OddballGreg - The Hacker Mentality

Nothing says "Hacker" like a wall of green hued binary code right? Unless of course you subscribe to the digital era understanding of the term which is essentially: "an inventor".

Have you ever imagined yourself as an inventor? Perhaps you dreamed about making fantastic new machines or writing amazing new programs when you were a child. Either way, these days you would not have been referred to as an aspirant inventor, but rather as a "Hacker". (Provided you're asking someone born in the digital era.)

Right about now, depending on your age or how informed you are about the internet and cultural going-ons of it's inhabitants, your brain may be ringing various alarm bells about the negative stigma surrounding the term "Hacker". Whether you subscribe to the digital-era's take on what it means to be a "Hacker" or not is irrelevant to this stigma, as it's still commonly understood that a "Hacker", whatever he may doing, has certain motivations which are contrary to the laws of society. What am I referring to? The belief of Hackers that break into banking systems to steal money, or into government files to steal information. Perhaps they're even vandals, destroying data or defacing websites.

Whatever the dogma, you need to understand, (for the purposes of this article), that a Hacker isn't necessarily a bad person. Sure you get those wayward individuals seeking personal gain regardless of those it impacts, but in the digital era, "Hacker" has come to stand as a term for people who look for ways to improve things or do them better. As Ymir Vigfusson said in his Ted Talk at TEDxReykjavik, he teaches students to hack for the benefit of society, with the hope that his teachings will instill a moral compass into his students that will help them to use their skills to the benefit of society, rather than its detriment. There is risk involved in doing so, but also the potential for great gains. (I heavily paraphrased that, sorry.)

Those great gains come from "The Hacker Mentality" as Pablos Holman referred to it in his Ted Talk at TEDxMidwest wherein he talked about how one of the reasons he taught people about Hacking was because of the mentality it caused in people. He put it, simply, as "Don't ask what it can do, but what can I make it do?" It's a frame of thought that makes for fantastic inventors, scientists and programmers because it frees you from thinking along pre-programmed lines. 

Most of us pick up our phones and use them to talk to people, to remember dates and take pictures. Functions that have been made and done thousands of time which we usually take for granted as the extent of the phones capabilities. Yet some people use their phones to run commercial servers remotely via command line prompts, to gather information from people using Wi-fi nearby (kind've dodgy, but it's been done), or to even use it as a remote point of access into a network that they shouldn't be accessing. (Definitely dodgy.) These smartphones are miniaturized computers which contain the processing power that the whole of NASA used to send the APOLLO space mission to the moon in the 1960's. (And yet we take selfies with them.)

So with so much power at our literal fingertips, whats to stop us from doing equally impressive things if we simply stop to ask "What can I make this do?", instead of "What does it do?" Various things perhaps, a specific lack of technical expertise for some surely. But the beauty of this mentality, is that like the word "Hacker", it needn't apply to computers specifically. Machines and their various parts can be re-purposed in a great variety of ways if one thinks about it carefully. So the next time you see some nifty piece of tech, consider what it can be made to do.

If you which to add something of your own to the argument for/against "Hacking", or simply want to share some great story of how this "Hacker Mentality" changed your perspective on the machines around you, do be sure to let us know down in the comments below, or via Facebook/Twitter. We here at TCSA love to hear your feedback. And of course, if you enjoy finding out about awesome stuff on the web and world then do please be sure to like the Official TCSA Facebook page and/or follow us on Twitter using the associated buttons on the bar to the left to get all the latest posts as they're published. Also, do be sure to share posts you enjoyed with your friends as it helps us out a great deal. Regardless of what you do, I thank you for having taken the time to read this post; hope that you have/had an absolutely FANTASTIC day, and I will speak again soon.

Happy hacking my friends.