The Tinkerer/Builder Dilemma: Notes on Creation in an Era of Abundance

My entire life I have been both a tinkerer and a builder. The two go hand in hand.

For every new piece of camera equipment, software, or emergent technology, I tinker as a form of exploration. I play with the latest features and capabilities, letting my mind consider the possibilities. The purpose is pure discovery. By knowing what is possible, I am able to consider what is worth actually doing.

That is where building comes in: the intention to take what is only imagined, and through action and persistence, realize it into existence.

Usually this dichotomy works well for me. Six years ago, after a Macbook Pro failed me, I researched, tinkered, and did something I hadn't done since college. I built my own PC. After several weeks of exploration, I had a powerhouse editing machine for $3,000 that rivaled Mac Pro equivalents priced above $15,000. It was the perfect balance of exploration and execution.

This week I've been kicking myself. After six years without incident, my carefully crafted machine experienced a series of cascading failures. A boot drive failed. Then while troubleshooting, the liquid cooling unit failed, putting my CPU at risk. Even with the troubleshooting prowess of Gemini and Claude, I was hitting dead ends.

My tower now sits in the service shop down the street, poked and prodded by diagnosticians. It's hard not to feel like I've failed the machine I birthed. But I have to remind myself that destruction is a part of creation, especially when you're working at the bleeding edge of technology.

And here's the thing: digital work is just as fragile. Many in my cohort of early interactive storytelling producers believed our creations would last forever. In the era of "Snowfall" style storytelling, we were lulled into thinking the Internet was infinite and permanent. It is not. (Though I'm encouraged that the NYT still maintains the story that inspired so many others.)

You can find some old blog posts on the Wayback Machine. But complex interactive experiences? They don't survive. Most digital work is as ephemeral as the things we build in the physical world. Maybe more so.

Which raises real questions about how to approach the current transformation we are in. There is an abundance of both tools and the things we can build with them. What is valuable when the walls that create scarcity start falling down? What, if any of it, will truly last?

I don't have a definitive answer. But I have some guiding principles:

Intention: The hype cycles on social media are accelerating. Every day there seems to be some new tool, model, or technology that will change everything. At least until tomorrow. I'm trying hard to resist the temptation to tinker with everything that drops. Some advancements are transformational, but plenty are time-wasting playthings masquerading as revolutionary. That was my experience with the Sora app. I try to play and discover only with the tools that have real promise of helping me build what I have planned.

And when I do build, I try to sit with the problem first without AI assistance. AI is remarkably good at accelerating a well-considered plan, but it struggles to create something meaningful out of thin air. It needs context. The builder's intention has to come first.

Trust: There is an abundance of fear and anxiety right now, and I'm noticing more people preying on that uncertainty for financial gain. Even people I regard as trusted professionals. But trust isn't something you can hack or shortcut. It's built slowly, through consistent work that delivers on its promises. In an age of digital abundance, the reputation you build through quality work may outlast the work itself. That's the signal that cuts through noise.

Community: I love the sense of personal accomplishment that comes from creating something myself, but there is no doubt it's more fun and effective to build with others. Collaboration is a force multiplier. AI agents may become very capable, but in the short term I'd still put my money on a group of humans working toward common purpose over a multi-agent system.

That's part of why I'm committing to sharing more of my process publicly. Not just finished work, but the tinkering and building along the way. If you take any of these tools for a spin, let me know your experience. Let’s filter the signal from the noise together.

By the time you read this, my tower should be back from the shop with a new cooling unit and boot drive. Six years of faithful service, a few days of crisis, and then back to work, more capable than ever. That's the real lesson of building at the bleeding edge of technology: nothing lasts forever, but we can rebuild better than before, carrying forward everything we’ve learned.

Starting with this newsletter, I'll be including a few sections: what I've been building, what I've been tinkering with, and what I'm watching. Think of it as a window into my workshop.

What I've Been Building

Origen Story Scout

I've been using Claude Code a lot since early December, building out internal tools for my practice. As part of my commitment to failing more publicly, I've created a public repo on GitHub of my latest experiment called Origen Story Scout. I'm building it as a way to channel all the newsletters, podcasts, RSS feeds, and decentralized social media accounts I follow into an intelligent system that can surface the topics most relevant to my interests. I'm also using it as my sandbox for testing provenance detection approaches and creator compensation layers.

What I've Been Tinkering With

Preview.io

Before my tower crashed, I moved a recent AI project into Preview.io. It's a fascinating new generative AI workspace by Stefan Feješ that I met at Upscale Conf. What I love about Preview is that it adapts the story-first building approach I use in my own workflow, allowing discovery and exploration while anchoring it to the structured story plan in the script. I'm excited about its potential and looking forward to diving back in once I get my machine back.

What I'm Watching

OpenClaw (Previously ClawdBot & then Moltbot)

If your feed isn't tainted by AI enthusiasts, you may have missed the craze over OpenClaw. While I'm enamored with the idea of a genie in my machine that can grant all my wishes, this tooling is a personal security nightmare. It's worth following Casey Newton, who has been both reckless enough to try this on his own machine and sober enough to identify the real risks. For now I'll be sticking with Claude Code as my more secure genie of choice.

Europe's Social Media Revolution

Europeans have had about enough with U.S. tech companies and their social media platforms.

W Social launched at Davos, which on its own is enough to make me skeptical, even if I agree with some of the values motivating its launch. It's Stockholm-based and aims to keep all data within Europe in a bot-free environment. But if it doesn't adopt a federated protocol, it's hard to justify starting an entirely new social graph on a new platform.

EuroSky is the one I'm more optimistic about. This project, related to the Free Our Feeds campaign and the newly created Modal Foundation, is built on the AT Protocol, the same underlying technology that powers BlueSky. It will launch imminently and you can register now. If they deliver on what they're building, I should be able to seamlessly move my @mattford.media Bluesky handle, followers, and content to their servers with very little disruption. This openness and portability of social graphs is the kind of social Internet I want to help build towards.