Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

Soros (1997) enunciated the basic terms of this liberal critique: “the untrammeled intensification of laissez-faire capitalismand the spread of market values into all areas of life is endangering our open and democratic society.”
    The most influential articulations and organizations within this nascent commons movement have been those founded by Lessig (1999, 2001b; Creative Commons) and David Bollier (2002, 2009; Public Knowledge). These in turn have helped spawn offshoots, such as the Students for Free Culture movement, which is organized into clubs on colleges across North America. These thinkers used the messages and example of F/OSS to build institutions that support the production of open knowledge. In both writings and public talks, Lessig and Bollier frequently refer to F/OSS as a source of inspiration as well as justification for their visions and projects.
    For instance, in his enormously influential book
Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace
, Lessig (1999, 7) justifies his argument that “the lack of ownership, the absence of property, the inability to direct how ideas will be used—in a word, the presence of a commons—is key to limiting, or checking, certain forms of governmental control,” and does so by relying heavily on the example of “open code.” The nonprofit organization he founded, Creative Commons, has developed licenses and Web tools that are used by individuals and organizations to “build an intellectual property conservancy.” 15 The model he drew from, unsurprisingly, was the GNU GPL:
    Taking inspiration in part from the Free Software Foundation’s GNU General Public License (GNU GPL), Creative Commons has developed a Web application that helps people dedicate their creative works to the public domain—or retain their copyright while licensing them as free for certain uses, on certain conditions. 16
    While Lessig and Creative Commons may represent the most prominent of these liberal translations, there are many others. Bollier’s book
Silent Theft
(the title plays off Rachel Carson’s
Silent Spring
, which crystallized much thinking about the movement), for instance, contends that the establishment of a commons can limit the multinational plundering of knowledge and culture. One example of an existing commons is F/OSS, which he treats as an independent gift economy that is seen to coexist productively with the market, although also providing protections against some of its least savory elements. Benkler (2006), a legal theorist, has published a thorough account of what he calls peer-to-peer production, liberally using the illustration of F/OSS to make an argument about the vibrancy of a new networked economy—a mode of production that helps sustain and nourish classical liberal political ideals, such as autonomy and freedom.
    But more than any other actor, Lessig’s individual role in translating the meanings of F/OSS deserves attention. He acted as a “spokesperson” for many years—a role conceptualized in the work of Latour (1987, 1988) as a prominent person who enrolls allies, builds institutions, changes perceptions, and translates the message of free software in ways that appeal to a wider constituency. Just as Louis Pasteur served as the spokesperson whomade the germ theory of illness compelling and intelligible to wider publics (Latour 1993), Lessig has worked assiduously, passionately, and diligently to bring out and successfully translate the artifacts and messages of F/OSS from the confines of the hacker lab out to the field. He took a highly technical, sometimes-esoteric set of concerns shared among geeks and reenvisioned them in a language accessible to wider groups: academics, lawyers, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, policymakers in Washington, DC, and activists.
    As part of these efforts, Lessig spoke hundreds of times to various audiences (including geeks), has written dozens of articles and four books, built the Creative Commons organization that provides alternative licensing schemes to copyright, argued in the Supreme Court case
Eldred v. Ashcroft
over copyright extensions heard in January 2003, personally taught a cadre of lawyers at Harvard and Stanford universities about open code, and has made the politics of technical architectures, once a fringe interest in academic circles, into a publicly relevant (and more intelligible) issue.
    Of the ten times I have seen Lessig give lectures, the first was the most indicative of the set of transformations that