Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

free software’s legal culture.
    Just as IBM is unlikely to foreground certain messages of freedom (in particular, those critical of intellectual property), leftist activists such as those from the Indymedia collectives tend to downplay or express concern about the reality that F/OSS’s flexibility can be used to any end, even the very instruments of oppression and discrimination (like the military or corporation) they are trying to dismantle.
    Along with activists, left-leaning academic writers, such as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2004), Alex Galloway (2004), and Johan Söderberg (2007), are inspired by what they see as the radical political potential of free software, and treat it as a living, breathing icon to refine their political sensibilities and projects. Galloway, for instance, locates political potential in the hacker capacity to leverage change by altering technology, code, and protocols. In
Multitude
, Hardt and Negri (2004, 340) deploy the concept of open source to clarify the democratic underpinnings of the political category of multitudes:
    We are more intelligent than any one of us is alone. Open source collaborative programming does not lead to confusion and wasted energy. It actually works. One approach to understanding the democracy of the multitude, then, is an open-source society, that is, a society whose source code is revealed so that we can work collaboratively to solve its bugs and create new, better social programs.
    Just as at IBM, the adoption, use, and support of F/OSS by activists and its academic rearticulations give F/OSS much greater visibility within acompletely different domain of production. In particular, it has extended the networks where developers code into the spheres of activism and academics. And just as some F/OSS developers work full-time on F/OSS, blurring their volunteer pastime with their day job, other F/OSS developers have entered the world of anticorporate political activism through the spread of F/OSS into these channels (or vice versa).
    It is also important to note that many IMC geeks are themselves hackers, and a number of them are involved with free software projects such as Debian. They may attend developer conferences or larger hacker gatherings, such as HOPE or the European outdoor festivals held every four years. They represent a small but growing population among the technological elite of overt political aficionados who direct their love of and passion for technology toward leftist political transformation as well as activism (B. Coleman 2005; Juris 2008; Milberry 2009). Although more common in Italy, Spain, and eastern Europe (often aligning with homegrown anarchist politics), these leftist hackers have established hacker collectives across North America, Latin America, and Europe. Through their exposure to the Left, some hackers have come to appreciate their own role in F/OSS development and advocacy as part of a wider leftist political sensibility (even if they are reluctant to project these intentions onto other F/OSS developers, as this is discouraged—sometimes vehemently—in traditional F/OSS projects). Nonetheless, the use of F/OSS as both a technology and icon to justify other political projects has led some hackers to come to inhabit new political subjectivities.
    Liberal Commons and Limits to Capital
    In the course of the last decade, an explicit campaign calling for the creation as well as protection of a knowledge commons and free culture has emerged in certain parts of the globe, including North America, Europe, Latin America (especially Brazil), and parts of Asia, among others. The main actors within this movement and sociopolitical debate—students, lawyers, geeks, and other activists—construe access to public goods as the basis by which to further create and extend the commons, a collective pooling of resources made publicly accessible to many. The commons is often articulated as a pool of shared resources that then acts as the fertilizer for further vibrant cultural production and at times a healthy democracy. Among moderate proponents, the commons is understood as compatible with private property and a capitalist market, although certainly acting as a bulwark against some of their worst abuses. 14 The more liberal facet of the commons endeavor is but one moment within a broader liberal critique of the neoliberal face of capitalism. In an
Atlantic Monthly
article, reformed financial tycoon (now also philanthropist) George