On Craft in an Age of Abundance

Care, coherence and building things that endure

In August 2016, the music world waited for Frank Ocean’s follow-up to Channel Orange. Instead of a traditional rollout, Ocean livestreamed himself building a staircase. The project became Endless. Twenty-four hours later, he released Blonde, an album that would achieve near-universal acclaim and grow in legend as fans learned how he secured independence and ownership of his music.

Endless, overshadowed by the more structured Blonde, raised a strange question: why was he building a staircase?

A clue appeared in the magazine released alongside the albums, featuring an introduction by artist Tom Sachs.

Sachs is known for leaving the process exposed in the final work. His studio operates with near-militant adherence to defined procedures, challenging the romantic notion that art emerges from chaos. His work often embodies bricolage, which is constructing something from a diverse range of available materials.

That ethos echoes throughout Endless. It opens with a monotone poem by Wolfgang Tillmans (who shot the now-iconic Blonde cover) about livestreaming one’s life. The project moves from Aaliyah covers to southern hip-hop to Johnny Greenwood strings, Trent Reznor synth textures, and Jasmine Sullivan vocals. It feels assembled from multiple worlds, yet unmistakably its own.

Taste is having a moment in tech. Greg Brockman recently called it a core skill in the AI era. But taste is often misunderstood.

Popular usage treats taste as having “good” or “correct” aesthetic sensibility; my view is that taste is simply an opinion. The more experiences and references you have, the stronger opinions you can form.

When someone says “you have good taste,” they often mean “you like the same things I do” or “you like the things you’re supposed to like.”

Some may prefer Monet, Sargent, Rockwell, or Picasso. As the expression goes, “it’s a matter of taste.”

Craft is something else.

Craft is acting on your taste. The goal of an artist is to inhabit a world that is completely their own. To create something only they could create and return to the regular world for a moment to share the creation. The question of “why create?” is then a pertinent one.

Plato’s allegory of the three beds offers a useful metaphor. God creates the ideal bed. The carpenter builds a bed in its image. The artist paints the carpenter’s bed, a representation of a representation.

But perhaps great artists and inventors are not painters in this analogy. Perhaps they are carpenters: devoted to the discipline of making, striving toward an ideal they may never fully reach.

Viewed this way, Ocean’s staircase begins to make sense. We as fans receive a polished final product, but it is the ritualistic commitment to the act of creation that makes it possible. The goal may be to produce a finished staircase or album, but excellence is forged in a monk-like devotion to craft itself.

The most obvious parallel in technology is Steve Jobs. His father taught him that the unseen back of a cabinet should be finished as carefully as the front. Calligraphy influenced the Macintosh’s typography. The Apple I motherboard was designed to be visually elegant despite being hidden.

Jobs framed taste not as objective beauty but as exposure:

“Ultimately, it comes down to taste, exposing yourself to the best things humans have done and bringing those things into what you’re doing.”

Less discussed is his admiration for Sony. He viewed the company, and co-founder Akio Morita, as a North Star for design and consumer-friendly innovation. The Walkman influenced the iPod. He even considered running Mac OS X on Sony VAIO hardware. He admired that Sony was committed not only to researching consumer technology, but to building it beautifully.

Apple products often felt like attempts at the platonic ideal of a computing device. That devotion to craft produced enduring dominance for the company and led to it becoming the most valuable in the world for a period of time.

This ethos persists in modern technology companies. Stripe, for instance, feels crafted at every level, as if striving not only toward the ideal payment processor but toward the ideal technology company.

ASML builds machines few will ever see, engineered to tolerances that border on the absurd. Hermès limits production because the craft cannot be rushed. Nintendo obsesses over how a button feels under the thumb. Ferrari optimizes not for efficiency, but for emotional precision. SpaceX’s Starship reveals visible weld seams, which, like Sachs’ work, make the process of construction legible.

In software, Mercury and Ramp bring the same devotion to clarity and workflow design. Their products feel considered and thoughtful rather than purely functional.

Craft reveals itself across mediums. Akira redefined animation through obsessive hand-drawn precision and environmental detail that still feels modern decades later. More recently, works like Expedition 33 demonstrate that even small teams can produce cohesive, authored experiences and worlds that resist formula. You could feel the care in the soundtrack. Every detail clearly mattered. Nothing was accidental.

In AI research, latent space describes how concepts cluster by proximity. Craft operates similarly. Certain objects feel adjacent despite belonging to different domains: True Detective Season 1, a Birkin, a Patek Philippe Nautilus, a McLaren, the iPhone, and Blonde. They share a devotion to excellence that transcends category. It’s hard to describe, but they have a certain aura. They radiate brilliance and intention. They were clearly made on purpose and with great care.

What does exceptional craft teach technology?

• Craft as the end, not the means.

• Maximize exposure to great work across a variety of domains.

• Taste is having opinions, craft is the chance to create something uniquely your own, something that did not exist before. A chance to be the carpenter.

Today, there is much discussion of “AI slop,” content clearly generated by prompting a machine. But slop did not begin with AI. Humans have produced plenty of it.

Formulaic four-chord pop dominated the 2000s. Frank Ocean’s music felt like a rejection of that template, and Endless felt like a statement embracing the path of the carpenter.

It is the pursuit of an ineffable ideal. The willingness to push beyond comfort. The discipline to care about one’s work in painstaking detail. The creation of a standard that endures beyond the moment whether in art, companies and products, or culture.

In an age obsessed with scale, the most enduring companies behave like artisans, building toward an ideal they may never fully reach.

Taste is aesthetic preference, but Craft is disciplined devotion to excellence.