Why does making matter so much more than consuming?
Oliver Sacks had an idea late in his life that I keep coming back to. He observed that most people treat being present as the goal, as if the whole point of living were to sit inside the current second. He thought that was a little sad. The people he found most alive were soaked in the past and future at once: remembering, planning and dreaming. That’s what making does to you. It stretches you across all three tenses, because you’re building toward something you can already see, out of everything you’ve ever loved. Consuming, by contrast, parks you in the now.
Take social media. At the start it was a little miraculous: people taking the time to share what was happening and what they were thinking with each other. Then it became a contest. A call for attention. And once the algorithms took over, the thing that broke through was whatever was loudest, so people optimized for loud, and lately we’ve started calling the machine-made version of it slop.
But the feed was slop before any machine got involved. Slop is just what you get when everyone consumes and nobody creates, and the cure is people making things again, which AI is unusually good at enabling. That’s about the most anti-slop thing I can imagine. A companion you talk to and shape and argue with will do more for you than a celebrity you watch from across the internet, because one of them is a thing you make and the other is a thing that happens to you. It’s the difference between putting on an autogenerated Spotify playlist and making somebody a mixtape. A mixtape is you, smuggled into another person’s afternoon.
And this isn’t reserved for creatives. A master electrician
with no computer science degree used AI to build a load-calculation tool that sells for $12.99 and replaces a $500 service call. A plumber
canceled a $40,000 consulting contract
after a single afternoon with OpenClaw got him further than the consultants had scoped in weeks. For most of computing history, if you couldn’t code, you were a consumer of other people’s ideas. That’s over. The cost of trying things has collapsed, and the people picking this up first are not the ones anyone predicted. Software is about to be everywhere the way YouTube made video everywhere, and most of it will be built by people who’d never have called themselves builders.
