Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

sophisticated game software with friends at school. Many recalled enjoying programming because it provided “immediate gratification” or was “instantly rewarding”—features that many still find seductive.
    Although many of their childhood experiences with programming were personal and noncommercial, a surprising number of geeks, by the time they reached high school (sometimes as early as late elementary school), wrote software that was used or purchased by peers or superiors. Whether via informal uses (a teacher using a student’s program to randomize the homeroom seating arrangements, for example) or more formal ones (a local public library purchasing a child’s math program), many child programmers witnessed their creative outputs being used in the real world. They experienced early on that programming was not just personally gratifying but also that it held a form of social utility and/or economic power that solved real-world problems.
    As kids, many programmers had already started to collaborate. Some of these youthful collaborations became the basis of close friendships that entailed playful public contests. Bill told me that in high school, “there were two or three folks who I really developed long-lasting relationships and friendships with. [ … ] We would stay after school and mess with the computer for hours. It was just an intense number of hours playing with systems and goading each other on.” Others went to math camp, where they found like-minded technical companions. Or as explained by Doug, it was not uncommon to “emulate” a friend’s software by writing one’s own version (which he told me with pride ran “more efficiently”). 5 Thus young programmers engaged in a practice of “mimesis” (Benjamin [1933] 1999) that combined competitiveness with at least a practical (if not yet ethical) acknowledgment that one is bound to peers, often friends, through coproduction. Later on, they would encounter a social movement that brought intelligibility to these early childhood experiences.
    By the time programmers reached high school, many of them came to adopt the identity of hacker or programmer—an identity now acquired atprogressively younger ages because of access to the Internet, where discussion about the cultural and technical facets of hacking is common. Many hackers did not awaken to a consciousness of their “hacker nature” in a moment of joyful epiphany but instead acquired it imperceptibly. In some cases, certain books, texts, movies, and places of interaction sparked this association. Some came to identify their personal relationship to computers as hacking by, for example, watching a movie (
War Games
), reading a book (
Hackers
) or manifesto (“The GNU Manifesto”), or during interactions with other people who also called themselves hackers in various locations such as a user group meeting, conference, math camp, or most especially a BBS where hackers congregated in droves during the 1980s and early 1990s.
    Meeting Other Hackers on BBSs
    A BBS is a computerized meeting and announcement system where users can upload and download files, make announcements, play games, and have discussions. Many were run and frequented by hackers, and hence discourses and texts about hacking were ubiquitous (Scott 2005; Sterling 1992; Thomas 2003). 6 While the Internet existed in the 1980s, and its architecture was open, practically speaking it operated under a lock, with the keys available only to a select number of hackers, engineers, administrators, and scientists gainfully employed at research labs, universities, and government agencies (Abbate 1999). Given this, BBSs played an important role in hacker history because they were the basis for one of the first expansions of hacking through which hackers could interact autonomously, anonymously, and independently of official institutions. 7 Although this networked expansion entailed a movement outward and beyond institutions (such as the workplace and university), the use of the BBS on a personal computer also represented an inverse move in the other direction, into the privacy of the home. Prior to the 1970s and even for much of the early 1980s, most computing occurred at work or the university.
    So long as they could pay the phone bill and temporarily bracket off basic biological needs like sun and sleep, hackers could explore BBSs to their heart’s delight, with each BBS independent like a virtual pond. BBSs were not networked