Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

(Anderson 2012; Pickard 2006 )
    Politically minded geeks who were bred during the era of cheaper personal computers, homeschooled programming, and virtual interactionschose to use or write free software for the technical components of the IMCs. Mailing lists and IRC, both widely available in free software versions at the time, were used in many of the same ways as in F/OSS projects. They were the main communication tools that facilitated conversation between dispersed tech activists establishing centers in different locations like Washington, DC, Boston, London, and Seattle. Unlike most F/OSS projects, however, the IMC movement articulated itself as a primarily political endeavor seeking to tackle broad structural problems:
    It is our goal to further the self-determination of people under-represented in media production and content, and to illuminate and analyze local and global issues that impact ecosystems, communities and individuals. We seek to generate alternatives to the biases inherent in the corporate media controlled by profit, and to identify and create positive models for a sustainable and equitable society. 12
    As part of their mission, the IMCs made a conscious choice to use and develop free software to further their goals. Unlike IBM—which conceptualizes F/OSS production as a flexible means by which to extend market presence and emphasize individual, consumerist messages of openness—these activists saw it as a radical and independent alternative to the existing corporate-driven market, and they used it to advance explicitly anticorporate political aims (Milberry 2009).
    For example, the IMC tech working group (the segment of the IMC that makes technical decisions about software choices, development, and licensing, and implements and maintains the technical infrastructure of the IMC) gave significant weight to licenses when choosing a particular piece of software. After a lengthy discussion through IRC, it was decided that copyleft-style licenses (such as the GNU GPL) were preferable to noncopyleft free software licenses (such as the Berkley Software Distribution license, which do not require modified versions to remain open), which in turn were preferable to proprietary software. If the free software was not functional or presented a security risk, then consideration of potential alternatives, along a gradated list of software with increasingly less free licenses, was deemed appropriate. These two quotes from the IRC discussion exemplify understandings of how F/OSS can be used as a revolutionary tool to further the political goals of IMCs:
     : I assume it is safe to say that we are making this choice in order to try to choose the thing which has the least chance of benefiting any corporation, or any other form of hoarding in any way
     : There is a wonderful pool of very well-developed free software out there. Earlier, someone said that IMC is a revolutionary project, and free software is a revolutionary tool for it. I stan[d] very firmly behind using free software first
    In 2001, the IMCs formalized this commitment to F/OSS by including it as one of the provisions in their networkwide Principles of Unity: “All IMCs shall be committed to the use of free source code, whenever possible, in order to develop the digital infrastructure, and to increase the independence of the network by not relying on proprietary software.” 13
    Despite their official stance on licensing, some leftists have trouble accepting the formulation of nondiscrimination lying at the heart of F/OSS legal agreements. Some express discomfort or dismay that nondiscrimination, as articulated in F/OSS licensing, bars the type of control that would allow Indymedia to keep its work from being exploited for purposes of oppression (by the military, say) or corporate profit. In this guise, they echo the Marcusian critique of liberalism’s “pure tolerance” of free speech (Marcuse 1965). In the IRC conversation mentioned earlier, one Indymedia participant expressed her anxiety about the decision to use free software: “I disagree strongly with the [Debian] social contract: you can’t deny use of your software to army, etc, in it.” Though the activist confuses the provision of nondiscrimination as specific to Debian (when in fact it is the underlying logic of all F/OSS licenses), her concern captures some of the incompatibilities between leftist and more liberal notions of freedom and equality that underwrite so much of