The Tedious Power of Storytelling

Cory Doctorow | Pluralistic | Jun 02, 2026

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.

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.

Process knowledge is crucial to economic development

Henry Farrell | Programmable Mutter | Sep 02, 2025

The biggest lesson I took from Breakneck was not about China, or the U.S., but the importance of “process knowledge.” That is not a concept that features much in the existing debates about trans-Pacific geopolitics, nor discussions about what America ought do to revitalize its economy. Dan makes a very strong case that it should.

I spent a lot of time on workshop floors, listening to small-scale founders talking about their lives. I’ll never forget a particular conversation with a manufacturer of teabag-packing machines about the technical ingenuity required to figure out how to reliably staple on the threads attached to some fancy tea bags, which allow you to pull the teabag out without either scalding your fingers or rummaging around for a spoon. The machinery for accomplishing this apparently simple task was quite complex and fantastical: it was a surprisingly difficult engineering problem. I decided then and there that if I ever became an eccentric billionaire, I would have a teabag-packing line installed in the basement of my vast mansion, like the Gothic machineries in Edward Scissorhands.

But Dan puts most of the blame for America’s deficits on policy-makers’ lack of understanding of “the importance of process knowledge.” China - through some mixture of luck and adept policy making - has been able to turn low wage industries into cornucopiae of process knowledge, where, for example, phone companies figure out how to use their know-how to build cheap EVs. The US, in contrast, maintains an advantage in complex industries where fundamental research and basic science can translate readily into commercial dominance, but finds itself increasingly outdistanced in slightly less complicated industries, where iterative improvements are important. Chinese firms are great at solving teabag-string-attachment type issues, and it turns out that this is a large and important class of problems.