Vanessa Paradis.

Using open-source software, cheap components and fabrication tools that were once available only in large machine shops, people like Ms. Fried are finding their own niches in the high-tech marketplace. Many are using the Web to share information and sell their wares. And several start-up companies are now catering to people with the urge to tinker.

Across the country, aspiring writers are using Craigslist not just as a place to offload their futons, but as a pixeled writing workshop where they test their stabs at social satire on some of the more than 30 million visitors that the site draws each month. Their personal ads ostensibly seek a soul mate, but what they’re really looking for is an audience.

Sometimes when I walk through the East Village, I feel a gust of nostalgia for 1993, when I first moved to New York and lived with my artsy friend Jill in a two-bedroom on 12th Street. It was a carefree, de-gorgeous era, when I often wore girl’s-size thermals printed with snowflakes or flowers and $3 thrift store bell-bottoms. I even knotted my hair in Bjork buns. I suppose we can all get lost in our nostalgia, no matter how dumb we looked.