Yes, we can just do things.

Dan Abramov's fantastic piece perfectly captures the spirit of something exciting happening right now: people are riffing, forking, fixing, and shipping in the open.

It feels exciting and highly contagious.

But it also highlights an uncomfortable truth — most of the world isn’t in this workshop and can't easily get in: They’re stuck in social platforms, trained to scroll, like, and consume, not to build and explore.

We’ve had the internet for almost four decades. It's a place that much of the world visits every day. And yet the original promise of the web — that anyone could build, publish, and participate — has never seemed so out of reach.

The result is that only a small minority experience this golden age of collaboration. For everyone else, the idea that they could build or contribute never even enters the imagination. This isn’t about a lack of ideas or interest or creativity; it’s because dominant platforms make participation feel impossible.

Walled gardens are built for passive use not active participation. 'Digital natives' may be fluent in TikTok filters, but not in the open web’s materials, gears, and levers. They’re conditioned to graze from behind a glass wall, not to create. Tech companies want you feeding the machine, not making your own.

The tragedy is that the real magic — making wild and unreasonable things together — remains invisible and unimaginable to most.

This isn’t a critique of builders.

It’s a tiny disgruntled protest against a broader system that has kept the public technologically illiterate by design. The fix is digital education as a civic project.

That means treating digital fluency the way we treat literacy or numeracy — a shared baseline that schools, libraries, and all our communities are responsible for nurturing.

It means tools with documentation written for the nervous, not just the initiated. It means defaults that explain themselves, and more learning environments where breaking and fixing things is encouraged.

Builders have a role to play and many already do: sharing processes, making work open source, inviting others to tinker.

But the challenge goes beyond code.

Open source culture itself has to get better at welcoming non-engineers, at lowering barriers, at seeing usability and documentation as core contributions, not afterthoughts to cool technical achievements.

The spirit of “we can just do things” only compounds when it spreads. If we want this moment to last, we can’t just build for ourselves. We have to open the door wide enough for everyone — and actively pull them through.