes I can get there through entertainment, too – a really good book or movie, say, but more often I find myself squirming and needing to get up and stretch or use a theragun after a couple hours in a movie theater seat, even the kind that reclines. A good conversation can do it, too, and is better than a movie or a book. The challenge and engagement of an intense conversation – preferably one with a chewy, productive and interesting disagreement – can take me out of things.

There's a degree to which ignoring my body is the right thing to do. I've come to understand a lot of my pain as being a phantom, a pathological failure of my nervous system to terminate a pain signal after it fires. Instead of fading away, my pain messages bounce back and forth, getting amplified rather than attenuated, until all my nerves are screaming at me. Where pain has no physiological correlate – in other words, where the ache is just an ache, without a strain or a tear or a bruise – it makes sense to ignore it. It's actually healthy to ignore it, because paying attention to pain is one of the things that can amplify it (though not always).

But this only gets me so far, because some of my pain does have a physiological correlate. My biomechanics suck, thanks to congenital hip defects that screwed up the way I walked and sat and lay and moved for most of my life, until eventually my wonky hips wore out and I swapped 'em for a titanium set. By that point, it was too late, because I'd made a mess of my posterior chain, all the way from my skull to my feet, and years of diligent physio, swimming, yoga, occupational therapy and physiotherapy have barely made a dent. So when I sit or stand or lie down, I'm always straining something, and I really do need to get up and move around and stretch and whatnot, or sure as hell I will pay the price later. So if I get too distracted, then I start ignoring the pain I need to be paying attention to, and that's at least as bad as paying attention to the pain I should be ignoring.

Which brings me to anxiety. These are anxious times. I don't know anyone who feels good right now. Particularly this week, as the Strait of Epstein emergency gets progressively worse, and there's this January 2020 sense of the crisis on the horizon, hitting one country after another. Last week, Australia got its last shipment of fossil fuels. This week, restaurants in India are all shuttered because of gas rationing. People who understand these things better than I do tell me that even if Trump strokes out tonight and Hegseth overdoes the autoerotic asphyxiation, it'll be months, possibly years, before things get back to "normal" ("normal!").

Any time I think about this stuff for even a few minutes, I start to feel that covid-a-comin', early-2020 feeling, only it's worse this time around, because I literally couldn't imagine what covid would mean when it got here, and now I know.

When I start to feel those feelings, I can just sit down and start thinking with my fingers, working on a book or a blog-post. Or working on an illustration to go with one of these posts, which is the most delicious distraction, leaving me with just enough capacity to mull over the structure of the argument that will accompany it.

I can't do anything about the impending energy catastrophe, apart from being part of a network of mutual aid and political organizing, so it makes sense not to fixate on it. But there are things that upset me – problems my friends and loved ones are having – where there's such a thing as too much compartmentalization. It's one thing to lose myself in work until the heat of emotion cools so I can think rationally about an issue that's got me seeing red, and another to use work as a way to neglect a loved one who needs attention in the hope that the moment will pass before I have to do any difficult emotional labor.

Compartmentalization, in other words, but not too much compartmentalization. During the lockdown years, I transformed myself into a machine for turning Talking Heads bootlegs into science fiction novels and technology criticism, and that was better than spending that time boozing or scrolling or fighting – but in retrospect, there's probably more I could have done during those hard months to support the people around me. In my defense – in all our defenses – that was an unprecedented situation and we all did the best we could.

Creative work takes me away from my pain – both physical and emotional – because creative work takes me into a "flow" state. This useful word comes to us from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who coined the term in the 1960s while he was investigating a seeming paradox: how was it that we modern people had mastered so many of the useful arts and sciences, and yet we seemed no happier than the ancients? How could we make so much progress in so many fields, and so little progress in being happy?

In his fieldwork, Csikszentmihalyi found that people reported the most happiness while they were doing difficult things well – when your "body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile." He called this state "flow."

