I’d like to break a lance in favor of hackers. Or rather a caterpillar, given the story I’m about to tell. The fabulous story of Ikea hackers. In short, it seems that during the pandemic in the world the phenomenon of those who have modified the classic Ikea furniture has exploded, improved them, made them become something else, sharing instructions and results online in increasingly numerous groups, forums, communities.
According to The Hustle, with the hashtag #ikeahack on TikTok there are videos that have collected over 60 million views, on YouTube they reach 100 million; on Instagram there are 500 thousand posts on the subject, on Facebook hundreds of groups, not to mention Pinterest which is perhaps the most suitable social network for exhibiting one’s home creations. The phenomenon is interesting for various reasons. The first is that it concerns Ikea, one of the most famous and admired companies in the world, the one that invented another way of furnishing the house, practicing a democratic, economic and functional design that however has a turnover of over 40 billion dollars a year. . Initially Ikea did not see well this small army of amateur carpenters who modified its creations: we are talking about a decade ago, when the thing was really in its infancy and the Swedish company took the first hackers to court and ordered them not to use anymore. the word Ikea on their sites.
But then something changed and they must have realized that basically hackers do just what Ikea taught us to do: they create useful furniture from simple and cheap wooden components. If someone modifies an old bookcase or a broken chair to make something more useful, he is applying exactly the philosophy of the founder of Ikea that waste of resources is a mortal sin. The second reason this story is interesting is that it makes us familiar with another sense of the term hacker, who is not just a cybercriminal, as we hastily say today, but someone who uses technology to do something others have not previously. never done.
.