Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

he helped initiate. At that meeting, in 1999 in a packed room of University of Chicago law students, Lessig spoke of his then-recently published book
Code
. In it, he discussed the “emergent” übergeeky technical movement called free software that relies on different licensing mechanisms than those of intellectual property law. Lessig had to proceed at the time with great caution with his argument that open code, as he calls it, had come across a profound and important insight. His idea that there were limits and alternatives to intellectual property law was scandalous (and seen as just plain wrong),
especially
at the University of Chicago law school—home to neoliberals, like Richard Epstein (2004), who are deeply committed to private property and thus have been quite skeptical of open source. 17 When I spoke of the example of free software between 1999 and 2001, I routinely encountered similar skepticism or at least confusion, with most people unable to even grasp how developers gave away their code for free and asking me to repeat my description of free software multiple times.
    Today, Lessig and those who follow in his footsteps no longer have to walk on eggshells. The discourse has so radically transformed that open source is accepted as a social fact, known to many outside technological circles. Lessig has helped utterly redefine the terms of engagement, such that law students now learning about computer law and intellectual property are compelled to cast their skepticism aside (at least for a short while) and confront the existence of intellectual property alternatives.
    Part of his success can be attributed to the fact that he, like F/OSS geeks, is reluctant to portray his work as political; instead, he prefers to articulate his position either in terms of a constitutionality that sits above the fray of politics (Lessig 1999, 2001b) or in terms of the importance of cultural preservation (Kelty 2004). In an arena where politics has acquired negative connotations, Lessig’s avoidance of the term has allowed him to garner adiverse audience and build the many alliances that have extended his work around the globe. Like many of the developers I studied, he clearly operates from a social imaginary that emphasizes one form of liberty—that represented by the Millian tradition stressing self-development and free speech—over a more libertarian or even classic liberal position, in which the most important value is protecting individual autonomy and private property. While certainly not antithetical to property, Lessig (1999, 85) elevates what he calls “Mill’s method” to identify all forms of coercion (government, markets, and norms) that impinge on an individual’s liberty.
    Given Lessig’s own brand of political agnosticism, articulation of Millian liberal values, and active presence in the geek public (speaking at rallies and events, writing articles, and serving on the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation), it is not surprising that Lessig’s message has taken at least partial hold in the geek community. Lessig relied on an accessible and compelling vocabulary—such as the commons, public goods, and code is law—that has been used by hackers to understand the nature of F/OSS knowledge along with its broader social significance. In large part because of Lessig’s claims and analysis, developers can no longer deny the political effects of their work, even if they do not fully accept Lessig’s politics, and even if some of them are still unwilling to hinge their labor on grand narratives of justice, socialism, and anticapitalism.
    Lessig has also had a subtle though no less profound effect on the political consciousness of some individual hackers. Largely by way of his work, and in part bolstered by the dramatic dot-com bust of the late 1990s, he has reined in the libertarian inclinations of some hackers, leading them toward more liberal grounds that mirror his own personal biography. Lessig, raised in a conservative family, was a faithful member of the Republican Party in his youth. Placing enormous faith in the power of the individual and the free market, he held a corollary distrust of the government. Much of this changed during the early 1980s when he went to study at Cambridge University at the height of Margaret Thatcher’s neoliberal rule. As he explained in a
Wired
article, “I remember going to Cambridge as a very strong libertarian theist,” and “by the time I left I was not