Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

utilitarian theory, he redefined individuals as rational actors who cultivate their capacity for thought and discrimination. This self-refashioning required a specific set of social and affective conditions (judgment, critical debate, and the freedom to speak); it engendered a stance of skepticism and justified the political liberty to speak freely. In the United States, John Dewey continued to give further shape to Mill’s concerns. He launched a critique of “rugged individualism” and laissez-faire liberalism. Dewey (1935, 88) insists that “the ultimate place of economic organization in human life is to assure the secure basis for an ordered expression of individual capacity and for the satisfaction of the needs of man in non-economic directions.” Today hackers are entangled in as well as voice this dilemma over personhood, the meaning of freedom, markets, and property, asserting that not every object of knowledge falls under a neoliberal property regime.
    Certainly the debate over the direction and limits of intellectual property law is not over simply because of the rise of the F/OSS legal alternatives; the mere existence of a material practice such as F/OSS has not fully muted contentions based on universal principles or theories of human nature. In some respects we can say that because of the forceful appearance of F/OSS, a formidable politics has taken hold in the last decade, fueled by the rise of technologies like peer-to-peer systems that encourage copying, translation, and reconfiguration. The politics of intellectual property law have over the past ten years reached a contentious point—a political debate that cannotfully or at least comfortably rely on abstractions, universal principles, or naturalized rationalities but instead must entertain more local, pragmatic stakes along with the reality of what people do, can do, or desire to do.
    Under threat, these principles may clamor for more attention. For example, in March 2005, on the eve of an important Supreme Court deliberation over the legality of peer-to-peer technologies, the
New York Times
ran an editorial stating its position on intellectual property law by way of arguments couched in a vocabulary of doom, liberal progress, and naturalization: “If their work is suddenly made ‘free,’ all of society is likely to suffer. [ … ] The founders wrote copyright protections into the Constitution because they believed that they were necessary for progress.” 19 By invoking the country’s founders and tropes of progress, this message sought to reassert the naturalness of these propositions precisely when they were most under threat.
    The battle over the proper scope of intellectual property law thus continues to rage worldwide. Nonetheless, by virtue of the fact that one can point to a living practice that unsettles arguments based on abstract principles, the latter tend to lose some of their efficacy. On this basis, policy and law can perhaps be more easily channeled away from universal claims, and entertain local, pragmatic stakes while addressing the reality of what people do, can do, or desire to do. As Helen Nissenbaum (2004, 212) has maintained, we are drawn to the example of hacker activity because hackers “represent a degree of freedom, an escape hatch from a system that threatens to become overbearing.”
    Rendered visible, the F/OSS example has been utilized by many scholars and lawyers as a powerful justification for balancing the current system, even as other activists and educators shore up their own claims not within the pages of books but instead by building alternatives (Benkler 2006; Bollier 2002; Lessig 1999). The formal attributes of this critical politics of defamiliarization should immediately strike a resonant chord with anthropologists, whose work is often conceptualized in terms of a politics of denaturalization. For most of the last century, anthropological knowledge has been marshaled to unsettle essentialist and universal assumptions about human behavior through cross-cultural and comparative examination (Benedict 1959; Marcus and Fisher 1986; Mauss 1954; Sahlins 1976). The disciplinary vehicle for this is a work of speech: the narrative of ethnography. What I find interesting is that F/OSS, among many other things, functions as a form of critical ethnography writ large. It exemplifies what George E. Marcus and Michael Fisher (1986, 139) call “defamiliarization” [ … ] by “cross-cultural