Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

weather climates, from scorching summers in San Juan, Puerto Rico, to one of the coldest North American cities, Edmonton, Canada. While a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers University, I received useful comments from Meredith McGill, Michael Warner, Greg Lastowka, Paula McDowell, Ellen Goodman, Daniel Fisher, and especially Lisa Gitelman, and was also afforded a lively context from which to learn about intellectual property law from the angle of book history. At the University of Alberta, Rob Wilson, Kathleen Lowery, and my office mate Jeff Kochan also read various sections and chapters of the book. I finished a good chunk of the book thanks to the support (and amazing peace and quiet) provided by the Institute for Advanced Study. I would like to especially thank Didier Fassin and Tanya Erzen, whose insights have made their way into this book.
    There are a few people who also have given important feedback on portions of this book, presented at conferences or other venues: Jelena Karanovic, Kathy Mancuso, Andrew Leonard, Nanodust, Martin Langhoff, Bill Sterner, Margot Browning, Jonas Smedegaard, Danny O’Brien, Cory Doctorow, Graham Jones, Thomas, Malaby, Alan Toner, Samir Chopra, Scott Dexter, Jonah Bossewitch, Marc Perlman, and Patrick Davison. Quinn Norton, whose expansive creativity and deep insight into all things geek aided me in toning down the academese, supplied great nuggets of wisdom and insight. Mary Murrell was kind enough to read the entire manuscript, and provide substantive insight and feedback on my arguments and the book’s structure. I am so fortunate that I was able to teach material related to this topic and, especially, to such engaged students (and offer a hat tip to Parker Higgins, Max Salzberg, and Kevin Gotkin, in particular). Everyone in my “home away from home,” #techfed, provided me with essential support throughout this process—humor—and many also offered their suggestions. Even if IRC has been known to draw my attention from writing, I could not have finished this book without it.
    Two of my closest friends are everywhere in this book. Genevieve Lakier, the brightest woman I know, has read much of this book and pushed my thinking forward. Karl Fogel, an open-source developer and open access advocate, is not only featured in the pages of this book but read through many sections and chapters as well to make sure that my language, and thus arguments, were more precise.
    For my first academic teaching position, I had the amazing fortune of landing at the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University—fortunate for the collegiality, commitment to excellence, and resources provided to junior faculty. I would like to thank my two chairs, Ted Magder and Marita Sturken, who went to bat for me many times, making New York University such a hospitable home from which to work. My New York University colleague Michael Ralph was one of the most engaging sounding boards, providing invaluable feedback especially on the question of cunning and craft among hackers. My research assistants, James Hodges, Parker Higgins, and especially Matthew Powers, helped enormously with making this book happen.
    Various organizations provided me with generous funding, which has been essential for carrying out this research and writing. I graciously acknowledge support from the National Science Foundation Grant for a dissertation research grant, the Social Science Research Council for a research grant for the study of nonprofits, and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation’s Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship for the study of religious and ethical values.
    Parts of this book have also been published elsewhere, and have benefited tremendously from the anonymous reviewers and journal editors. The last section in chapter 1 was published as “Hacking in Person: The Ritual Character of Conferences and the Distillation of a Lifeworld,”
Anthropological Quarterly
83 (1): 47–72. An earlier version of chapter 5 was published as “Code Is Speech: Legal Tinkering, Expertise, and Protest among Free and Open-Source Software Developers,”
Cultural Anthropology
24 (3): 420–54. Sections of the conclusion can be found in “The Political Agnosticism of Free and Open-Source Software and the Inadvertent Politics of Contrast,”
Anthropology Quarterly
77 (3): 507–19.
    I am extraordinarily fortunate that my book landed with Princeton