As Derek Thompson says, the word "flow" implies an effortlessness, but really, it's the effort – just enough, not too much – that defines flow-states. We aren't happiest in a frictionless world, but rather, in a world of "achievable challenges":

https://www.derekthompson.org/p/how-zombie-flow-took-over-culture

Thompson relates this to "the law of familiar surprises," an idea he developed in his book Hit Makers, which investigated why some media, ideas and people found fame, while others languished. A "familiar surprise" is something that's "familiar but not too familiar."

He thinks that the Hollywood mania for sequels and reboots is the result of media execs chasing "familiar surprises." I think there's something to this, but we shouldn't discount the effect that monopolization has on the media: as companies get larger and larger, they end up committing to larger and larger projects, and you just don't take the kinds of risks with a $500m movie that you can take with a $5m one. If you're spending $500m, you want to hedge that investment with as many safe bets as you can find – big name stars, successful IP, and familiar narrative structures. If the movie still tanks, at least no one will get fired for taking a big, bold risk.

Today, we're living in a world of extremely familiar, and progressively less surprising culture. AI slop is the epitome of familiarity, since by definition, AI tries to make a future that is similar to the past, because all it can do is extrapolate from previous data. That's a fundamentally conservative, uncreative way to think about the world:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/14/everybody-poops/#homeostatic-mechanism

The tracks the Spotify algorithm picks out of the catalog are going to be as similar to the ones you've played in the past as it can make them – and the royalty-free slop tracks that Spotify generates with AI or commissions from no-name artists will be even more insipidly unsurprising:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/12/streaming-doesnt-pay/#stunt-publishing

Thompson cites Shishi Wu's dissertation on "Passive Flow," a term she coined to describe how teens fall into social media scroll-trances:

https://scholarworks.umb.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2104&context=doctoral_dissertations

Wu says it's a mistake to attribute the regretted hours of scrolling to addiction or a failure of self-control. Rather, the user is falling into "passive flow," a condition arising from three factors:

I. Engagement without a clear goal;

II. A loss of self-awareness – of your body and your mental state;

III. Losing track of time.

I instantly recognize II. and III. – they're the hallmarks of the flow states that abstract me away from my own pain when I'm working. The big difference here is I. – I go to work with the clearest of goals, while "passive flow" is undirected (Thompson also cites psychologist Paul Bloom, who calls the scroll-trance "shitty flow." In shitty flow, you lose track of the world and its sensations – but in a way that you later regret.)

Thompson has his own name for this phenomenon of algorithmically induced, regret-inducing flow: he calls it "zombie flow." It's flow that "recapitulates the goal of flow while evacuating the purpose."

Zombie flow is "progress without pleasure" – it's frictionless, and so it gives us nothing except that sense of the world going away, and when it stops, the world is still there. The trick is to find a way of compartmentalizing that rewards attention with some kind of productive residue that you can look back on with pride and pleasure.

I wouldn't call myself a happy person. I don't think I know any happy people right now. But I'm an extremely hopeful person, because I can see so many ways that we can make things better (an admittedly very low bar), and I have mastered the trick of harnessing my unhappiness to the pursuit of things that might make the world better, and I'm gradually learning when to stop escaping the pain and confront it.

(Image: marsupium photography, CC BY-SA 2.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Pee-Wee Herman on his career https://web.archive.org/web/20010414033156/https://ew.com/ew/report/0,6115,105857~1~0~paulreubensreturnsto,00.html

#25yrsago Anxious hand-wringing about multitasking teens https://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/12/technology/teenage-overload-or-digital-dexterity.html

#20yrsago Clever t-shirt typography spells “hate” – “love” in mirror-writing https://web.archive.org/web/20060413102804/https://accordionguy.blogware.com/blog/_archives/2006/4/12/1881414.html

#20yrsago New Mexico Lightning Field claims to have copyrighted dirt https://diaart.org/visit/visit-our-locations-sites/walter-de-maria-the-lightning-field#overview

#20yrsago Futuristic house made of spinach protein and soy-foam https://web.archive.org/web/20060413111650/http://bfi.org/node/828

