
“The street finds its own uses for things” (2012) - walterbell
http://citiesandcitizenship.blogspot.com/2012/03/street-finds-its-own-uses-for-things.html?m=1
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eli173
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.

~~~
bobthepanda
\- Bitcoin, Tor for drugs/illicit purposes

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

~~~
Fnoord
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Spring)

