“The street finds its own uses for things” (2012) | Hacker News Reader

“The street finds its own uses for things” (2012)

citiesandcitizenship.blogspot.com

82 pointswalterbell16 comments

Does anyone have any tales of 'street uses' they have come across of some more recent technologies?

I often feel like the technologies people get excited about around here are too tied to their designed uses, but maybe that's a lack of ingenuity or perspective on my part.

One somewhat emergent use case that I've been really interested in lately is the use of social media to coordinate and communicate during emergencies and disasters, which is arguably not really the original intended use of the technology. The really famous/ridiculous one is the Yo app being used to alert people about missile strikes [1]. For a nice case study about this kind of use case, [2] is a good read.

[1] http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-28247504

[2] http://www.un-spider.org/sites/default/files/Volunteered%20G...

Cellular hotspots and solar-powered phone chargers, once tools of the jet-setting executive and the bougie outdoorsman, respectively, became de facto ISP and electric utilities for homeless encampments.

I imagine it's a combination of things being more specialized and the fact that we have honestly solved a tonne of problems and made a lot of... things. There is probably already a thing for whatever alternative use you come up with design specifically to achieve the task.

- Bitcoin, Tor for drugs/illicit purposes

- Tumblr as a social media space instead of a Blogger-type platform (the original intended use case)

Along those lines, Tumblr for pornography.

> Bitcoin, Tor for drugs/illicit purposes

I'm not certain if those count. Bitcoin and Tor were explicitly intended to circumvent government controls. The creators surely knew that meth dealers and child pornographers would use them; they just felt that the benefits were worth the cost.

Social media and Bluetooth played a role in the Arab Spring [1]. Your average spy movie or series (I am currently watching The Americans) contains loads of [fictional] examples. Some other examples: SSH over Tor to get around firewall(s). USB sticks in concrete as a means of a drop point.

And what is fiction, might become reality. Just a matter of how far you wanna look. Snow Crash pretty much described Second Life or MMOs with the Metaverse. Plus, I remember around 2000 a joke IIRC called the iBrator. It was a remote, internet controlled vibrator. Back then it was an April Fool. Look where we are now? You can pay to make a person's (most likely a woman) vibrator vibrate, live, over the internet. You can call that an unintended consequence of the internet, USB, video conferencing, javascript, or what not.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Spring

Funny, I see it the other way around; the tech is so flexible and untied that it's hard to classify any use as outside of what was intended.

Smartphones, 3D printers, VR goggles, Quadcopters, IPFS - all of them are designed without a single use in mind, but as platforms for the users. A certain use case (e.g. 3D printed heads as urns) may be unexpected, but it's not an hack, it's just the tech being used as intended.

Perhaps the magnetic tape recorder and cell phone weren't the best examples of "unintended uses", but using chest x-rays as phonograph records is a clever hack.

Smartphones are intended a a personal device running apps controlled by a human user (sure, a "platform"). They're not intended to be a sensor pack / CPU for self-driving cars.

3D printers are intended for printing plastic stuff (sure, arbitrary plastic stuff). But maybe they can be co-opted for squirting molten plastic at your enemies.

Quadcopters are intended for doing arbitrary stuff while hovering. But you could re-purpose one as an oscillating fan.

I've experimented with my 3d printer by attaching a wire connected to a capacitor bank to the tool head. I can cut (with low accuracy) metal foil that's connected to the other end of the capacitor bank this way, I never did more experiments with it.

Some un-banked people use sneakers (eg. Air Jordans) as 'stores of value'

Source: I've watched all the sneaker documentaries on Amazon prime.

Are sneakers bit larger, bulkier and harder to store than cash? If your wearing a pair I guess not, but then your stored value is diminishing with each step.

your stored value is diminishing with each step

This is a plight of poor people, if not the plight of poor people, since time immemorial.

How Tide Detergent Became a Drug Currency

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5023204 (2013)

USB ports and battery packs are used to power things that have nothing to do with USB.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com