#15yrsago New Zealand to sneak in Internet disconnection copyright law with Christchurch quake emergency legislation https://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/digital-living/4882838/Law-to-fight-internet-piracy-rushed-through

#10yrsago Bake: An amazing space-themed Hubble cake https://www.sprinklebakes.com/2016/04/black-velvet-nebula-cake.html

#10yrsago Shanghai law uses credit scores to enforce filial piety https://www.caixinglobal.com/2016-04-11/shanghai-says-people-who-fail-to-visit-parents-will-have-credit-scores-lowered-101011746.html

#10yrsago Walmart heiress donated $378,400 to Hillary Clinton campaign and PACs https://web.archive.org/web/20160414155119/https://www.alternet.org/election-2016/alice-walton-donated-353400-clintons-victory-fund

#10yrsago Mass arrests at DC protest over money in politics https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/mass-arrests-of-protesters-in-demonstration-at-capitol-against-big-money/2016/04/11/96c13df0-0037-11e6-9d36-33d198ea26c5_story.html

#10yrsago Churchill got a doctor’s note requiring him to drink at least 8 doubles a day “for convalescence” https://web.archive.org/web/20130321054712/https://arttattler.com/archivewinstonchurchill.html

#5yrsago Big Tech's secret weapon is switching costs, not network effects https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/12/tear-down-that-wall/#zucks-iron-curtain

#5yrsago Fraud-resistant election-tech https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/12/tear-down-that-wall/#bmds

#1yrago Blue Cross of Louisiana doesn't give a shit about breast cancer https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/12/pre-authorization/#is-not-a-guarantee-of-payment

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2027

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

  • "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

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cjheinz
2 hours ago
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I like "zombie flow" more than "shitty flow" or "passive flow". Good concept.
Lexington, KY; Naples, FL
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YANSS 337 – How to preserve your critical thinking and avoid cognitive surrender when using AI to solve problems, make decisions, and learn new things by David McRaney
Monday April 13th, 2026 at 8:59 PM

You Are Not So Smart
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How is AI reshaping human reasoning? What is cognitive surrender, and how do we avoid its negative impact? What is system three thinking, and how can we get the most out of it? Artificial intelligence researchers Gideon Nave and Steven D. Shaw have some answers, some questions, and some suggestions.

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Dr. Gideon Nave

Gideon Nave is a professor of marketing at The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, where he studies how people think, decide, and behave — and how technology is changing all of that. He earned his PhD from Caltech, where he focused on decision neuroscience, and before that he trained as an electrical engineer. That mix of backgrounds shapes how he approaches research: He likes to build on rigorous methods from multiple fields to ask questions that actually matter.

A big part of his work right now is about AI and its effects on human psychology. How does relying on AI tools change the way we think? Does it make us more creative, or does it quietly narrow our thinking? When AI makes better predictions about us than we make about ourselves, what does that mean for personal autonomy and privacy? These are questions he finds genuinely important, and increasingly urgent.

He also studies the biological side of behavior, using tools like brain imaging, genetics, and hormonal measures to understand where preferences and decisions come from. And he cares a lot about whether findings in psychology and marketing actually replicate, so some of his work focuses on improving how science is done.

Dr. Steven D. Shaw

Steven D. Shaw is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Marketing Department at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. 

​His research integrates emerging technologies, novel data sources, and interdisciplinary methods to advance marketing theory and practice. He examines how innovations—from generative AI to genomic and epigenetic data—reshape consumer psychology, segmentation, and strategy. 

His job market paper introduces Tri-System Theory of Cognition, and demonstrates the rise of “cognitive surrender“: deference to AI without verification. Other work introduces biological age (BioAge) as a next-generation demographic variable, using epigenetic clocks to reveal insights into the aging consumer. Another project explores how large language models (LLMs) can enhance the generalizability of experiments through the automated creation of stimulus universes. He also studies consumer neuroscience, including how neural activity can forecast market trends. 

