When existing business models are failing the all-too-common reaction is to try to shore up losses and hang on to what used to work. And yet for the last several years we’ve seen plenty of evidence that this just isn’t working – the “mainstream media” being a fine example.

My question is when big business is going to realize that quick and nimble trumps big and scaled – because scale is no longer expensive. That fundamental shift makes hacking existing systems on an individual level suddenly profitable and competitive.

Disagree? Tell me why.

Bell Labs’ Telstar I:
The first telecommunications
satellite from
scienceprogress.org

I live in what used to be Bell Labs territory. At its peak, the research arm of Ma Bell telephone developed a wide range of revolutionary technologies including the transistor, the laser, information theory, and the UNIX operating system.

During that heyday a neighbor, John, was an engineer for Bell Labs. As their computer systems grew more interconnected, John wanted to be sure that all their work for the U.S. government was secure. So he began his own project to build that security system. But his bosses pulled him aside: Cease and desist they told him. His work might make their government clients ask questions, exposing holes in Bell Labs’ security. (Ah, duh!) Secretly, John kept working on it, hacking around his bosses’ wishes.

Then John retired. Bell Labs owned the rights to all his corporate-sanctioned work. He could not patent any of that work under his own name or profit from it. But they still wanted nothing to do with his security research. He got to take that with him. John took that research and established a highly profitable and globally-respected computer security firm.

Moral of the story: If you know you’re right and your bosses are wrong, keep working around them, even in secret if you have to. You could end up starting a new business that leaves you laughing all the way to the bank.

It’s always a pleasure to see dry wit used to deliver insight, but getting it from a teenager who is both leveraging it as a platform (you’d better believe her big-media interviews are going on her resume) and educating her peers is pure gold. After all, who doesn’t want to know what a seventeen year old thinks of seventeen magazine – especially when trying to live by its edicts?

It’s a damn clever hack that benefits everybody – even Seventeen Magazine, for whom editorial accountabilty to their ostensible readers is sorely lacking.

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.

collider.com

Hacking Lesson: Bottom-up power is real. In recent years, every movie that wowed Comic-Con-ers won instant word-of-mouth raves eventually went on to become blockbusters at the box office. Most every movie that failed to wow them, well, let’s say sales could be heard in cartoon-balooned “Ssssplattt!”s and “Thudddd!”s. The power of the masses to give support or take it away is very real.

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?