Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

activists. For anthropologists and those interested in capturing these processes of cultural critique represented by the F/OSS example, there are a host of conundrums to be contemplated. The politics of defamiliarization that arises through the cultural practice is quite ephemeral, leaving few traces. The shock waves induce a process of cultural rethinking and transform practices in other arenas of social life. The nature of this shock is to lose its shock value and sink back into the natural state of affairs as soon as a set of practices are more or less stabilized. Thus, the task of a critical anthropology is to keep a mindful orientation toward these powerful yet elusive processes of cultural contrast as they are unfolding so that the politics of cultural defamiliarization can be more effectively known, acknowledged, and perhaps even directed.
    A number of other pressing questions about politics are provocatively raised by the example of F/OSS’s politics: Must a politics of visibility rely on the circuits of capital to make itself known in a public sense, and is the law a political friend or foe? Can we realistically work outside these channels? If so, how? And if we work within these channels, are there ways to be flexible about some convictions, but firmer about others, and secure the vision or values being heralded, as the copyleft does? This of course is the copyleft’s most striking element. It allows knowledge to travel and gain new meanings, but since it is protected by a clever legal mechanism from the commodification of dissent (Frank and Weiland 1997) and other viral corruptions, the knowledge stays intact and accessible, recursively returning to its source, the developer, and user community. Here I won’t provide answers to these questions, but since they are so strongly suggested by the F/OSS case, I raise them for further thought.

EPILOGUE
    How to Proliferate Distinctions, Not Destroy Them

    I n 2006,
Time
magazine crowned social media and “you” as the person of the year. Typical of many mainstream media representations,
Time
not only latched on to the moniker Web 2.0 but celebrated it with breathless hyperbole too:
    It’s a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It’s about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people’s network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It’s about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes. (Grossman 2006)
    This quote treats Wikipedia, YouTube, and Myspace not only as interchangeable examples of community and collaboration but also as moral solvents with the power to melt away existing power structures. Although the hype may be more pronounced in this piece, the simple conflation of these distinct digital domains is not unique to
Time
or even other journalistic pieces; it is simply one example of how Internet technologies between 2005 and the present have been imagined by academics, journalists, policymakers, and activists.
    Starting in 2005, but continuing unabated today, many commentators and critics alike have placed a range of digital phenomenon, including free software, under the umbrella of Web 2.0. This term was first coined in 2005 by O’Reilly to differentiate contemporary technologies (wikis, blogs, and embedded videos) from their immediate predecessors, such as email and static Web pages. These second-generation technologies, he claimed, allowed for more interactivity, flexibility, and participation than the earlier ones. Since the term’s invention, it has not only become
the
governing metaphor by which to understand contemporary Internet technologies and the social practices that cluster around them. It also has been stretched so farand so wide that it now encompasses software (blogs and wikis), corporate platforms (Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Myspace), projects and nonprofits (Wikipedia, Debian, and Creative Commons), and collaborative techniques (remixing and crowdsourcing).
    There are certainly points of connection to be made between these domains, technologies, practices, and projects. Yet this constant conflation obscures far more than it reveals. When used in celebratory terms, Web 2.0 puts on equal footing a user who uploads a video on YouTube or a photo on Flickr (corporate-owned, proprietary platforms) and a free software developer or even a