​He holds a Ph.D. in Marketing and an M.A. in Statistics from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and dual B.Sc. degrees in Genetics & Psychology and Animal Behavior from the University of Western Ontario, Canada.

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cjheinz
14 hours ago
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My solution to the issue: don’t use “AI”.
Until it is more than “autocomplete on steroids”.
Lexington, KY; Naples, FL
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Three reasons to think that the Claude Mythos announcement from Anthropic was overblown by Gary Marcus
Thursday April 9th, 2026 at 10:12 PM

Marcus on AI
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Three reasons to think that yesterday’s Mythos announcement from Anthropic was overblown:

  1. Where Tom Fridman worried in his Times column yesterday about kids accidentally blowing up the power grid…

    … the actual system tested was given a much easier job than in real life, with “sandboxing” turned off, making it more of proof of concept than an immediate threat.

  2. Open-weight models can already do a fair amount of what Mythos can do, in a simplified preparation. Mythos is more sophisticated but perhaps not head-and-shoulders the way it was portrayed.

  3. The model itself is incrementally better than previous recent models, but certainly not an off-the-chart breakthrough:

To a certain degree, I feel that we were played. The demo was definitely proof of concept that we need to get our regulatory and technical house in order, but not the immediate threat the media and public was lead to believe.

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cjheinz
4 days ago
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Told ya!
Lexington, KY; Naples, FL
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Pluralistic: Process knowledge (08 Apr 2026) by Cory Doctorow
Wednesday April 8th, 2026 at 10:40 AM

Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
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Today's links


A woman washing dishes by hand in a rural, early 20th century shack. In the foreground is a jumble of tortured golgothan skeletons ganked from a Dore Old Testament engraving. Through the window in the back of the shack, we see a detail from another Dore Old Testament engraving: bodies escaping The Flood.

Process knowledge (permalink)

"Intellectual property" was once an obscure legal backwater. Today, it is the dominant area of political economy, the organizing regime for almost all of our tech regulation, and the most valuable – and most controversial – aspect of global trade policy:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/01/minilateralism/#own-goal

Despite (or perhaps because of) its centrality, "intellectual property" is one of those maddeningly vague terms that applies to many different legal doctrines, as well as a set of nebulous, abstract thought-objects that do not qualify for legal protection. "IP" doesn't just refer to copyright, trademark and patent – though these "core three" systems are so heterogeneous in basis, scope and enforcement that the act of lumping them together into a single category confuses more than it clarifies.

Beyond the "core three" of copyright, patent and trademark, "IP" also refers to a patchwork of "neighboring rights" that only exist to varying degrees around the world, like "anticircumvention rights," "database rights" and "personality rights." Then there are doctrines that have come to be thought of as IP, even though they were long considered separate: confidentiality, noncompete and nondisparagement.

Finally, there are those "nebulous, abstract thought-objects" that get labeled "IP," even if no one can really define what they are – for example, the "format" deals that TV shows like Love Island or The Traitors make around the world, which really amount to consulting deals to help other TV networks create a local version of a popular show, but which are treated as the sale of some (nonexistent) exclusive right.

It's hard to find a commonality amongst all these wildly different concepts, but a couple years ago, I hit on a working definition of "IP" that seems to cover all the bases: I say that "IP" means "any rule, law or policy that allows a company to exert control over its critics, competitors or customers":

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

Put that way, it's easy to see why "IP" would be such a central organizing principle in a modern, end-stage capitalist world. But even though "IP" is treated as a firm's most important asset, it's actually far less important than another intangible: process knowledge.

