inverse vandalism

n.

Creating something for no other reason than the sheer fact that you can create it.

Example Citation:

Children should be challenged to improve their ability to make images, to think about things and to make representations of things. A lot of technology is really inverse vandalism; just people making machinery just because they can.

—Judy Schuster, "A bicycle for the mind, redux," Electronic Learning, April 1, 1994

Earliest Citation:

A twentieth century problem is that technology has become too "easy." When it was hard to do anything, whether good or bad, enough time was taken so that the result was usually good. Now we can make things almost trivially, especially in software, but most of the designs are trivial as well. This is inverse vandalism: the making of things because you can.

—Alan Kay, " The Early History of Smalltalk: http://www.smalltalk.org/smalltalk/TheEarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk_Abstract.html," ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 28, No. 3, March 1, 1993

Category:

Sociology (General)