He’d always liked tinkering: taking things apart, putting them back together. As a kid he’d had model kits which he ‘customised’ as he called it, creating Frankenstein monsters or speculative objects. He moved on to fixing things, much to his parents’ concern. As a teenager his tinkering became political. He found ways to take things apart when the manufacturers deliberately made it difficult. He called it ‘opening’. Things were getting more difficult, he had to admit. The companies were locking things down . The AI black boxes were becoming harder to open. He reached for a new line of code.