My new favorite website - Street Use. Tracks global uses of technology for purposes never intended.

I have long been a fan of writer William Gibson. I started reading him when I was twelve, which was not an audience I think he ever intended his books for; but they made an immediate impact. It's always hard to explain for those who can't think outside the scifi ghetto what it is exactly that elevates his work so much to me. Part of it is linguistic - he found a way to translate so many new words into a believable vernacular, he understood before so many others the cultural impact of ubiquitous computation, he has a decent sense of humor and character, and his work just reads like 21st century collage.

One of the most influential things has to be a phrase from what I believe was the short story Burning Chrome. "The street finds its own uses for things". Having written that in the 80s, watching kids turn record players into legitimate instruments and so on and so forth, one thing it defined was the end point of the hacker ethos. It wasn't just hacking computers, in a world of mass manufactured retail items hacking is about taking those parts and doing something a little more with it. I think everyone who reads Giant Robot understands the ingenuity, canniness, and use of resources that implies.