Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

Titel: Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking Kostenlos Bücher Online Lesen
Autoren: E. Gabriella Coleman

Vom Netzwerk:

language has been often deemed adequate, and my take of the announcement was a fait accompli.
     stig: as I told you before, the idea is for our statement to be constructive, in that it’ll try to suggest some modifications that will make this mess a bit less of a problem to us.
    What this discussion demonstrates is that by presenting a fairly significant technical change in a way that
seemed
like an established decision, the delegates violated the norms of acceptable and appropriate behavior. In this proposal, many developers found it difficult to believe in the “pure technical intentions” of entrusted members. What had failed here was a necessary performance of the goodwill that normally acts to limit anxieties about corruption in meritocracies, especially those with hierarchies like Debian.
    What this event revealed is that Debian’s implementation of meritocracy, like all meritocracies, is a fragile framework easily overtaken by the threat of corruptibility. In the case of Debian, this threat is particularly onerous, for it can potentially block the conditions for rough technical consensus; this event ostensibly edged too close to such corruption for the project’s comfort zone.
    Within Debian, the delegates and teams hold a similar form of authority as the mythical philosopher king and his guardians presented in one of the most favorable accounts of meritocratic rule, Plato’s
Republic
. In this imagined world, rulers are granted authority for life by virtue of their talents, their passion for the inherent good of ruling, and a well-cultivated character that breeds the proper “intent” for rule. Leaders are those who are “full of zeal to do whatever they believe is for the good of the commonwealth and never willing to act against its interest. They must be capable of possessing this connection, never forgetting it or allowing themselves to be either forced or bewitched into throwing it over” (Plato n.d.). This sentiment is eerily descriptive of the ways in which Debian developers conceive of proper meritocratic rule. Team members and delegates are entrusted to hold technical authority for as long as they want to (insofar the Debian project leader has never removed someone from these positions), because they display their “zeal” to do good for the “technical commonwealth” of Debian through superior acts of technical production.
    In Plato’s imaginary republic, rulers were kept in check by being subject to a highly public presence and the demands of rigorous ascetic life—little property and no domestic relations. These components confirmed and sustained proper intent. But in Debian, there are few formal mechanisms to curb the excesses of power of those who have been granted positions of technical authority. Teams and delegates, in theory, are fully trusted members who no longer have to perform their intent in order to prove their worth and make decisions. The teams that convened in Vancouver were empowered to make the significant technical decisions that they proposed. Yet in practice (as this crisis made clear), such decisions would be difficult to pull off without first consulting and building technical consensus. The guardians are bound by the informal codes discussed earlier in this chapter by which they must beseen to act not out of a self-interest but instead always in the interest of the Debian project.
    Given this, the overwhelming response to the Vancouver prospectus was a reaction to the perceived violation of meritocratic trust, and during this period, accusations of a cabal proliferated. It seemed to some as if the myth, the joke, of “smoky backrooms” in Debian was perhaps no joke at all. But if the crisis raised the specter of mistrust, it was also the very mechanism by which trust was rebuilt again. The overt public voicing and revoicing that the Vancouver meeting “smacks too much of deals in smoky backrooms, where a seat at the table is by explicit invitation,” was a moment of collective clarification. The backlash and conversations that called Debian’s philosopher kings to task served to call attention to what was seen as potentially inappropriate exercises of technical meritocratic authority as well as an opportunity for Debian guardians to assert that no such thing had ever happened.
    Through an overwhelming tide of emails, many of these delegates were forced to explain the reasoning behind their recommendation that Debian limit architecture support. In