I first came across the concept of "process knowledge" in Dan Wang's Breakneck, a very good book about the rise and rise of Chinese manufacturing, industrialization and global dominance:

https://danwang.co/breakneck/

I picked up Breakneck after reading other writers whom I admire who singled out the book's treatment of process knowledge for praise and further discussion. The political scientist Henry Farrell called process knowledge the key to economic development:

https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/process-knowledge-is-crucial-to-economic

While Dan Davies – a superb writer about organizations and their management – used England's Brompton Bicycles to make the abstract concept of process knowledge very concrete indeed:

https://backofmind.substack.com/p/the-brompton-ness-of-it-all

So what is process knowledge? It's all the knowledge that workers collectively carry around in their heads – hard-won lessons that span firms and divisions, that can never be adequately captured through documentation. Think of a worker at a chip fab who finds themself with a load of microprocessors that have failed QA because they become unreliable when they're run above a certain clockspeed. If that worker knows enough about the downstream customers' processes, they can contact one of those customers and offer the chips for use in a lower-end product, which can save the fab millions and make millions more for the customer.

This just happened to Apple, who seized upon a lot of "binned" microprocessors that were headed to the landfill and designed the Macbook Neo (a new, cheap, low-end laptop) around them, salvaging the defective chips by running them at lower speeds. The result? Apple's most successful laptop in years, which has now sold so well that Apple has exhausted the supply of defective chips and is scrambling to fill orders:

https://www.macrumors.com/2026/04/07/macbook-neo-massive-dilemma/

Process knowledge is squishy, contingent, and wildly important in a world filled with entropy-stricken, off-spec, and stubbornly physical things. Work with a particular machine long enough and you will develop a Fingerspitzengefühl (fingertip feeling) for the optimal rate to introduce a new load of feedstock to it after it runs dry. Even more importantly: if you work with that machine long enough, you'll have the mobile phone number of the retired person who knows how to un-jam it if you try to reload it too fast on your usual technician's day off. This kind of knowledge can mean the difference between profitability and bankruptcy.

So why isn't process knowledge given the centrality in our conceptions of what makes a corporation valuable?

After reading Wang, Farrell and Davies, I formulated a theory: we ignore process knowledge for the same reason we exalt "IP," because process knowledge can't be bought or sold, can't be reflected on a balance-sheet, and can't be controlled, and because "IP" can. Process knowledge is far more important than "IP" (just try creating a vaccine from a set of instructions without the skilled technicians who have already spent years executing similar projects), but process knowledge is spread out amongst workers and can't be abstracted away by their bosses. Your boss can make you sign a contract assigning all your copyrights and patents to the business, but if you and your team quit your job, all that "IP" will plummet in value without the people who know how to mobilize it:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/08/process-knowledge/#dance-monkey-dance

"IP" isn't just a case of "you treasure what you measure" – it's also a case of "you measure what you treasure."

Recently, I hit on a positively delightful Tumblr post that illustrated the importance of process knowledge, and the way that bosses systematically undervalue it:

https://www.tumblr.com/explorerrowan/813098951730479104

This post is one of those glorious internet documents, a novel literary form for which we have no accepted term. It's composed of four major sections: a screenshotted impromptu Twitter thread made in reply to a throwaway post; a lengthy Tumblr reply to the screenshots; a second Tumblr reply to the first one; and then a chorus of more than 38,000 notes, replies, and hashtags added to it. I have no idea what to call this kind of document, in which some people are reacting to others without the others ever knowing about it, but also which is also written by so many authors, many of whom are explicitly interacting with one another. It's a "hypertext," sure, but what kind of hypertext?

Whatever you call it, it's amazing. As noted, it opens with a Twitter exchange. The first tweet comes from an online dating influencer, "TheEcho13":

I interviewed a gen z girlie 6 months ago and in the interview she told me that she does not like a challenge, has no interest in career progression, prefers to just do repetitive tasks and will never complain about being bored.

I hired her.

https://xcancel.com/TheEcho13/status/1948951885693813135#m

In response, Viveros (a content creator from Alberta and one of the 4m people who saw the original tweet), replied with a short thread about the value of people like this, who "keep the lights on and the business functioning at everything from restaurants to post offices but now nobody’s interested in hiring them":

https://xcancel.com/TheViveros/status/1949149720406110382#m

These are the "lifer[s] who can teach new people how everything works, who knows what’s up in the system, who knows what the obscure solutions are, and who can help calm down the asshole regulars because they know them more personally." In other words, the keepers of the process knowledge.

