Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

reform.” 13 There is also an important, though currently untold, story about gaming and hacking, not only because hackers created some of the first computer games, notably Space Wars, written in 1962, but because of the formal similarities between gaming and hacking as well (Dibbell 2006).
    National and regional differences make their mark as well. For instance, southern European hackers have followed a more leftist, anarchist tradition than their northern European counterparts. Chinese hackers are quite nationalistic in their aims and aspirations (Henderson 2007), in contrast to those in North America, Latin America, and Europe, whose antiauthoritarian stance makes many—though certainly not all—wary of joining government endeavors.
    Finally, while the brilliance of Levy’s account lies in his ability to demonstrate how ethical precepts fundamentally inhere in hacker technical practice, it is important to recognize that hacker ethics, past and present, are not entirely of their own making. Just a quick gloss of the language many hackers frequently invoke to describe themselves or formulate ethical claims—freedom, free speech, privacy, the individual, and meritocracy—reveals that many of them unmistakably express liberal visions and romantic sensibilities: “We believe in freedom of speech, the right to explore and learn by doing,” explains one hacker editorial, “and the tremendous power of the individual.” 14 Once we recognize the intimate connection between hacker ethics and liberal commitments
and
the diversity of ethical positions, it is clear that hackers provide less of a unitary and distinguishable ethical position, and more of a mosaic of interconnected, but at times divergent, ethical principles.
    Given this diversity, to which I can only briefly allude here, the hacker ethic should not be treated as a singular code formulated by some homogeneous group called hackers but instead as a composite of distinct yet connected moral genres. Along with a common set of moral referents, what hacker genres undoubtedly share is a certain relation to legality. Hacker actions or their artifacts are usually either in legally dubious waters or at the cusp of new legal meaning. Hence, they make
visible
emerging or contentious dilemmas.
    Although hackers certainly share a set of technical and ethical commitments, and are in fact tied together by virtue of their heated debates over their differences, given the existence of the diversity just noted, my claims and arguments should not be taken as representative of all hacking, even though for the sake of simplicity (and stylistic purposes), in the chapters that follow I will often just refer to hackers and hacking. My discussion is more modest and narrow for it will stick primarily to the example offree software. 15 My preference for announcing the “self-conscious, serious partiality” (Clifford 1986, 7) of this account comes from witnessing motivations, ethical perceptions, desires, and practices far more plastic, flexible, sublime, contradictory, and especially fiery and feverish than usually accounted for in academic theories. The world of hacking, as is the case with many cultural worlds, is one of reckless blossoming, or in the words of Rilke: “Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.”
    Omissions and Chapter Overview
    Some readers may be asking why I have not addressed Silicon Valley entrepreneurship and Web 2.0, both of which might further illuminate the ethics and politics of F/OSS. 16 For those interested in Web 2.0—a term that is bandied around to refer to nearly all contemporary digital tools and the social practices that cluster around these technologies—you might want to jump to the short epilogue, where I critique this term. It is a moniker that obscures far more than it reveals, for it includes such a wide range of disparate phenomena, from corporate platforms like Flickr, to free software projects, to dozens of other digital phenomena. In fact, by exploring in detail free software’s sociocultural dynamics, I hope this book will make it more difficult to group free software in with other digital formations such as YouTube, as the media, pundits, and some academics regularly do under the banner of Web 2.0.
    The relationship between Silicon Valley and open source is substantial as well as complicated. Without a doubt, when it comes to