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On the fourth floor of NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, there is a hackathon. Just walk in the door and follow the signs depicting George W. Bush wearing a Photoshopped Oculus Rift during his famous "Mission Accomplished" speech. Past the VR Lab you'll find a half-dozen tables full of hackers, staring at their laptop screens elbow to elbow. They're young, disheveled. Hair has had been mussed, collars tugged at, sleeves rolled up. A deep, computerized voice mutters incoherent gibberish off in the distance. A quirky machine with a tangle of wires twitches and squirts out Easy Cheese. Someone in VR makes a kissy face and waggles her head at nothing in particular. No one bats an eye.
Welcome to the third annual Stupid Shit No One Needs and Terrible Ideas Hackathon.
Founded two years ago by Amelia Winger-Bearskin and Sam Lavigne, the Stupid Hackathon is an outgrowth of the duo's time as students in the school's Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), a two-year grad program that melds technology and art. This year's event is the largest by far—there around 100 people here today, Lavigne tells me. (A later count puts it at roughly twice as many.) To either side of him projection screens display the day's topics, which include:
- VIRTUAL REALITY (FOR BABIES)
- ARTISANAL AD NETWORKS
- OPEN SOURCE DEBTORS PRISON
The Stupid Hackathon shares a portion of its DNA with the more common, often corporate-sponsored variety. Participants register ahead of time with an idea for a project and show up on event day to spend several hours in each other's company, working diligently to duct tape their ideas together—figuratively and literally—before the event closes with presentations and awards.
That's where the similarities begin and end. While many hackathons organize themselves around a goal—like the Decoded Fashion Hackathon, intended to "create an app with the most innovative ability"—the Stupid Hackathon congeals around an absence of purpose. These are projects devoid of any greater meaning. Not because their creators couldn't find it, but because they made a conscious effort to avoid it. Examples from previous years explain it better than I ever could.
This year's fare is little different. From the moment I walk in I can spot all kinds of absurdities. One team—whose members trekked all the way from Connecticut—has taken to resurrecting a broken CNC machine, the kind of computerized tool that uses a system mechanical beams and tracks to manipulate a drill in three dimensions with millimeter precision. When I ask about their inspiration, the answer is wonderfully simple. "The Dremel broke and the Easy Cheese fits in the same spot."
The end goal of the project is naturally silly: Turning Easy Cheese back into a solid form by 3D-printing it into a bar. But the technical challenge is no joke. CNC machines like this are subtractive, creating finished products by boring into wood or plastic with spinning bits. To transform one into a 3D printer is to turn the thing inside out. However, the team's chief challenge is nothing quite so complicated. "The cheese smells pretty gross," one member half-jokingly complains. Let me tell you, they are not wrong.
Another hacker sits in a corner with a giant desktop screen he clearly dragged in for the event. On it is a transparent cube that is spinning wildly and full of hundreds of rag-dolling nude bodies. Upon closer inspection (of the screen, not the man) you can tell that they are his nude bodies.
"I wanted to make a snow globe with a bunch of my naked bodies in it," he explains. "It's just what the world needed."
Once again, this stupid pursuit isn't entirely frivolous. The hacker explains that the snow globe is really just an extension of his thesis: He's exploring the future of realistic digital avatars, and what happens when the image of your body falls into someone else's hands, or goes outside of your comfort zone. Would you be able commit simulated mass murder in video games so easily if the bodies were those of your family? Your friends? Your own?
"With technology right now, it's going to be really simple to make an avatar that's based on photos," he says as the cube makes a particularly violent twist, flinging a half dozen bodies through its simulated glass wall and off into the simulated distance.
Virtually every project at that hackathon is simultaneously stupid and smart. One hacker sums it up when I lend her my phone to take a picture of her own project—a book-turned-phone-case for masking your slack-jawed screen addiction with something that looks halfway intelligent. "The best projects are the ones that straddle that line," she says. "The line between stupid and not stupid."
The careful, self-conscious straddling of this line is the closest thing the Stupid Hackathon has to a goal, and it's that pursuit Lavigne and Winger-Bearskin encourage in participants. The clowning around is a direct response to the countless self-serious corporate hackathons the pair encountered during their time as students at ITP.
"We were getting tons of invitations to really dumb hackathons," Lavigne says, rolling his eyes. "They didn't think they were dumb, but they were all this stuff like 'Oh we're going to solve the water crisis!' or 'We're going to solve poverty in this two-day hackathon!'." He cites a Microsoft hackathon somehow involving the film Her and the theme of "love"—the specific details of which neither he nor Winger-Bearskin can't quite remember—as the final straw. You don't have to look far to find similar examples, like the HackDC "Hackathon for Heath" which confidently planned to "hack PTSD" somehow.
This megalomaniacal implication that tech—corporate tech specifically—can solve every problem is only the smallest slice of a typical hackathon's hypocrisy and weirdness, according to the pair. "A lot of times you have to sign away your rights, and if you make something, the hackathon or its sponsors will own it, " Winger-Bearskin says, clearly incredulous at the prospect. "Why would you go and work for 24 hours on something like this just to give it away to someone else for free?" Nonetheless, these events are popular, dominated by a sort of boys-club social Darwinism, with teams of ambitious programmers keen to out-code the competition by any means necessary, in hopes of winning prizes or glory in front of ever-present corporate recruiters handing out swag and eyeing the room for fresh meat.
Pushback against the male-dominated tech sphere's tone-deaf and casual sexism leads to some of the hackathon's best projects. Take, for instance, last year's "Egg Timer" project, which conveniently and grimly reminds women how many ovulation cycles they're likely to have left in their life. It's satire so sharp that it almost could have come out of a tech bro's fever dream about what women really need to know.
The Stupid Hackathon is self-effacing and savvy where its corporate-sponsored competition is oblivious at best, and nefarious at worst and its silliness sets it free. "I feel like it's the only honest hackathon in the world," Lavigne says. Despite the Stupid and Terrible part, there's still a lot of innovation. "Everyone actually makes stuff and people are using weird technologies," Winger-Bearskin says. "Making things for no reason with your friends is good."
It's a vibe felt very clearly in the crowd as the hacking winds down and the presentations start. Participants put final touches on their projects and excitedly practice their patter on their neighbors while Winger-Bearskin recites a registration URL over a microphone one letter at a time and Lavigne locks his iPhone into a Quick-Grip clamp so he can capture the projects close up and stream them onto projectors for all to see.
The teams present at a blistering pace of one-minute apiece, just enough time to execute their jokes. There's OptIn, a service that tweets everything you type to the NSA so you don't have to wonder if you're being spied on. There's NonAd Block, a Chrome extension that does exactly what it says on the tin.
The cheering and laughter fades up and down throughout, dropping to near silence during the presentation of "A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates, the Audiobook." In the 1950s, large collections of random numbers were hard to come by without a dedicated reference text, a computerized voice explains, reading out an intro to the audiobook over the stillness. A stillness that breaks into boisterous applause and cheers as the voice moves on to begin its absurd task and reads the first dozen or so numbers from a list that's literally a million long.
When all is said and done, and a few dozen more presentations are finished, nothing will really be different. The world will mostly be the same. In that way, the Stupid Shit No One Needs and Terrible Ideas Hackathon shares the same fate as nearly every other hackathon it lambasts. But instead of self-seriously creating nothing out of something, these hackers are flipping the recipe on its head—they celebrate the nothing, creating a something that is stupidly brilliant.
You can find out more about the Stupid Hackathon on its homepage, where you'll find a collection of its fantastically dumb projects. You can also follow it on stupid Twitter for more news about this year's event, and the next.
