Hacktastic
Now I am a proud child of the 60s and have seen a great many cultural hacks over the years…I saw the moon landings on original black and white TV. I remember when the Sex Pistols hacked the 70s music scene I paid for a sound kicking at the Screen on the Green in Islington to listen to their dischordant grunge. I saw the hacking of the Berlin Wall and I think I even had a piece of it, I remember watching it on our state of the art colour TV – the size of a small family car, whilst discussing the new east/west freedom with a friend using a phone with a dial and a curly cable disappearing into it – whoops those got hacked...I remember when mobile calls involved a box and needed a 10p coin The A Team hacked vehicles, The Hoff had a speaking car, we started lugging phones around in suitcases…
So too did computers which went from green writing to orange. Jobs and Gates came onto the scene and democratised technology, with palm tops (but people kept falling out of trees) and laptops emerged and phones got small and then the got big and turned into pads and TVs…and then of course came d’internet – the 5th musketeer which arrived on the scene and smashed down borders, changed fortunes and denied an entire teenage generation an understanding of what the sky and the great outdoors looked like.
Music and film started streaming, Blockbuster went out of business, the high street decayed, retail went big, then went online and then online swamped bricks and mortar and delivered cauliflowers in drones. We became a generation of subscribers and we got social – joining communities bigger than territories we lived in, the world got smaller and as we unfurl the calendar into the next decades we learn that we have created an unstoppable agenda of cataclysmic environmental change; and not just that but we are so reliant on our device windows into the virtual world that the next stage of our physiologically evolutionary change will be lead by our reliance of technology.
To hack was originally a bad word for a cough, or a dodgy reporter, or a teenager sticking smiley faces on top secret Pentagon documentation - but now it's 2016, nearly 2017 and hacking is acceptable – it’s a way of innovating, of accelerating through ideas and failing fast and moving on and we like to hack…So the 3rd of Nov I will remember as the day I won a pass for a double hackathon judging record spree spanning the unforgettable 10 hours of 14:00 and 23:30 and covering such diversity, as modelling the supply distribution to the infrastructure industry, facial recognition software to replace Oystercards, a sentiment tool that analyses massively unpopular projects like digging up Chesham to build a high speed railway' and finally a stint on how to get across London faster. Over 500 smart people got together and hacked together over 500 ideas and even if 450 get screw balled into the round file, there’s 50 which might see the light of day…and who know's maybe one is a cure for cancer…or better still for a hacking cough.
Get hacking people – hack with your mates, hack with your neighbours, hack a better world…but don’t get hacked off - be part of the solution not part of the problem.