Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

technologies are at times experienced as transcendent bliss. In these moments, utility is exceeded. The self can at once express its most inner being and collapse within the objects of its creation. In the aftermath of a particularly pleasurable moment of hacking, there is no autonomous liberal self to be found.
    To be sure, these forms of pleasure and engagement were impossible for me, the ethnographer, to touch and feel. But I routinely witnessed the social markers of the joy of hacking, as hackers talked shop with each other, as they joked about technical minutiae, and especially during their festive hacker celebrations. The key point is that the multifaceted pleasures of hacking signal that utility is not the only driving force in hackers’ creative acts. Although hackers are fiercely pragmatic and utilitarian—technology after all must work, and work exceptionally well—they are also fiercely poetic and repeatedly affirm the artistic elements of their work. One of the clearest expressions of technology/software as art is when source code is written as poetry, or alternatively when poetry is written in source code (Black 2002). For many free software hackers, the act of writing software and learning from others far exceeds the simple enactment of an engineering ethic, or a technocratic calculus for the sake of becoming a more proficient as well as efficient programmer or system administrator.
    This is hacking in its more romantic incarnation—a set of characterizations and impulses that hold an affinity with liberalism, and yet also stray into different, largely aesthetic and emotional territory. Liberalism, as a body of thought, certainly allows for pleasure, but for the most part does not theorize the subjective and aesthetic states of pleasure, which the Romantic tradition has centralized and made its own. Romanticism, explainsRosenblum (1987, 10), is a “lavish departure from sober individualism,” but also “amounts to an exploitation of liberal ideals.” Although it is important to differentiate liberal from romantic sensibilities, they nonetheless can coexist without much friction, as Rosenblum contends in her account on Romanticism. She draws on various prominent historical figures, such as John Stuart Mill and Henry David Thoreau, to examine the compatibilities and symbiosis between liberalism and Romanticism. Hackers, borrowing from free speech commitments
and
also committed to aesthetic experiences, are a social group whose sensibilities lie at the interface between a more rational liberal calculus and a more aesthetic, inward-looking one.
    Hackers are not alone in embracing this aesthetic, expressive sensibility, which philosopher Charles Taylor (1992) argues persuasively is a fundamental part of our contemporary imaginary, or what he calls the “expressive self.” First visibly emerging in the eighteenth century, this sentiment formed the basis for “a new fuller individualism,” and places tremendous weight on originality, sentiments, creativity, and at times, even disengagement. What must be noted is that expressive individualism and the moral commitments it most closely entails—self-fulfillment, self-discovery, and self-improvement—can be secured, as many critics have shown, through consumption, self-help, human enhancement technologies, and body modification (Bellah et al. 1985; Elliott 2003; Hogle 2005), and thus can converge seamlessly with elements of possessive individualism. Today to liberate and express the “authentic,” “expressive” self is usually synonymous with a lifelong engagement with consumption, fine tuned by a vast advertising apparatus that helps sustain the desire for a seemingly limitless number of consumer goods and, increasingly, human enhancement technologies such as plastic surgery.
    The example set by free software (and a host of similar craftlike practices), however, should make us at least skeptical of the extent to which an ethic of consumption has colonized expressive individualism. Free software hackers undoubtedly affirm an expressive self rooted not in consumption but rather in production in a double sense: they produce software, and through this technical production, they also sustain informal social relations and even have built institutions. Given the different ethical implications entailed in these visions of fulfillment, expression, and self-development (consumerist versus productive self), it behooves us to analytically pry them