Terminology is a bit weird.<p>I think what the author actually means is the concept of social scripts + the fact that you can just break/hack them + that breaking/hacking them usually leads to interesting results (and learnings! as they've said).<p>Social scripts are a sharable performance optimization. They do not require much resources to run and can be simply downloaded.<p>Everyone relies on them to some degree sometimes, because processing new inputs in real time is simply not viable.<p>Because they're performance optimizations, the more stressed people are, the more likely they are to start using them.
That's worth keeping in mind when getting angry at the fact that you're currently being confronted with such a script.<p>Breaking it without offering an elegant alternative might not always be the ethical thing to do, however, depending on the script or user, it sometimes might.