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Why Silly Ideas Don’t Solve Real-World Problems
Turns out, you can’t really hack anything of importance
Over the last few years the word hack has become the go-to cliché of the under-35s. Apparently we should be able to hack pretty much anything and turn it to our (temporary) advantage.
Thus we have body hacking, bio-hacking, brain hacking, sleep hacking, health hacking, life hacking, food hacking, problem hacking, relationship hacking, and of course code hacking.
The only thing we seem to be lacking is fracking hacking, which disappoints me greatly because then if someone who was supposed to be fired (in British English, sacked) from a fracking company in fact wasn’t fired, we could have fracking hacking lacking sacking, which would make an amusing headline and something to attempt after far too many glasses of box wine.
The problem with all of the silly hacking nonsense is of course that the analogy between a few lines of trivial code and a complex biological organism or any part thereof is utterly risible.
Hacking originally meant a quick work-around, a sloppy and inelegant temporary solution, a short-term fix. Perhaps because the young generation of hoodie-clad coders never learned the virtues of elegant and properly modularized code, hacking came to mean any attempt at generating an executable that…
