A few days before Thanksgiving, George Hotz, a 26-year-old hacker, invites me to his house in San Francisco to check out a project he’s been working on. He says it’s a self-driving car that he had built in about a month. The claim seems absurd. But when I turn up that morning, in his garage there’s a white 2016 Acura ILX outfitted with a laser-based radar (lidar) system on the roof and a camera mounted near the rearview mirror. A tangle of electronics is attached to a wooden board where the glove compartment used to be, a joystick protrudes where you’d usually find a gearshift, and a 21.5-inch screen is attached to the center of the dash. “Tesla only has a 17-inch screen,” Hotz says.

He’s been keeping the project to himself and is dying to show it off. We pace around the car going over the technology. Hotz fires up the vehicle’s computer, which runs a version of the Linux operating system, and strings of numbers fill the screen. When he turns the wheel or puts the blinker on, a few numbers change, demonstrating that he’s tapped into the Acura’s internal controls.

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One afternoon in early 2014, an employee of the Manhattan co-working space Coworkrs got behind the handlebars of a large tricycle and began pedaling it through the Flatiron district. The tricycle was outfitted with a small desk; the employee seemed to be sitting at her desk while cycling around the city.

A company called Peddler Pop-Ups had designed the display and rented out the tricycle for use as a rolling advertisement. (The tricycles can also be used as pop-up stores.) Peddler Pop-Ups is one of six companies founded and operated by a 27-year-old entrepreneur named Danielle Baskin. She does not have any employees, and until this month, Ms. Baskin’s businesses had their headquarters in a 160-square-foot live-work space in the East Village.

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