The Work

For a long time I couldn’t explain what bothered me. I just knew that certain things felt right and others didn’t. Some objects, systems, and scenes had a quality I kept returning to, while others left me with a low-level unease I couldn’t name. Over time, I started paying attention to the gap. What I found, slowly, was that the things I trusted shared something: they had been made in genuine response to a real constraint, and that origin remained legible in the thing itself. The things that troubled me shared something too. It wasn’t always obvious, because they were often dressed in the language of the things I trusted, but they were oriented toward a different end.

In early 1943, Charles and Ray Eames received a U.S. Navy commission to solve a real problem: casualties needed a lighter, safer leg splint. Working from a press they had built in their apartment, they refined a forming process that produced an estimated 150,000 splints before the war ended. The same breakthrough was later turned toward the home: making high-quality moulded plywood available to a much broader public. A hard constraint, taken seriously, generated something that widened quality and availability rather than enclosing it.

The 240Z, Porsche 911, Land Rover Defender, USM Haller, Vitsœ: different objects, same arc. Engineering seriousness, real constraints, and an intention that remains legible in every component. Designed to be used and maintained, not to signal.

The G-Wagen started the same way. Steyr-Daimler-Puch built it for Austrian farmers and the Iranian military. The brief called for a vehicle that could run continuously for twenty-five years on nothing more than routine maintenance by conscripts with basic tools. Every decision from the ladder frame to the flat panels followed from that brief. Its cultural afterlife as a grotesque signal of wealth and performative power says as much about the present as the original said about function. A vehicle designed to be maintained by anyone, anywhere, indefinitely, is now sold as a statement that maintenance is beneath you. That transformation is not incidental. It is the pattern.

The same thing has happened to the values these objects once carried. What once reflected a commitment to restraint, utility, and better everyday forms is now sold back as identity. People buy the surface of those values at vastly inflated prices, performing proximity to them without having to embody them. The objects remain, while what they represented gets hollowed out. Prices skyrocket precisely because the meaning has been separated from the thing and turned into a commodity in its own right.

As grotesque as I find the prices these objects now command, and the way they are used to perform belonging, I’m not interested in ceding them. Part of what matters to me is reclaiming them, and reclaiming the principles they once embodied, from the people and systems that turned them into status goods. I don’t accept that these things belong more naturally to the polished, the credentialed, or the wealthy than they do to a northern working-class man with bad teeth and worse tattoos.

Part of what held my attention in early crypto, and around Ethereum in particular, was the sense that there might still be space to build differently: systems for coordination and participation that were not yet fully captured by the logic of incumbency. What became impossible to ignore was how quickly that possibility narrowed. Each cycle arrived dressed as a breakthrough for openness and empowerment. Each time the centre of gravity pulled back toward speculation, extraction, and value capture. The mean might rise; the median person was left more exposed, more manipulated, and ultimately worse off. A transfer dressed up as a frontier.

Crypto is only one version of the story. Too much of what passes for innovation today is managerial, extractive, and enclosed. Discovery gets optimised until nothing feels discovered. Friction gets smoothed away until participation becomes passive. Attention gets centralised and the result gets called progress. The language of openness remains, but the reality is capture by platforms, incumbents and financial logic that has no interest in what can’t be easily priced.

What I care about is working against that logic: earning authority through knowledge rather than money, designing for agency rather than dependency, making things properly. Not rejecting technology, or the canon, or retreating into nostalgia, but recovering what was worthwhile before it got enclosed: seriousness, accessibility, experimentation, and the belief that quality shouldn't belong exclusively to the wealthy or the already initiated.

The Eames splint existed because of a real constraint, not despite it. Working within limits seriously enough that the limits become generative. That's still the model. And I don't accept that it belongs to the people who turned it into a lifestyle. It belongs to anyone willing to actually do the work.