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From Chapter 1

WISING UP ABOUT A SMARTPHONE

A FEW YEARS AGO I ENGAGED my then two-month-old smartphone,


a BlackBerry of some sort or another, in a very nontechnical road
test: I sat on it. I only noticed the damage when one afternoon I
reached to check my email. The small screen, usually jittering and
scrolling with plenty of new messages, was suddenly a disconcerting
Technicolor swirl with a huge black spot in the middle. A Rorschach
test for the addled info junkie.

Suffering from the withdrawal, symptoms familiar to anyone


addicted to their phone, I drove in a mild panic to the nearest
Verizon Wireless store, located in a small strip mall in a neighboring
town.

After a short wait, I met with a sales representative seated in front


of a computer screen. After asking for my vitals, he typed for a few
seconds and waited. Then he typed, then he waited. Then he
sighed.

“You can get a new phone,” he said.

“Free of charge?” I said, already knowing the answer.

“No,” he responded. “At retail price.”

“How much is that?” I asked.

“Four hundred fifty dollars.”

Could I get my current BlackBerry fixed? The rep shook his head
sadly. “They don’t let us repair the phones in the store anymore,”
he said. “That was my favorite part of the job. Now all I get to do is
sell phones.”

I felt his pain. Having grown up tinkering with Radio Shack


electronic kits, I used to love taking things apart—radios, tape
players, anything I could get my hands on.
But in the last twenty-five years or so, the number of household
devices we can easily tinker with has dwindled.

When I arrived home, I dug out my old BlackBerry. Two and a half
years earlier, I had marveled at its slick design and state-of-theart
“world phone” capability. Now it just looked thick and clunky. And
what would I do without its previously special ability to make calls
from other countries without swapping out a computer chip? It
didn’t matter since virtually every phone can do that now. I googled
my model number to see if I could find a more affordable
replacement. What I stumbled onto instead was a short video on
YouTube. The video showed a pair of hands disassembling a
BlackBerry and replacing the screen in a matter of minutes. A male
voice, with an appealingly clipped English accent, guided me
through each step.

I was hooked.

Through another Google search, I found an online retailer selling


replacement screens for around $45, as well as a small
smartphonespecific toolkit, including a tiny torque screwdriver and
a little plastic tool for prying apart the BlackBerry’s flimsy case.
One FedEx delivery later, I had my phone disassembled and its parts
neatly laid out on my desk. The screws came out easily; the case
popped right off. Inside the phone, there were remarkably few
parts. Following the YouTube video instructions carefully, I was able
to unplug the broken screen, which was attached to the circuit
board by a tapelike digital connector leading to a six-pin plug. I
snapped in the new screen with little trouble, clicked the case back
together, and tightened up the tiny screws with my tiny torque
screwdriver.

Just ten minutes after starting the process, I powered it up. Good as
new.

My tinkering journey ended at the point when I had a working phone


again. But it certainly didn’t have to. Having discovered through my
own persistence that this modern-age bit of machinery wasn’t quite
as complicated as I had first thought, I might have been
emboldened to make my own alterations to it.

Indeed, a quick online search revealed the fruits of a few intrepid


BlackBerry tinkerers. One was titled “How to Convert a BlackBerry
Camera into a Webcam.” Another demonstrated how to reverse-
engineer a BlackBerry into a complete home automation control
system.

Perhaps the best example of the smartphone-tinkering phenomenon


is the remarkable case of George Hotz. Hotz came to fame in 2007
as a seventeen-year-old hacker of Apple’s iPhone.

Hotz, a T-Mobile subscriber, wanted to use the iPhone with his


existing phone plan. But at the time, Apple had an exclusive deal
with AT&T. Armed with nothing more than an eyeglass screwdriver,
a guitar pick, and a soldering gun, he was able to erase his iPhone’s
baseband processor, the computer chip that determined which
phone carriers the device would operate with. On his own PC, he
wrote a new string of code for his iPhone, allowing it to operate
with any wireless network. Hotz staked his claim as the first person
to unlock an iPhone. This accomplishment quickly brought him both
fame and notoriety.

A few years later, in January 2010, Hotz succeeded in unlocking a


Sony PlayStation 3 video-game console, which ignited a torrent of
malfeasant hacking, culminating in a grand attack by a hacking
group known as Anonymous that temporarily forced Sony to shut
down its PS3 online gaming network.

I don’t mention Hotz’s story as evidence of hackers wreaking havoc,


but rather to show the immediate power seemingly innocuous
tinkering can have in contemporary society. It’s important to note
here that Hotz viewed himself as performing a valuable service to
society in both of these cases.

And Hotz’s impressive resume as a tinkerer backed up his claim.


While still in high school, he invented a personal transportation
device called the Neuropilot that users could drive around just by
thinking about it. His senior year, he won a $15,000 science-fair
prize for building a 3-D display. In May 2011, Sony extended an
invitation to Hotz to visit its American headquarters, where he met
with engineers working on the PS3 and explained how he broke into
their system.

Where do we draw the line between tinkerers and hackers? What


role does tinkering play in contemporary society? How did tinkerers
traditionally influence American industry and society? Do we still
have what it takes as a nation of tinkerers to excel in the global
economy? This book explores the impact American tinkerers have
had on the growth of the nation, and what role they may play in our
future. It also explores some of the cutting-edge approaches being
taken to address what some fear is the waning American tinkering
spirit.

I believe the answers to these questions lie somewhere in the


tension between corporate discipline and individual ingenuity. My
experience with my BlackBerry is a perfect example. With the rapid
decline of Research In Motion—the company that manufactured it—
since I first purchased it, no doubt new ideas for repurposing these
smartphones are cropping up every day.

But there is no guarantee that the best ideas will ever be realized,
much less filter into the marketplace. That’s because too many
average people are discouraged from ever opening these gadgets
and examining how they work. Of course, large manufacturers
would prefer that we simply toss them out and replace them with
something shiny and new. That’s just the nature of capitalism.

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