Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

Mitnick 2011; Thomas 2003).
    In July 2004, free at last and allowed to use computers again, Mitnick attended HOPE in New York City for the first time. He delivered his humorous and enticing keynote address to an overflowing crowd of hackers, who listened, enraptured, to the man who had commanded their political attention for over a decade as part of a “Free Kevin Campaign.” He offered tale after tale about his clever pranks of hacking from childhood on: “I think I was born as a hacker because at ten I was fascinated with magic,” he explained. “I wanted a bite of the forbidden fruit.” Even as a kid, his victims were a diverse lot: his homeroom teacher, the phone company, and even the Los Angeles Rapid Transit District. After he bought the same device used by bus drivers for punching transfers, he adopted the persona of Robin Hood, spending hours riding the entire bus network, punching his own pirated transfers to give to customers. He found transfer stubs while dumpster diving, another time-honored hacker practice for finding information that was especially popular before the advent of paper shredding. Despite the way that lawyers and journalists had used Mitnick’s case to give hackers a bad name, Mitnick clearly still used the term with pride.
    When I finished my story describing what I personally thought was a pretty engrossing speech, one hacker, who obviously disapproved of my reference to Mitnick as a “hacker,” replied, “Kevin is
not
a hacker. He is a cracker.” In the mid-1980s, some hackers created the term cracker to deflect the negative images of them that began appearing in the media at that time. According to
The Hacker Jargon File
, crackers are those who hack for devious, malicious, or illegal ends, while hackers are simply technology enthusiasts. Although some hackers make the distinction between crackers and hackers, others also question the division. To take one example, during an interview, one free software hacker described this labeling as “a whitewashing of what kind of people are involved in hacking. [ … ] Very often the same techniques that are used in hacking 2 [the more illegal kind] are an important part of hacking 1.”
    To be sure, hackers can be grasped by their similarities. They tend to value a set of liberal principles: freedom, privacy, and access. Hackers also tend to adore computers—the glue that binds them together—and are trained in specialized and esoteric technical arts, primarily programming, system, or Net administration, security research, and hardware hacking. Some gain unauthorized access to technologies, though the degree of illegality varies greatly (and much of hacking is legal). Foremost, hacking, in its different forms and dimensions, embodies an aesthetic where craft and craftiness tightly converge. Hackers thus tend to value playfulness, pranking, and cleverness, and will frequently perform their wit through source code, humor, or both: humorous code.
    Hackers, however, evince considerable diversity and are notoriously sectarian, constantly debating the meaning of the words hack, hacker, and hacking. Yet almost
all
academic and journalistic work on hackers commonly whitewashes these differences, and defines all hackers as sharing a singular “hacker ethic.” Offering the first definition in
Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
, journalist Steven Levy (1984, 39) discovered among a couple of generations of MIT hackers a unique as well as “daring symbiosis between man and machine,” where hackers placed the desire to tinker, learn, and create technical beauty above all other goals. The hacker ethic is shorthand for a list of tenets, and it includes a mix of aesthetic and pragmatic imperatives: a commitment to information freedom, a mistrust of authority, a heightened dedication to meritocracy, and the firm belief that computers can be the basis for beauty and a better world (ibid., 39–46).
    In many respects, the fact that academics, journalists, and hackers alike refer to the existence of this ethic is a testament not only to the superb account that Levy offers—it is still one of the finest works on hacking—but also to the fact that the hacker ethic in the most general sense is an apt way to describe some contemporary ethics and aesthetics of hacking. For example, many of the principles motivating free software philosophy reinstantiate, refine, extend, and clarify many of those original precepts. Further, and rarely