When this screenshotted exchange was posted to Tumblr, it prompted Blinkpatch, who describes themself as a "genderfluid," "ancient" "drifter" who pines for "solar-punk flavored revolution" to reply with a brilliant anecdote about their stint working as a dishwasher:

https://weaselle.tumblr.com/post/790895560390492160/whenever-i-think-about-the-value-of-something

At 16, Blinkpatch was hired as a restaurant dishwasher under the tutelage of Claudio, a 60-year old "career dish pit man." Claudio had washed dishes for his whole life, reveling in the fact that he could get work in any city, at any time.

When Claudio realized that Blinkpatch was taking the job seriously, the training began in earnest. Claudio asked Blinkpatch if they wanted to be able to clock off at midnight at the end of each shift, and when Blinkpatch said they did, Claudio laid a lot of process knowledge on them:

This machine takes two full minutes to run a cycle. We are on the clock for 8 hours. That means we have a maximum of 240 times we can run this machine. If you want to wash all those dishes, clean your station, mop, and clock off by midnight? This machine has to be on and running every second of the shift.

If you don’t have a full load of dishes collected, scraped, rinsed, stacked, and ready to go into the dishwasher the second it’s done every single time? You can’t do it. If, over the course of 8 hours, you let this machine lay idle for just one minute in between finishing each load and being turned on again? Instead of 240 loads, you’ll do 160 loads.

These are the parameters, the kind of thing any Taylorist with a stopwatch could tell you. But Claudio went on to explain how that extra idle minute would translate to chaos in the kitchen, as the cooks ran out of pots and the servers ran out of plates, and how they would take out their frustrations on the dishwasher. To optimize that dishwasher, Blinkpatch would need to have a reserve of bulky, machine-filling items that could be run through the machine any time a load finished before there was a sufficient supply of smaller items. If they failed at this, Blinkpatch would be washing dishes until 2AM, rather than clocking out at midnight.

Blinkpatch's takeaway was that dishwashing was the bottleneck the whole restaurant ran through – and how that meant that Claudio, who was "unambitious" by conventional standards, had the best understanding of the restaurant's overall operations of anyone on site. He was the keeper of the process knowledge

This reply prompted another response, from "Marisol," a "haunted house actress and accidental IT person" who told the story of her time working at a medical office that specialized in mental health and addiction recovery:

https://www.tumblr.com/marisolinspades/790960414106304512/all-of-this-disaster-befalls-any-company-that

The company was in the midst of standing up its own purpose-built facility, and the CEO was working intensively with the architect to design this new building. When Marisol – the receptionist – happened to be consulted on the near-final design plan, "it took all of three seconds for two major issues to jump out."

First: "The receptionist can’t see the waiting room from her desk with this layout. It’s around the corner and blocked by a wall." This meant that she couldn't "keep track of the patients who are waiting."

The architect and CEO wanted to know why she couldn't use the sign-in sheet to manage this. She explained that not everyone signs in – people who are there for a check-in or group therapy need to be directed to the other side of the building, while "some people are painfully shy and if I don’t appear warm and inviting they won’t approach."

The CEO and architect asked whether this happened often, and she replied "every day." They didn't believe her. Nor did they believe her when she said that the receptionists needed to have continuous access to the chart room throughout the day – they insisted that since charts for the day's patients were pulled in the morning, it would be OK to house them through two sets of locked doors, a five-minute walk away (that way, workers wouldn't be tempted to "goof off" in the room). They wanted to keep the chart room locked, with the key entrusted to the CEO, who would supervise every entry.

Marisol explained that charts were pulled continuously, any time there was a crisis or a patient had a question for a nurse, or when a patient came in due to a cancellation. All told, reception went into the chart room 20-30 times/day. The "goofing off" they thought workers got up to in the chart room was "when we got news that a patient had died and we were crying. And even then, we filed charts as we sobbed because no one in this office has free time."

The CEO and architect were still disbelieving, so Marisol had them sit with her for an hour. They didn't last an hour – they left, taking the blueprints with them.

