Thus, Dennis hangs up his shirts so that they face the right; I hang up mine so they face the left. In a logical Universe, we would respect this light-optimised orientation when hanging up each other's shirts. But even a dual-programmer household falls well short of the Spock/Sherlock ideal. Alack.
The mayhem and havoc wreaked by misaligned clothing can be quantified in terms of extra fractions of a second required to select the t-shirt whose snark and/or geek culture in-joke best matches our mood-of-the-moment. A #firstworldproblem if there ever was one, in other words. But it illustrates the power of personal norms to trump logic (and the instinct to use it). And, in a way, it makes me despair for human progress as driven by first world technology...or even most first world technologists (in whose number I count myself, btw).
Silicon Valley has been panned by folks as diverse as Valleywag and Startup L. Jackson for burning so many calories turning paper millionaires into paper billionaires while infantilising the twenty-something dudebros who are the face of its culture/ethos. The first is just what shareholder capitalism is optimised to do. (The second is just plain pathetic.) Neither of them can be considered truly "disruptive"--at least not in the net positive sense their apologists would have you believe. Sure, it's taking bites out of the taxi and hotel industry by socialising the costs of industries formerly held more accountable via regulation. But, hey, you can't make a creative destruction omelette without breaking a few social contracts, amirite?
It's not even a private sector ailment. NGOs can (and do) squander resources applying first world thinking outside the first world. Case in point: The first attempts to convince Cambodian families to add a lotus-shaped chunk of iron to their cook-pots to reduce/eliminate anaemia fell short. Follow-up visits discovered the iron being used for other purposes, notably doorstops. But casting the iron in the shape of a fish considered "lucky" by locals changed the game. Anaemia has been eliminated in 43% of trial subjects, and a sustainable business model was spawned in the process.
Moral of the story: Sometimes it's the users, not the technologies, that have to be "hacked." The catch is that those of us who are paid to be problem solvers have the instinct to hack technology first. Don't get me wrong--I'm a huge proponent of usability. The bigger a technology's side effects, the more incumbent it is upon its designers to make it as impossible as possible to misuse. I get it.
But the slickest, most bulletproof interface in the 'verse means bupkis if it is A.) Not solving a worthwhile problem, and/or B.) Is too expensive (in terms of cost, infrastructure support, externalised costs, etc.) to use by those who would most benefit from it.
So, to recap, to successfully "disrupt" anything, the designers/developers need to:
- Allow people to benefit their lives/families/communities in a way that was previously impossible
- Allow them to do it in a way that doesn't require huge (for them!) investments or later remediation
- Ensure that misuse is darned near impossible without anything beyond rudimentary training
