Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

superior, free software, articulated as what Debian “does best.”
    While Debian provides one of the most crystalline instances of how political disavowal emerges during the course of everyday social interaction, it is by no means unique. Debian only stands out and serves as such a useful ethnographic example because it is regarded as the project with the starkest ethical standards. Many other software developers, especially those who identify with the utilitarian principles of open-source software, are reluctant to conceptualize their collective labor in ethical terms, much less expansive political vocabularies (Ross 2006).
    Avowed neutrality is of course a central feature of how segments of liberalism function as a moral philosophy for it enshrines certain fundamental principles—notably tolerance and free speech—as residing outside the sphere of the proper domain of politics (Brown 2006; Marcuse 1965). These precepts are seen as apolitical vehicles of sorts, necessary for a healthy democracy and the marketplace of ideas. As Stanley Fish (2002, 219–20) argues, one important idea animating free speech theory is that a “reward” will follow free expression, which “will be the emergence of general and self-evident truths.” 6 By supporting free expression, hackers also seek to secure a marketplace of ideas that will help establish self-evident truths. Yet as the work of Kelty (2005, 2008) keenly demonstrates, these truths are generally limited to what hackers love to obsess over: the functionality, elegance, and worth of technology, and increasingly, the technical means of connection—the Internet—that allows them to collectively associate.
    As should be clear by now, I do not seek to reveal the fallacy of liberal neutrality; the critical literature on liberalism has convincingly shown the construction and consequences of such an ordering (Brown 2006; Fish 1994; Marcuse 1965). Nor am I assuming the perspective of normative liberal theory that posits a clear connection between the marketplace of ideas and democracy writ large. What I am more interested in is demonstrating how these eclipses acquire meaning within technological social contexts (as opposed to more formal jurisprudence or abstract liberal theory), and what sorts of unexpected consequences they may have in transforming other domains of social, political, and legal life.
    Although this disavowal is intriguing in its own regard and could be discussed at further length, I have described it to get at one of the most crucial results of the disavowal itself. Although some free software hackers disavow politics among themselves, the effects of doing so have spilled far beyond this realm of technoscience to transform the politics of intellectual property law more generally. Take, for one, Microsoft’s repeated attempts in the early 2000 to tag free software and open source as a cancerous force of communism. 7 Despite the fact that some Microsoft employees tried to portray F/OSS as fundamentally about polluting politics—usually some variant of socialism or communism—ultimately and surprisingly, their red baiting failed (surprisingly, as it is a remarkably effective political tactic in the United States). What happened instead is that F/OSS became a beacon, andinspired a range of groups and actors to embrace some facet of free software, allowing the idea and practices associated with free software to travel far beyond the technological field. And when free software traveled, it also garnered new and distinct types of associations.
    Three Moments of Translation
    In using the term translation, I invoke the work of Latour, who has extensively theorized the microprocesses of social translation as part and parcel of the extension of technoscientific networks. Latour’s model reveals how, through a process of gradual enrollment, social actors recruit various allies to extend a network of meanings, objects, and institutions. Though his model pays attention to nonhuman actors (like artifacts or techniques), a number of critics have argued that he puts too much weight on the capacity of individuals to extend networks, thus overlooking how semiotic processes may shape the conditions for translatability (Downey 1998; Haraway 1997). Donna Haraway (1997, 33), for instance, characterizes Latour’s account as a perverse elevation of “heroic action.” My discussion below makes it clear there are examples of human-initiated translation, notably the