Ikea hackers

Here's a quickish post which might be of interest to people interested

in the word "hack", and how its meaning has changed over time and how

it differs between the hacker subculture and those outside it.

At my local library the other day I saw a book titled "Ikea

Hackers", which is about interesting ways to assemble or use Ikea

furniture which differ from the official Ikea instrutions or the

designer's intentions.

What I found curious was that the foreword of the book felt some need

to explain the concept of Ikea "hacking" to a non-computery audience,

and did so as follows:

Now, you may ask, "What's an IKEA hack?". In its simplest terms,

it's a modification of an IKEA product. In no way does the term

"hack" infer that the mods are sloppily done. Rather, the name

suggests that the hackers "break into" the IKEA "code" of furniture

assembly and repurpose, challenge and create with new results.

(totally irrelevant aside: I only noticed while typing that quote from

a phone photo I took that they used "infer" when they clearly meant

"imply". Top notch editing!)

There's quite a lot going on here! The assurance that the book's mods

aren't sloppily done suggests an anticipation that the reader's most

likely understanding of "hack" is in the sense of "hackjob" or, e.g.,

"hack journalist". The (quite strained) "breaking into code" analogy

plays into the mainstream media's definition of "hacking", so often

decried by "real hackers" who would prefer that this was called

"cracking". The bit at the end about repurposing, challenging and

creating actually captures quite well an important aspect of the

"true" meaning of "hack".

But most interesting of all for me is the following: the "true" sense

of hacking was domain general, and not inherently linked to computers.

One of the most commonly suggested origins of the phrase "hacking" is

from the MIT model railway club. It's also been suggested that it was

borrowed from British horse riding culture where it referred to riding

around in a casual and undirected manner with no particular goal just

for fun. To people familiar with this history of "hacking", there's

nothing unusual at all about "Ikea hacking". Of course, most people

• aren't* familiar with this history, and so in standard English

"hacking" is, or perhaps until very recently was, fundamentally a

computery thing - the term underwent a kind of "semantic narowing".

Now the original, wider understanding of "hack" is starting to become

a bit more mainstream (consider especially the popularity of

"life hacks" on the web). But while this appears to people like you

or I as simply a return to the way things always were, or should have

been, for mainstream culture this is a "semantic widening" of a

computer term (similar to, e.g. "rebooting" an old television or

cinema franchise). Because of this perspective, authors feel the need

to justify something like a furniture hack as being some how kind of

analogous to "breaking into code", while this comparison just seems

totally unecessary and artificial to somebody who never participated

in the original semantic narrowing in the first place.