Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

but rather from the experiences involved in the production of free software. These experiences were formative, leading a generation of hackers to become astute legal thinkers and producers—knowledge that was in turn eventually marshaled for political protest against the current intellectual property regime.
    Before turning to these two chapters, it is worth highlighting how historical representation is a delicate play of fabrications, or stated a little moreeloquently by Voltaire in his short story “Jeannot et Colin, “fables agreed upon.” By fable, I don’t mean false, yet it is imperative to acknowledge the constructed nature of the accounts. Choices have to be made about what to include, what to exclude, and most important,
how
to include them. For the life history chapter, I have chosen stories, elements, and events that I hope faithfully capture the zeitgeist of becoming a free software hacker, ending with one of the most memorable hacker events: the hacker conference. The subsequent chapter, by examining the dual character of our age, whereby we are subject to an omnipresent legal system and also have at our disposal a vibrant set of legal alternatives, is meant to inspire a paradoxical degree of hope and despair, thereby contributing, in its reading, to the making of history.

CHAPTER 1
    The Life of a Free Software Hacker

    One may say that true life begins where the tiny bit begins—where what seems to us minute and infinitely small alterations take place. True life is not lived where great external changes take place—where people move about, clash, fight and slay one another—it is lived only where these tiny, tiny infinitesimal changes occur.
    —Leo Tolstoy, “Why Do Men Stupefy Themselves?”
    The Basic “Specs” of a Lifeworld
    A life history, by definition, belongs uniquely to one person, textured by innumerable details, instances, events, idiosyncrasies, and happenings. 1 As such, the writing of a “typical” life history is an impossible, quixotic task, seeking to standardize and represent what evades such a neat distillation. Nonetheless, to the best of my ability, here I provide some fairly typical experiences derived primarily from seventy interviews and other sources, such as blogs, conversations, and autobiographical tales.
    Although the exact details vary, many hackers reminisced about their technological lives using a relatively standard script that traces how their inborn affinity for technology transformed, over time and through experience, into an intense familiarity. A hacker may say he (and I use “he,” because most hackers are male) first hacked as an unsuspecting toddler when he took apart every electric appliance in the kitchen (much to his mother’s horror). By the age of six or seven, his actions ripened, becoming volitional. He taught himself how to program in BASIC, and the parental unit expressed joyous approval with aplomb (“look, look our little Fred is sooo smart”). When a little older, perhaps during adolescence, he may have sequestered himself in his bedroom, where he read every computer manual he could get his hands on and—if he was lucky enough to own a modem—connected to a bulletin board system (BBS). Thanks to the holy trinity of a computer, modem, and phone line, he began to dabble in a wider networked world where there was a real strange brew of information and software to ingest.He could not resist. He began to drink himself silly with information on UFOs, bomb building, conspiracies, and other oddities, downloading different categories of software, shareware, sometimes warez (pirated software), and eventually free software. 2 Initially he spent so much time chatting he would “pass out on his keyboard, multiple times.” The parents, confusing locked doors and nocturnal living with preteen angst and isolation, wondered whether they should send their son to a psychologist.
    Once he met like-minded peers in high school, college, or online, the boy’s intellectual curiosity ballooned. He initiated a quest to master all the ins and outs of a technical architecture like the Linux OS, one or two computer languages, and the topographical terrain and protocols of a really cool new virtual place called the Internet. He soon discovered he could never really master all of this, and that he actually exists in an asymptotic relationship to technology. Nonetheless, he grew to adore the never-ending, never-finished nature of technological production,