Civil disobedience, as defined by Wikipedia, "argues that people should not permit government to overrule or atrophy their consciences, and that people have a duty to avoid allowing such acquiescence to enable the government to make them the agents of injustice". One of the greatest examples of the benefits of civil disobedience is Gandhi’s campaign for independence from the British Empire. Like the civil protests that we all have a right to, hacking can be seen as civil disobedience when it shows discontent and opposition, and it ultimately shows a way of doing things better. What are the benefits of hacking? One benefit of our disobedience is that it gives us more options. When the iPhone first came out, the options to customize it or doing other productive things, like reading PDF files, or just changing the background, was limited or inexistent. The hacking community created applications and modified the OS so that we could change those settings and add functionality to the phone, functionality that was already available on other phones. What did Apple do? They came up with their own implementation of the features introduced by the hacking community, i.e. we now have multi-tasking, we can change wallpapers, will be able to change sms ringtones soon, etc. As someone puts it "we need to keep on hacking so long as we're angry, frustrated, and dissatisfied with the status quo. We can sit around and complain, or we can do better." It should be a pretty easy choice and as long as someone is willing to "disobey" we all will enjoy the benefits that come with it.
