Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

and eventually fell, almost entirely by accident, into a technical movement.
    That movement, the free software movement, seemed to describe his personal experiences with technology in a sophisticated yet accessible language. It said that sharing was good for the community, and that access to source code is not only handy but also the basis by which technology grows and improves. Eventually, he understood himself to be connected to a translocal community of hackers and grew increasingly peeved at their stereotyped representation in the media. As he grew older and more financially independent (thanks to lucrative information technology jobs as a programmer or system administrator that gave him the financial freedom, the “free time,” to code for volunteer projects, or alternatively paid him explicitly to work on free software), he consistently interacted with other geeks at work, over IRC, on a dozen (or more) mailing lists, on free software projects, and less occasionally, at exhausting and superintense hacker conferences that left him feeling simultaneously elated and depressed (because they invariably have to come to an end).
    Over time, and without realizing when it all happened, he didn’t just know how to hack in Perl, C, C ++, Java, Scheme, LISP, Fortran, and Python but also came to learn arcane legal knowledge. His knowledge about technology had become encyclopedic, but ironically he was still wholly dependent on the help of his peers to get just about anything done. He firmly came to believe that knowledge access and transactions of sharing facilitate production, that most types of software should be open source, and that the world would be a better place if we were just given choices for software licensing. Although not exactly motivated to engage in F/OSS production to fulfill a political mandate, he understood the political dimension of coding in an entirely new light. In fact, since reading Lawrence Lessig’s
Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace
, and through his daily reading of Slashdot and Boing Boing, popular Web sites reporting technology news and geek esoterica, hecame to understand that code is law; code regulates behavior. But so do the copyright industries, which are using everything in their arsenal to fundamentally shape legal policy and even behavior. They suck.

    This chapter expands the narrative introduced above to present some consistent features of the hacker lifeworld by visiting the sites, practices, events, and technical architectures through which hackers make as well as remake themselves individually and collectively. Drawing on a rich set of sources, I typify common life experiences of many F/OSS developers. I have attempted to include the sense of excitement, humor, and sensuality that I witnessed as hackers told me about their adventures in hacking.
    Following the anthropologist Michael Jackson (1996, 7–8), I understand a lifeworld as “that domain of everyday, immediate social existence and practical activities with all of its habituality, its crises, its vernacular and idiomatic character, its biographical particularities, its decisive events, and indecisive strategies.” The account I present of the hacker lifeworld might be better described as a tempo-historical phenomenology. My concern is not to privilege one of its elements (such as a detailed description of the experience of administering a server, programming, or hacking with peers) but instead to paint a panoramic picture of hacking over a fairly large swath of time. Through this, it will be clear that hackers make and remake themselves in a slow, piecemeal rhythm as they engage in diverse activities (coding, debating, reading, gaming, playing, and socializing) in equally diverse settings and institutions (the Internet, conferences, development projects, places of work, and at home).
    Although the following life history uses the first-person point of view of phenomenology, I follow Alfred Schutz (1967, 1970) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962) in maintaining that experience is intersubjective. Personal experience is frequently rooted in collective and practical activities whose nature is stable, coherent, and patterned, although constantly, if minutely, in flux. Even if transformations are rarely detectable to those immersed in the everyday flux of living, an existing lifeworld, says Merleau-Ponty (ibid., 453), is “never completely constituted,” for action and reaction occur in shifting contexts, and thus “we are