Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

Wikipedian who is part of a nonprofit, collective effort. Many academics and journalists who are critical of Web 2.0 often accept the assumption smuggled within this discourse—namely, that these disparate phenomenon belong in the same analytic frame in the first place. “It breaks my heart,” writes one of the fiercest critics of contemporary computer currents, Jaron Lanier (2010, 70), “when I talk to energized young people who idolize the icons of the new digital ideology, like Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia and free/open/Creative mashups.” Lanier might be less perturbed if he knew that those who embrace F/OSS and Wikipedia are frequently the fiercest critics of the privacy violations and copyright policies of social network platforms like Facebook.
    Among other effects, this rampant lumping together obscures the complex sociology and history of some digital projects—a surprising omission given that a number of quite prominent citizen media and free software projects, like Indymedia and Debian, were at the forefront of organizing themselves into institutional forms years before the rise of so-called Web 2.0, by 2000 and as early as 1998. It was not simply that most journalists, pundits, and many academics ignored this fact, though. This omission was replaced with a countervailing story that suggested otherwise, alleging that knowledge was being created by forces of mild disorganization whereby individuals, acting in loose coordination with each other, led to novel forms of collaboration. This vision reached prominence for the way it so perfectly meshes with, and thus supports, dominant understandings of freedom, agency, and individualism. There is no better example of this sentiment than the title of Shirky’s enormously popular 2006 book
Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations
. Although many of his observations about digital dynamics are illuminating, and many of the examples he draws on, such as meet-up groups, remain informal, many others that he discusses, such as Wikipedia and Linux, were by 2006, organized, and as such, some type of organization.
    These new institutions are not the large slumbering bureaucracies most often associated with governments, the post office, or big corporations. In building what are new institutional forms, open-source developers and Wikipedians usually seek to strike a balance between stability and open-ended flexibility. In the process of doing so, many engender particular formsof social value that include mutual aid, transparency, and complex codes for collaboration along with other ethical precepts that help guide technical production. In the case of Debian—explored in detail in this book—its policies, direction, and imperatives are decided by a collective that not only creates software but also has been innovative, quite successfully so, in terms of institution building. Just as significant is the fact that free software licensing ensures that the fruits of labor are equally available to all—a condition unmet by many forms of crowdsourced labor, much less ones that unfold on corporate and cloud-based platforms, such as Flickr, where collaboration is said to flourish, and yet where users can lose access to their data when and if the company folds or takes down a service.
    The politics of F/OSS, narrowly defined though they may be, are obfuscated and severely distorted when they are lumped in with Web 2.0. When the organizational sociologies of these projects are ignored, it is far easier to collapse them into the category of more informal, less coordinated forms of production, thereby obscuring how these distinct forms of production ethically, politically, and economically function. “Observing participation without any guide to its diversity,” argues Adam Fish and his colleagues (2011, 160), “is like watching birds with no sense of what distinguishes them other than that they fly and squawk (when of course, many do neither).” In recent times, scholars have started to unearth as well as describe the organizational dynamics at play with free software (Kelty 2008), Wikipedia (Fuster Morell 2010; O’Neil 2009; Reagle 2010), and hacker anticapitalist technology collectives (Anderson 2009; Juris 2008; Milberry 2009), and insist on analytically disaggregating the lumping that is so common when analyzing digital media (Gillespie 2010; Fish et al. 2011). 1
    Many, however, continue to conflate different digital domains. For instance,