Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

juxtapositioning.” In the case of F/OSS, such juxtaposition arises from an accidental cultural practice and not a discursive anthropological one.
    In emphasizing this performative and critical dimension of F/OSS, I am echoing a common theme within a rich body of anthropological and sociological theory (Comaroff 1985; Gilroy 1993; Hebdige 1979; Martin 1998; Ong 1987; Scott 1985; Taussig 1980, 1987). This literature has compellinglyshown that the scope of political transformation far exceeds intentional political action, which has been the traditional focus of political theory, activists’ perceptions, governmental programs, and even much of critical democratic thought. F/OSS hackers, in other words, have not helped usher in social change primarily by organizing in order to change the world, standing and speaking on the political soapbox, or demanding legislative changes (although some free software developers do engage in these political forms). Instead, as noted above, they speak primarily in their capacity as F/OSS producers.
    Following the work of theorists of publics, politics, and carnival (Stallybrass and White 1987; Warner 2002), the important question to consider is: Under what conditions can nonrhetorical, embodied action speak effectively, become public, captivate an audience, offer critical insight, and move an audience to join in its carnival of possibilities?
    The answer does not lie in the formal or a priori nature of performativity; it requires us to assess the interrelationship between a dominant political climate and the pragmatic, semiotic elements specific to a phenomenon under investigation. In the case of F/OSS, I have argued that its political ambiguity and replicable nature facilitate its ability to captivate a diverse audience, which is then provoked into action because it has confronted a living piece of evidence and a model for organizing similar endeavors. Sometimes language alone is not capable of inspiring action, and, under certain historical conditions, language is often
robbed
of the potential it holds to imagine alternative realities.
    Indeed, the F/OSS case reveals broader insights about what is possible in the prevailing political atmosphere, especially in the United States, where the media and other actors can dismantle, literally in the blink of an eye, the import of a message or politics through spin, insufficient attention, or spectacle (Kellner 2003; Postman [1985] 2006). The mass media, closely aligned with imperatives of capital (McChesney 1997), routinely reduce events to well-established ideological categories (in the United States, this is usually along the lines of liberal versus conservative, and since 9/11, patriotic versus antipatriotic, with red baiting also being a common tactic). 20
    While F/OSS was certainly covered extensively in this news, the media, for the most part, did not reduce it to any simplistic ideological binaries. Indeed, early media reports featured in the
New York Times
and
Wired
, for example, seemed so surprised at the economic logic of free software, that they faithfully and extensively reported as well as conveyed the very surprise and even wonder that was also expressed by many individuals, including hackers themselves, about this phenomenon, noting the pleasures and difficulties of using open-source software.
    Much of the early history of F/OSS in fact demanded a certain level of skeptical and open experimentation on the part of developers and hackers, and eventually other adopters of the software and legal ideas of F/OSS.Initially, hackers themselves collaborated with each other without complete conviction (or even a vocabulary) that such an approach could realistically compete with software built under proprietary or “cathedral” models of development. Only through the course of small progressions, partial successes, frustrations, and a series of translations that expanded the F/OSS network was this form of production apprehended temporally as a viable technical modus operandi. Ultimately, when it gained visibility with wider publics (in part through the circuits of capital and its politically agnostic character), a range of actors turned to F/OSS to fuel other imaginaries outside the geek public.
    In drawing attention to F/OSS’s portability and lack of political affiliation as two elements that facilitate its politics of visibility, I am admittedly raising a host of difficult questions that should be of interest to both academics and