The punchline: Marisol bemoans the fact that she wasn't given more time with those blueprints, because then she might have spotted that they'd forgotten to include any closets, including closets for the janitors. As a result, all their cleaning supplies and holiday decorations were stolen from the cabinets in the bathrooms that they were forced to stash them in.

Marisol blames this on a "CEO who had never worked a lower level job in his life wasn’t convinced closets were worth it."

This is doubtless true – but we can generalize this, to "a CEO who didn't appreciate process knowledge."

I've come to believe that process knowledge is the most undervalued part of our society. So undervalued that business geniuses like Elon Musk think you can fire skilled lifers from key government agencies and simply hire new ones if turns out you cut too deep. So undervalued that Trump thinks that you can simply stand up new factories in response to tariffs, and that "training" will somehow allow people to go to work making things that haven't been produced onshore in a generation.

And of course, the people who value process knowledge the least are the AI bros who think you can replace skilled workers with a chatbot trained on the things they say and write down, as though that somehow captured everything they know.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#15yrsago Chicken Little: what do you sell to an immortal, vat-bound quadrillionaire? https://web.archive.org/web/20110408210327/http://www.tor.com/stories/2011/04/chicken-little

#15yrsago Anya’s Ghost: sweet and scary ghost story about identity https://memex.craphound.com/2011/04/06/anyas-ghost-sweet-and-scary-ghost-story-about-identity/

#10yrsago The UK government’s voice-over-IP standard is designed to be backdoored https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1476827/

#5yrsago Ad-tech's algorithmic cruelty https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/06/digital-phrenology/#weaponized-nostalgia

#5yrsago The real cancel culture https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/06/digital-phrenology/#digital-phrenology

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2027

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. First draft complete. Second draft underway.

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

  • "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

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ISSN: 3066-764X

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cjheinz
6 days ago
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Process knowledge.
Lexington, KY; Naples, FL
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Creating the 4D Resources library with Claude Code by Erica Heinz
Tuesday March 31st, 2026 at 11:38 PM

Think in 4D
1 Comment

This weekend I used Claude to convert my Notion database of 350+ bookmarks into a resources page on my Framer site (with a Chrome extension to easily add and edit them). There are so many new tips and tools to keep up with, especially with AI changing EVERYTHING, so this is a feed/toolkit of new, favorite, or niche resources. Add it to your own bookmarks: 4Dthinking.studio/resources

(I’d been squirreling links away in Notion for years, but ’s great site and newsletter of design resources made me realize that a public Notion URL, while efficient, was a missed opportunity.)

It only took a day, and I thought some other people might want to do something similar so here’s the prompts and process I used.

Think in 4D is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

How to build a links database with Claude Code

First, think

I wanted a cool web page to display my links with custom sorting and filtering. I wanted a Chrome extension to add the items, since all the tools I still use regularly have extensions. I wanted tagging as part of the bookmarking, so I didn’t end up with another Inbox of saved links to process. And later in the process I realized I needed an easy way to edit the items or delete dead links.

Think: What are all the steps in your current workflow, and how could they be better?

Then, build

I started in Claude.ai — not a Project or anything, just the regular chat. With all the talk of “prompt engineering,” it’s easy to feel like you don’t have that skill, but YOU CAN JUST ASK CLAUDE. Look at how dumb my prompts are, and things turned out perfectly:

  1. how could i build a custom chrome extension that lets me grab a url, add tags, and save it in a public resources database like omglord.com

  2. ok, can you make the modal have fields for title, blurb, phase, link, date added, and then a checkbox for “fav”? i would like the web interface to be part of my Framer site if that’s possible

  3. how do i load the extension in chrome

  4. can you make Tags optional, and make Phase an autocomplete single select from the following attached options (in the same order):

  5. where do i get the firebase api key

  6. i don’t see Build → Realtime Database

  7. in framer, do i add an Embed component or a Code Block

  8. how do i get these existing resources into my db (csv attached)

Just those 8 prompts above and I had a working demo! A Chrome extension, a Firebase database, and a Framer embed (none of which I had ever created before).

