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The Way of the Unplugged – MANIFESTO

Developers rule the world. But often, they don’t know it.

In our world today, we’ve seen a move from hardware to software. Take music for example. Synthesizers – the great ‘new’ technological instrument – are a story of the past. Nowadays a synthesizer is a software plugin. It’s not a heavy box with buttons, but a dialog box with virtual knobs. It’s just as good… No it’s better, because it doesn’t weigh anything.

Another example: phone calls. Skype is starting to take over from phones. With Skype, there is no need to hold a piece of plastic in your hands, instead you’re clicking on a green button that says “call”. (You may ask “What about the iPhone?”… well, isn’t an iPhone a small computer that runs software?)

Software has been taking over from hardware. We must conclude that there has been a movement going on: the hardware-to-software movement.

Yet, now that we’ve come to discover this movement, this is also passing. The hardware-to-software movement is starting to come to a close. Dawning on us today is the movement back to hardware. We now want hardware with a software solution that drives it. We want software with a touchable shell.

Allow me to explain.

Millions of innocent people find themselves captured behind a desk from 9 to 5 or even longer. Their magic-wants are the keyboard and mouse which, by the way, were both invented over 25 years ago. Their eyes stare at a world that’s made up of graphic metaphors, metaphors of the hardware they once knew (or the hardware their parents knew). They live in a world where the word “work” means “being handcuffed to the mouse and keyboard”. No wonder there are so many meetings. No wonder perfectly sane people organize one useless event after another. They simply want to escape manning the tool that promised it could do it all. The computer.

The computer stimulates their visual senses and audible senses, but numbs the other three. It keeps them captured in one place, connected to virtual friends that cannot even help carry their groceries.

Friends, what would the world look like if we can wield the power of software, without being bound to its limitations?

That is the world of the Unplugged.

A brave group of product developers have broken the chains of input controls, and freed their mind, escaping with entrepreneurial solutions. They are not bound to one location and have discovered and engineered new ‘magic-wants’ that are changing their world for the better. They are waiting for you to join them.

Being unplugged doesn’t mean you don’t use technology. It means technology doesn’t use you.

It means you use its advantages while escaping its disadvantages. It means you need to unlearn certain well-known habits, and learn new habits that will free you.

The movement of The Unplugged is spreading and leaves you with a choice:

Stay in the past or help shape the future.

-Ruven

PS: If software developers can be Unplugged, anyone can. Share with us some blog posts or links to ideas and tools you use to escape “the computer”, “the cubicle” or “the meeting”.

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