Hacking is Playing is Learning

In my first posting I made reference to an essay by Frank Oppenheimer about play and learning (this Blog, Oct 22). Frank raises an issue that I must always remember: it takes discipline to play. The pressure to produce makes it hard to work creatively and playfully. The more I view a program like Flash as a tool for making money, the harder it is for me to think about creative uses of the program. I think this is why Frank liked that picture of the grain silo sculpted by the wrecking ball operator. Wrecking balls are not normally viewed as a tool for creative expression.

The art of hacking (which is a particular aspect of play) involves looking at the technological stuff around us not as "things-in-themselves" (sorry Herr Kant about misuse of your term) but rather as "things-to-take-apart" and make into something else, or behave in an new way (unintended by the original creators of the thing.)

Some awards for hacking:

--> Andrew "Bunnie" Huang and all the people who have been turning Xbox consoles into computers. See Peyri Ingrum's blog post of 11/29/03, Hacking the Xbox.

--> Adam Mathes: the guy who more or less consolidated the idea of "Google Bombing" (creating a google association between a term, and a particular web page by propagating a bunch of links between the term and the web page. This forces Google's algorithm to make the association.) To try this out, type miserable failure into the Google search engine and hit "I'm feeling lucky".

--> LEGO toys: One thing I like about LEGO toys is that the parts can be used for things other than their original intended purpose. A wheel can become the bumper of a touch sensor, a gear can become a face on a robot. In fact there has been a significant amount of hacking with the LEGO Mindstorms kits. People have reverse engineered the firmware on these toys to make them do rather exceptional things. The reason the Lego Company gets recognition here, is that they have decided not to get in the way of this community of hackers. Compare this to the legal action Sony has taken against certain Abio enthusiasts, under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.