Hacking Work

“Benevolent Hackers”

Workers are fomenting a quiet revolution. They subvert established company policies whenever those rules and regulations make their jobs harder or less efficient. This revolution takes the form of circumventing or replacing outmoded or silly procedures. It enables workers to be faster and more productive, and it allows them to fine-tune work circumstances to suit their own natures, rather than bending to idiotic bureaucracy. The members of this ever-growing community of under-the-radar revolutionaries are called benevolent hackers.

“Broken Businesses” Old business models and processes no longer work. Rigid managers and top-down directives make a company less productive. Yet in uncertain times, most firms tend to be more fearful, more controlling, more rigid and less concerned with employee happiness. But hard times demand courage, not timidity. Workers are fighting back. Evers Pearce’s bosses at Oxford cut his project’s funding to nearly nothing and told him to throw out its furniture and other detritus. Instead, he sold the supposed garbage on eBay and funneled £37,000 back into the project. Such workers are taking control. Well...