blocks signals
within 20 meters

You know the types: The one who talks wayyyy too loudly on private calls, completely disrupting everyone around him. Or the self-important person whose incoming text messages are always far more important than actually giving you his undivided attention for five minutes. Yeah, those types.

If you work w/ one of those, maybe it’s time for the ultimate work-around: A cell phone jammer. Churches, temples, theaters, concert halls and museums use them to ensure that their cultural norms are preserved and so self-possessed people need to exit the locale to talk loudly or check the scores from their favorite team.

Extreme? Maybe. But sometimes that’s what’s called for.

Case in point; The Edinburgh Fringe Festival website. They insist that reading their site constitutes a binding contract (not true in any country I know of) and that opening up their platform to others to share, remix, and distribute would cost them significant revenue. Nevermind that most other festivals go out of their way to do just that.

There are plenty of other examples; Vodafone, Ticketmaster, Easyjet – they all prevent deep-linking. That is, the ability for others to link to webpages that are NOT the front page is forbidden.

That means that all their carefully-curated content cannot be shared. Information about their sales, their special offers, their services – all private. Not a very smart way to run a company, is it? This is 2010, and yet the hacks most of us thought had gone mainstream in 1997 still prevail in places – which is exactly why people like us need to boostrap our businesses: they aren’t going to do it themselves.

photo: legendsrevealed

In Dubai, hundreds of thousands of laborers from all over the world are building luxury they will never experience. Some of those from India are hacking that economic divide — through cricket.

SmartLife realized that the one bond that tied both blue-collar Indian laborers, with few skills beyond what they could do with their hands, and white-collar Indian professionals, was their shared love of cricket. So SmartLife not only organized regular matches with both Indian economic classes, but they also helped establish mentoring programs where professionals “adopt” a laborer to assist in his training and development, and prizes from the cricket matches include free computer courses. (CNN Video)

Hacking Lesson: Often the best hacks involve making connections between people with seemingly different goals or agendas, and helping them see that helping each other is actually enlightened self interest. Are you a connector? Is that your hack?

And yet, when I read the details, this guy isn’t trying to make bombs, or even an existing style of reactor. He’s trying to make a fusion reactor based on the recently-unfunded work of Dr. Bussard, who showed promising signs of discovering a means of completely safe energy generation.

It’s far out, wierd, world-changing science. It’s not blowing up your backyard at all – despite what the media reporters might make of it. And it’s yet another example of useful, insightful information being inflated into sensationalist baloney.

So instead of hearing “some enterprising soul is trying to advance a promising long shot” we hear “terrorists next door.” It’s part of the reason people really DO need to embrace hacking.

Disagree? Tell me why.

Honestly, it’s a pretty obvious hack – just like when Colbert asked “the internet” to mess with Wikipedia’s entry on elephants. He has a big audience, and he’s able to use it. Maybe not the same way as certain other Twitterlebrities, but still – it’s clever. And after he proved his point on Wikipedia, he turned around and used it for good – by getting Comedy Central to pony up for some amazingly good branding.

In other words, he illustrated to them that if they donated a load of cash for his Gulf of America Fund they’d be associated with doing good in the mind of their (potential and existing) viewers, would reach a much larger (and better targeted) audience than if they’d just bought a billboard ad, and (I expect) got a great tax write-off to boot.

That’s a good hack. Why aren’t more folks doing this?

photo: robbinssports.com

Some were awesome, (just don’t go to meetings); some were funny yet useful (whack a screwdriver against a magnet a few dozen times and you now have a magnetized screwdriver); some were commonsensical (buy a box of small LED flashlights and place one behind anything you routinely have to peer behind — the fridge, TV, inside a computer rack).

But one made me go “Uhhhh, I dunno.” Suggested hack: Buy a starter pistol, the kind they use in track races, and store it in your CHECKED luggage when you travel. Your luggage will ALWAYS arrive where it’s supposed to because luggage with guns in them have to be stored and managed with much more attention to detail than all other luggage. Not all procedural workarounds are good ideas!

Hacking is about solving problems, despite government or big industry’s best efforts to prevent it in the name of the status quo or market share. As in any environment, the more you attempt to suppress a balanced system the more the system will disequilibriate itself to counter you – it’s the same thing that happened with BitTorrent and music downloads, and now (increasingly) with TV and streaming.

Would somebody please tell business to wake up and start working with its consumers to give them what they want?

image: icons.mysitemyway

It is not so much a wonder that people hate IT,
it is a wonder organizations
still find people to take the abuse.”
— Kevin Wood

In this YouTube clip, filmmaker David Lynch trashes the experience of watching a movie on your phone. No matter how good phones become, even those that start w/ “i,” we agree. People; popcorn; surroundsound; the images enveloping every part of you; experiencing the created world as the filmmaker envisioned it — that’s what we call watching a movie!

We’ll let David Lynch send you a wake-up call, in his own eloquent way, about experiencing a movie. We’d like to draw your attention to the fact that using the best tools for the best experience is always critical — whether it’s for entertainment or work. When your company produces crap project management tools, why subject yourself to that? Why not use awesome tools produced in the open-source marketplace. When your company tries to control your experience of how you build teams or how you communicate or how you perform evaluations or how you report your results with less-than-awesome (AKA: crappy) tools…why subject yourself to that?

Using the best tools for the job…(“best” as defined by “helping you do YOUR best”)…is supercritical. As Mr. Lynch might say IF he were an organizational design expert, “You’ll be cheated…It’s such a sadness…Stop using the company’s fucking tools…Get real!”