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- Trade secrets protect knowledge by keeping it confidential, deriving value from restricted circulation, and have evolved from guild secrecy to modern corporate IP law.
- The transition from guild systems to industrial capitalism saw trade secrets transform from communal protections to legally protected individual property.
- Trade secret law expanded dramatically, especially since the 1970s, to cover virtually any valuable information, including AI outputs, with indefinite protection unless reverse-engineered or disclosed.
- The author used algorithmically generated sources like Webster's Timeline History to speculate on future trade secret law, drawing parallels between historical and algorithmic knowledge assembly.
- Modern trade secrets serve as epistemic boundary objects, mediating between different knowledge systems, and are increasingly used to shield corporate data and AI models from public scrutiny.
- The piece highlights the irony of trade secrets protecting public data transformed by algorithms, and the potential for future historians to sift through such 'detritus' to understand the present.