Live from Etech ... In his introductory remarks to Etech, Rael Dornfest is talking about "the hacking imperative," the amateurization of looking into how technology works. It used to be just uber-hackers would look under the hood; now average people are putting new hard drives in their TiVOs. Rael is promoting the "remix" term rather than "hacking," because it's more conversational.

Rael offers a whole slew of landscapes that are being remixed:

Remix your music. Music buyers: "We like your product so much and we hate your format so much we're willing to break the law to remix it." The industry wasn't listening, customers weren't listening -- Apple was listening. If you're customers are rapidly prototyping something new for you, someone else will listen.

Remix your TV. Tivo leaves things open enough so that - wink - you can do the 30-second skip. Networks introduced one-minute error. Tivo added another

Remix your network. Wifi hackers untether everything. Hotspots spring up like dandelions. Airport Express. "turn it on and wait for the light to go green.

Remix your movies. Video on demand works. BitTorrent suddenly seems surprisingly (logically) interesting.

Remix your data. Small items loosely joined. No one talks about creatiing e-commerce engines anymore.

Remix syndication. RSS allowed Yahoo to turn into My Netscape. Turnabout is fair play.

Remix your bookshelf. Amazon. Google books. Internet Archive/Bookmobile.

Remix IT. Lots of specialists, be liberal in what you accept. Hacks becomes frameworks. Raw material grows on trees (open source in ready abundance). (Doc Searls)

Remix the browser. Firefox! The darling on the IT and the family sysadmin.

Remix brick and mortar. Use Amazon to search meatspace. Instore pickup is right around the corner. Even if there's a huge Walmart, it effectively disapears from the landscape.

Shaw: "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man adapts the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."