Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

internalized habits of thinking and feeling [ … ] viewing everything around them primarily as actual or potential commercial property” (Graeber 2007, 3; see also Macpherson 1962). Among hackers, selfhood has a distinct register: an autonomous being guided by and committed to rational thought, critical reflection, skills, and capacity—a set of commitments presupposed in the free speech doctrine (Peters 2005). 9
    However important these expressive and rational impulses are among programmers, they don’t fully capture the affective stances of hackers, most notably their deep engagement, sometimes born of frustration, and at other times born of pleasure, and sometimes, these two converge. Soon after commencing fieldwork, what I quickly learned is that hacking is characterized by a confluence of constant occupational disappointments
and
personal/collective joys. As many writers have noted, and as I routinely observed, hacking, whether in the form of programming, debugging (squashing errors), or running and maintaining systems (such as servers), is consistently frustrating (Rosenberg 2007; Ullman 2003). Computers/software are
constantly
malfunctioning, interoperability is frequently a nightmare to realize, users are often “clueless” about the systems they use (and therefore break them or require constant help), the rate and pace of technological change is relentless, and meeting customer expectations is nearly impossible to pull off predictably. The frustration that generally accompanies the realities of even mundane technical work is depicted as swimming with sharks in
xkcd
, one of the most beloved geeks’ comic strips ( figure Intro.2 ).
    What this comic strip captures is how hackers, as they work, sometimes swim in seas of frustration. To tinker, solve problems, and produce software, especially over one’s lifetime, will invariably be marked by varying degrees of difficulties and missteps—a state of laboring that one theorist of craftspersonship describes as material “resistance” (Sennett 2008). In encountering obstacles, adept craftspeople, such as hackers, must also build an abundant “tolerance for frustration” (ibid., 226), a mode of coping that at various points will break down, leading, at best, to feelings of frustration, and at worst, to anguish and even despair and burnout.
    Despite these frustrations and perhaps because of them, the craft of hacking demands a deep engagement from hackers, or a state of being most commonly referred to in the literature as “flow” (Csikszentmihalyi 1990).In its more mild and commonplace form, hacker pleasure could be said to approximate the Aristotelian theory of eudaemonia, defined succinctly by philosopher Martha Nussbaum (2004, 61) as “the unimpeded performance of the activities that constitute happiness.” In pushing their personal capacities and skills though playing around with and making technologies, hackers experience the joy that follows from the self-directed realization of skills, goals, and talents. Indeed, overcoming resistance and solving problems, someof them quite baffling, is central to the sense of accomplishment and pride that hackers routinely experience.
    FIGURE INTRO.2. “Success,”
xkcd
    Credit: Randall Munroe.
    Hacker pleasure, however, is not always so staid and controlled; it far exceeds the pride of eudaemonia. Less frequently, but still occurring often, hackers experience a more obsessive and blissful state. Hacker descriptions of immersing themselves in technology remind me of Rainer Maria Rilke’s terse and beautiful depiction of the passion that drives his intellectual pursuits: “All the soarings of my mind begin in my blood.” This form of pleasure approximates what Roland Barthes (1975) has portrayed as bliss or jouissance—a pleasure so complete, engrossing, and enveloping that it has the capacity to obliterate every last shred of self-awareness. In native hack jargon, the state of bliss is the “Deep Hack Mode.” Matt Welsh, a well-known hacker and computer scientist, humorously describes the utter magnetism of this mode, “very few phenomena can pull someone out of Deep Hack Mode, with two noted exceptions: being struck by lightning, or worse, your *computer* being struck by lightning.” 10
    Because hackers often submit their will and being to technology—and are famous for denying their bodies sleep, at least for short periods—the joy that hackers derive from attending to and carefully sculpting