What is playhacker?
What is it for? Why did we make it? What size is the business? How many people are involved? Where is the HQ? Where are the collaborators located? Who does what? And more...
Contents
Manifesto
Some slogans:
- You bought it, you break it
- Own your toys
- Creative destruction
The rationale: the world has progressed too far down the path of overwhelming technological complexity. With each generation of technical advancement, the tools and products we use become harder to understand, repair and customize to our tastes and needs. Playhacker is an experiment to try and wrest some small amount of control of our things, away from the emerging army of support specialists, back into the hands of users.
The focus: we preach, and teach, agency, autonomy, mastery and true ownership of things. We provide tools, materials, skills, tutorials and ideas for creative modding of things in everyday life. We strive to offer complete, no-assumptions projects for the making of new things from old things.
The outcomes: ideas and tutorials for building fun, unique, entertaining, giftable, sharable creations that you can be proud of. These acts of creation build new skills, and give a (re)new(ed) sense of agency in the world of stuff.
Business
Playhacker is a project of Garage Rocket, an invention development company. Which is in turn a business entity of Tangent Method LLC, which is owned and operated by Bruce Cannon, out of sunny El Segundo, California (greater Los Angeles), with a worldwide network of development partners.
Engineering
Bruce does architecture design and specification, prototyping and some production development. But most of the systems and processes you find on playhacker.com are built and maintained by Haider Abbas, working remotely from Lucknow, India. Interested in hiring him for development work? Here is his Upwork profile.
Design
A range of artists contribute work to the site. For details, check out our Credits Reel page, where we try and give credit to, and link to, key creative contributors.
Development
The site has a complex development history, and a regular sequence of innovation releases. For details about all of this, check out the Blueprints section.