Introducing Toil & Craft
A newsletter about making technology work for humans, instead of the other way around.
Craft is the work that fills your bucket. Toil is the work that empties it.
There is work that fills you and work that empties you. Most of us can feel the difference long before we can name it. The hours spent making sourdough bread fill the bucket. The hour spent fighting a form that should have taken thirty seconds empties it. I call the first one craft and the second one toil, and I have come to believe the whole question of technology comes down to which of the two a tool takes away.
I spent over a decade at Google building the machines behind the internet. Datacenters, custom hardware, a stretch doing R&D in virtual reality with Google Daydream. I designed and built infrastructure for 2K Games and Take-Two Interactive. I am, by any honest definition, a technology person. This experience has led me to pull back and ask fundamental questions about technology, AI, and how they should integrate into our lives.
A tool should be judged by whether it removes toil without diminishing craft. A good tool clears the work that empties you so there is more room for the work that fills you. A bad one does the opposite. It automates the very things that were worth doing by hand, and hands you back the drudgery.
Much of what is being built now fails that test. Not because technology is evil, but because most people aren’t developing a set of principles to guide where we should and should not be using technology.
So I left some room in my life to make things the slow way on purpose. I bake real bread and sell it at a farmers market. I write novels by hand, including one about artificial intelligence. I build software and games, some of it with AI, all of it trying to prove that the tools can serve the craft instead of eating it. These look like three unrelated hobbies. They are not. They are the same question asked in flour, in fiction, and in code.
I’m here to think out loud about how to build a life and a body of work that fills the bucket instead of draining it. I will write about the tools I appreciate or have built myself, as I explore ways to expand craft and reduce toil.
If that is your kind of question, please subscribe.
-Allen