Sometimes disobedience is necessary and good when rules fail us, and it's at the core of why one hacks. Hacking is a means of expressing dissatisfaction, confounding the mechanism, and ultimately doing better. Here's why it's so important.
What Does It Mean When We Say "Hack"?
Hacking can be defined a few ways, from the more innocent type of life hacking we generally talk about to the darker side of the spectrum where people are actually carrying out highly illegal actions. Here, we fall somewhere in the gray middle, where hacking disobeys companies, circumvents copyright laws, and challenges people to do more with what they're given. Hacking is a brand of disobedience that both expresses dissatisfaction with the status quo and does something to change it. This is the kind of hacking—and disobedience—that's beneficial and good.
The Reasons for Disobedience
It's hard for a lot of people to justify disobedience because it often involves breaking rules, if not the law. There's always at least a shred of incorrectness to disobedience, even if it's committed for all the right reasons. Hacking gets a bad reputation for those reasons as well, and to really understand why hacking is so important it's necessary to look at its roots: civil disobedience.We've seen numerous examples of the benefits of civil disobedience over time, from Gandhi's campaign for independence from the British Empire (e.g.: the Salt March),
Why We Hack?
We hack because we want to
do better. We hack because we want to demonstrate the desire for greater possibilities. We hack because we're sick and tired of being caught in a net designed for other people. We hack because it's fun. With the internet becoming the world community, hacking has become a form of civil disobedience. It's a way to passionately tear down and rebuild, confound the mechanism, and express dissatisfaction through improvement. It's about doing better, not breaking the law.
The need for disobedience comes in many forms but it all stems from being denied something we sorely need in our lives. While it's not always the right answer, it's hugely important. We need to keep on hacking so long as we're angry, frustrated, and dissatisfied with the status quo. We can sit around and complain, or we can do better. It's a pretty easy choice.
This is an extracted version from the Post of Adam Dachis (Original Author) at LifeHacker.com