Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

it was the end of 1993 and that was the end for me as well, or at least the beginning. All these flashing lines coming by [ … ] just immediately appealed to me.
    The “ah-ahhh,” “oh my gosh,” “this is so cool,” “oh my god” factor of discovering free software depended on a myriad of intersecting elements. For some hackers, free software meant they could finally have a workable Unix operating system for their personal computer (previously, Unix ran primarily on larger, more expensive machines). Gone were the days of having to trudge through snowy streets to access a beloved Unix machine in the computer science department.
    Prior to Linux, there were few workable Unix systems that ran on personal computers and were nonproprietary. The production of Linux thus represented a general liberation of the Unix architecture, and also inaugurated its individualization, decentralization, and proliferation. Unhitched from the sole province of the university, corporation, and stringent rules of conventional intellectual property law, Linux was released as a public good and was also produced in public fashion through a volunteer association. 10 Most significantly, hackers were able to run Linux on mass-produced personal computers at home, spending more quality one-on-one time than before with an architecture that even now, still demands an active and dedicated partner. One programmer explained his early excitement as “finally” having “a workshop with all the most powerful tools to hack on real stuff at home.” Most young hackers, however, were thrilled, and many were downright “floored,” at the newfound unlimited access to source code.
    Yet the real adventure of free software came
after
its discovery. In the early days, when Linux distributions were only available off the Net, one had to download the system from a slow connection, usually a modem—a technical feat in and of itself. Taking at least a week to accomplish, the connection would undoubtedly crash, multiple times (but fortunately the download protocols allowed resuming from where it crashed), and a number of the floppies would invariably be corrupt. Once completed, Linux would often occupy around “forty floppy disks.” 11 With a stack of floppies, some hackers would immediately begin installation, and then had to hack at the system to make it actually work. Others first had to fend off accusations of piracy from what some developers intimated was some pesky, ignorant, low-level computer lab administrator. The annoyed but excited hacker could offer the administrator only an ambiguous defense, because at this time most hackers lacked the vocabulary with which to describe themeaning and purpose of free software. They might have said it was shareware, to use a term that probably would have been understood, even if it was technically incorrect. Without the intimacy that is born from time and discussion about the nature of objects with peers, free software and Linux in the early 1990s existed for many hackers as an unconceptualized “thing” in the ways theorized by Martin Heidegger ([1927] 2008), whose meaning had yet to be actualized, naturalized, or solidified as a social “object” known collectively by many.
    Once the download was complete and the suspicious administrator was sufficiently placated, hackers would then proceed to the next phase of the adventure: the death match of installation. Uninstalled, the OS was an unruly creature that had to be transformed into an obedient object so that it could be used for other acts of creative production. Until at least around 1998 (and arguably still so with many distributions, depending on the user’s experience and skills), Linux installation was nothing short of a weeklong grueling ritual of esoteric initiation into an arcane technical world that tested skills, patience, and a geek’s deepest resolve to conquer the seemingly unconquerable. Just to configure basic components of a system like X windows (the graphical user interface) required technical wizardry and diligent work. The install was so precarious in the 1990s that, as a hacker told me, “you could risk destroying your monitor.” 12 Some geeks described installation as an example of the “larval stage” of hacking—
    [a] period of monomaniacal concentration on coding apparently passed through by all fledgling hackers. Common symptoms include the perpetration of more than one 36-hour hacking run in a given week; neglect of all