Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

apart.
    While the liberal articulations made by free software hackers, notably those of free speech, carry a familiar political imprint, their material experiences, the frustrations and pleasures of hacking, (including the particularities of making, breaking, and improving software) might seem politically irrelevant. Yet the passionate commitment to hacking and especially the ethics of access enshrined in free software licensing, express as well as celebrate unalienated, autonomous labor, which also broadcasts a powerful politicalmessage. A number of theorists (Galloway 2004; Söderberg 2007; Wark 2004) have previously highlighted this phenomenon. Hackers insistence on never losing access to the fruits of their labor—and indeed actively seeking to share these fruits with others—calls into being Karl Marx’s famous critique of estranged labor: “The external character of labour for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own, but someone else’s, that it does not belong to him, that in it he belongs, not to himself, but to another” (Marx and Engels 1978, 74). It evokes Marx’s vision precisely because free software developers seek to avoid the forms of estrangement that have long been nearly synonymous with capitalist production. Freedom is thus not only based on the right to speak free of barriers but also conceived as (although primarily through practice) “the utopian promise of unalienated labor, of human flourishing through creative and self-actualizing production,” as Barton Beebe (2010, 885) aptly describes it.
    F/OSS hacker morality is therefore syncretic—a quality that is also patently evident in its politics. It enunciates a liberal politics of free speech and liberty that speaks to an audience beyond hackers as well as a nonliberal politics of cultural pleasure and political detachment, which is internally and intensely focused on the practice of hacking only and entirely for its own sake, although certainly inspiring others to follow in their footsteps. When assessing the liberal ethics and affective pleasure of hacking, we should not treat pleasure as the authentic face of hacking, and the other (liberalism) as an ideological veneer simply in need of debunking (or in need of celebrating). From an ethnographic vantage point, it is important to recognize many hackers are citizens of liberal democracies, and have drawn on the types of accessible liberal tropes—notably free speech—as a means to conceptualize their technical practice and secure novel political claims. And in the process, they have built institutions and sustain norms through which they internalize these liberal ideals as meaningful, all the while clearly upholding a marked commitment to unalienated labor.
    On Representing Hacker Ethics
    If I was comforted by the fact that hacking could be analyzed in light of cultural issues like humor, liberalism, and pleasure, and that I had some methodological tools at my disposal to do so, as I learned more about hacking, my ease vanished as I confronted a new set of concerns. I increasingly grew wary of how I would convey to others the dynamic vitality and diversity that marks hackers and hacking, but also the points of contention among them. To further illustrate this point, allow me to share a brief story.
    Soon after ending my official fieldwork, I was having dinner in Chicago with three local free software developers. One of them asked me about some of my memorable fieldwork experiences. There were many stories I couldhave chosen, but I started to tell the story of a speech by Kevin Mitnick—a more transgressive hacker (for he had engaged in illegal behavior) than most free software developers and one of the most infamous of all time—that I heard during summer 2004 at Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE)—a conference founded in 1994 to publicize his legal ordeals. Mitnick is known to have once been a master “social engineer,” or one who distills the aesthetics of illicit acts into the human art of the short cons. Instead of piercing through a technological barricade, social engineers target humans, duping them in their insatiable search for secret information. Because of various legendary (and at times, illegal) computer break-ins, often facilitated by his social engineering skills, Mitnick spent a good number of his adult years either running from the law or behind bars, although he never profited from his hacks, nor destroyed any property (Coleman and Golub 2008;