Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

despite the astounding plurality exhibited by digital activism, it is treated in starkly singular terms. Take, say, the widely circulated (and much discussed) critique of the politics of digital media in a 2010
New Yorker
article titled “Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted,” where author Malcolm Gladwell (2010) notes, “the evangelists of social media seem to believe that [ … ] signing up for a donor registry in Silicon Valley today is activism in the same sense as sitting at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro in 1960.” I share Gladwell’s deep skepticism of the hype that envelops mainstream understandings of many social networking platforms like Twitter and Facebook. I think it is imperative to discuss the limits of activism based on weak social ties and the security risks in using corporate platforms. Yet his critique only works by way of silencing a number of historical and contemporary examples. Digital interaction and activism are not, as Gladwell suggests, inherently grounded in weak ties but also can be the basis for socially deep ties, such as is the case for much of F/OSS production—a domain that has fundamentally altered the politics of access and intellectual property. Digital media has also played a critical rolein fomenting and helping sustain more traditional social movements like the counterglobalization protests (Bennett 2003; Juris 2008). To take a more recent case, the digital entity Anonymous, part digital direct action, part human rights technology activism, and part performance spectacle, while quite organizationally flexible, is perhaps one of the most extensive movements to have arisen almost directly from certain quarters of the Internet (Coleman 2012a). Instead of differentiating between types and forms of digital activism, Gladwell, like so many, paints digital activism in starkly singular terms, in the process relegating existing forms that do not conform to “slacktivism” into the dustbin of history, and unable to distinguish in the most basic ways between forms of activism with distinct roots, forms of organization, and effects.
    Attention to these basic, sometimes-fundamental differences in digital sociality and activism can help foster greater understanding of what digital politics mean along with the range of possibilities they might have to offer and their limits. We must be ruthless in how we differentiate the social dynamics and formats of digital activism in order to more fully glean the public as well as political lessons afforded by these worlds.
    In the end, it is worth taking a cue from the world of free software in two regards. It is, for one, a domain where developers balance forms of sociality and forces often treated as mutually exclusive: individualism and social cooperation, utility and artistry, altruism and self-interest, organization and disorganization, populism and elitism, and especially individualism and social cooperation. Hackers who are seen (and at times portray themselves) as quintessentially individualistic often live this individualism through remarkably cooperative channels. This should not make us question the reality of individualism, which is also culturally incarnated, but instead encourage us to examine the assumption that this individualism precludes cooperation. In fact, individualism frequently results in more cooperation, on a larger scale than would otherwise exist. Second, what makes these projects so interesting is not how they engender democracy writ large, or fundamentally change the warp and woof of economic and social structures, but that collaborators make technology at the same time that they experiment in the making of a social commonwealth; it is there where the hard work of freedom is practiced.

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