Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

acknowledged, Levy’s account helped set into motion a heightened form of reflexivity among hackers. Many hackers refer to their culture and ethics. It is an instance of what Marshall Sahlins (2000, 197; see also Carneiro da Cunha 2009) describes as “contemporary culturalism”—a form of “cultural self-awareness” that renders culture into an “objectified value.” This political dynamic of self-directed cultural representation is suggested in the following quote by Seth Schoen, an avid free software advocate and staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. In the first line of text that appears on his Web page, Schoen announces, with pride: “I read [Levy’s
Hackers
] as a teenager. [ … ] I was like, ‘God damn it, I should be here!’ Then, about ten years later, I thought back about it: ‘You know, if there was a fourth section in that book, maybe I would be in there!’ That’s a nice thought.” 11
    As I delved deeper into the cultural politics of hacking, though, I began to see serious limitations in making any straightforward connections between the hacker ethic of the past and the free software of the present (much less other hacker practices). Most obviously, to do so is to overlook how ethical precepts take actual form and, more crucially, how they transform over time. For example, in the early 1980s, “the precepts of this revolutionary Hacker Ethic,” Levy (1984, 39; emphasis added) observes, “were not so much debated and discussed as silently agreed upon.
No Manifestos were issued
.” Yet (and somewhat ironically) a mere year after the publication of his book, MIT programmer Richard Stallman charted the Free Software Foundation (FSF) ([1996] 2010) and issued “The GNU Manifesto,” insisting “that the golden rule requires that if I like a program I must share it with other people who like it.” 12 Today, hacker manifestos are commonplace. If hackers did not discuss the intricacies of ethical questions when Levy first studied them, over the span of two decades they would come to argue about ethics, and sometimes as heatedly as they argue over technology. And now many hackers recognize ethical precepts as one important engine driving their productive practices—a central theme to be explored in this book.
    Additionally, and as the Mitnick example provided above illustrates so well, the story of the hacker ethic works to elide the tensions that exist among hackers as well as the different genealogies of hacking. Although hacker ethical principles may have a common core—one might even say a general ethos—ethnographic inquiry soon demonstrates that similar to any cultural sphere, we can easily identify great variance, ambiguity, and even serious points of contention.
    Therefore, once we confront hacking in anthropological and historical terms, some similarities melt into a sea of differences. Some of these distinctions are subtle, while others are profound enough to warrant what I, along with Alex Golub, have elsewhere called genres of hacking (Coleman and Golub 2008). F/OSS hackers, say, tend to uphold political structures of transparency when collaborating. In contrast, the hacker underground, a more subversive variant of hacking, is more opaque in its modes of social organization (Thomas 2003). Indeed, these hackers have made secrecy and spectacle into something of a high art form (Coleman 2012b). Some hackers run vibrant technological collectives whose names—Riseup and Mayfirst—unabashedly broadcast that their technical crusade is to make this world a better one (Milberry 2009). Other hackers—for example, many “infosec” (information security) hackers—are first and foremost committed to security, and tend to steer clear of defining their actions in such overtly political terms—even if hacking usually tends to creep into political territory. Among those in the infosec community there are differences of opinion as to whether one should release a security vulnerability (often called full disclosure) or just announce its existence without revealing details (referred to as antidisclosure). A smaller, more extreme movement that goes by the nameof antisec is vehemently against any disclosure, claiming, for instance, in one manifesto that it is their “goal that, through mayhem and the destruction of all exploitive and detrimental communities, companies, and individuals, full-disclosure will be abandoned and the security industry will be forced to