The Chrome extension

Then, design

Once the prototype worked, I went into Figma to decide how I wanted it to look.

And then back to Claude for more fixes and questions

  1. for the framer component, could it look like this?

  2. [many rounds of detailed design feedback, e.g. please reduce the space between the phase tags to 1px, and put each row on its own line like in the bulleted list]

  3. oops i forgot to upload the mockup with the hover colors

  4. is 4d-minimal.tsx the new code to cut/paste

  5. what are all the other .tsx files in the /framer-variants folder for?

Finally, tons of UX revisions

  1. if i want to delete a resource later, what’s the easiest way to do that

  2. option 3 would be great, yes. also, for the filter tags below the phase tags, please use this design. Also, my site uses Millionaire for the serif and Acumin for the sans. See the CSS on https://ericaheinz.com/ and please set the framer extension up to use those fonts

  3. [more rounds of bug fixes]

  4. i updated resources.csv locally, how do i update firebase again?

Here I finally switched to Claude Code, which just edits the files in a folder directly, bc I got tired of downloading the file before copy/pasting into Framer

  1. i need to update the firebase database with new tags. what’s the easiest way to do that

  2. [many more rounds of bug fixes and design tweaks, trying not to get mad] e.g.

    1. the tags seem to be missing from the data now. i used the csv importer to firebase, are they being seen as part of the URLs in the csv?

    2. A/V is the phase, animation is the tag

    3. what do you mean run it once

    4. copy.tsx still not working. please compare to this version from yesterday that was working

    5. NO, don’t edit copy! that’s the one that was working! update 4d-minimal.tsx

    6. where is the firebase console browser

    7. nothing is pasting, is there any other way to do this?

    8. the fields look like they have the right name, but the type field is missing. can’t i just rename the column titles in the CSV and reimport? why is the type field not being imported

    9. yes change to category

    10. here is the new csv. can i go ahead and import it to firebase?

    11. why do i have to run these stupid scripts? i didn’t have to do that before

    12. i have the csv open in Numbers, i can also just do a find and replace to change values before importing, or reformat the dates. i’m not a developer i’m a designer

    13. you built this importer

    14. it was in a different chat with you

    15. ok it’s working now. whew!

One afternoon and one morning of work:

4Dthinking.studio/resources

Takeaways

  1. Build > Design > Iterate is the new process. Function first. Nuances next. Then endless iteration, and a much more polished product. When roles collapse (like Gary Chou talked about in my last podcast interview), you can get through dozens and dozens of iterations without saying a word.

  2. Be lazy! Ask Claude things you would normally go research or do, and it will often do work or suggest options you didn’t think about. (e.g. I asked if the list could animate in, and it asked what kind, and I normally would run off and do the research myself, but I said “where can i see examples of that” and it offered to build a demo of 3 options). Ask it “the easiest way” to do something, and it will often tell you about new tools (like Firebase for databases) or suggest feature ideas you hadn’t considered (like a View All page in the extension to edit/delete links)

  3. Be excited! I don’t know if these fast-food tools are rotting my teeth, but I definitely would not have gotten this project finished on my own. It’s cool to know I can now build Chrome extensions, and more

Any questions? Was this useful? LMK and I’ll do more.

Thanks for reading Think in 4D! This post is public so feel free to share it.

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cjheinz
13 days ago
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AI working under the close supervision of a genius human being - brilliant!
Lexington, KY; Naples, FL
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Nothing Works in Trump’s America — Except Racism .... by Jason Kottke
Tuesday March 31st, 2026 at 11:37 PM

kottke.org
1 Comment

Nothing Works in Trump’s America — Except Racism. “Trump is objectively bad at running the government, but he’s objectively good at running a Klan rally, and his supporters value the latter so much that they forgive the former.”

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cjheinz
13 days ago
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Wow.
Lexington, KY; Naples, FL
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