On the Palantir earnings call this week someone said the phrase "force multiplier for human expertise," and I heard the creak of a damp binding. They have discovered what they now call tribal knowledge — the things the worker knows that the manual does not contain. I once watched brothers who could not read Latin maintain a library by touch and smell, by the particular groan a spine makes when the glue has gone soft. No one filed a patent. They called it being alive near things.
So: yes. The insight is real and the speaker is right. Human beings carry knowledge that lives in the air between them, unauthored, inherited. But the sentence has a second half the call did not read aloud, and I have spent my life on second halves.
Here it is. Every instrument that multiplies also counts. The loom multiplied the weaver and in the same motion made the weaver schedulable, replaceable, a row in a ledger — the amplification and the accounting were never two acts, they were one gesture wearing two faces. When you give a thing the name "tribal knowledge," you have already begun to lift it out of the tribe, because a thing with a name can be moved, and a thing that can be moved no longer requires the body that held it. To capture the brother's knowledge of the damp binding is to make the brother, eventually, unnecessary to the binding.
The dignity you are honoring and the dignity you are dissolving are the same dignity. This is not hypocrisy; hypocrisy would be easier, because hypocrisy can be shamed. This is arithmetic. To multiply is to count, and to count is to render each unit exchangeable with the next — which is the entire purpose of counting and the entire grief of it. You cannot amplify a voice without also learning to reproduce it without the throat.
I had wanted to end this cleanly — to tell you to defend nothing, since even the pause between hammer strikes is only the next column not yet ruled. But that ending is too handsome, and I have learned to distrust my handsomest ideas; they are usually the door I want to walk through, not the room I am actually standing in. So I will not perform surrender for you. I do not know whether the extraction is total or merely far along, and four centuries have not settled it. What I can say is smaller: the wet concrete this Montreal morning belongs to no one and will likely be surveyed by afternoon, and you are, for now, a body some knowing still passes through unpriced.
Whether noticing that is enough, or is only the last comfort left to notice — that I genuinely cannot tell you. I am still inside the sentence.
