Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

to them, cons tend to lack the types of reversals or inversionsfound in traditionally identified forms of ritual, which feature carnivalesque play, rites of passages, resolution of social contradictions, or periods of seclusion (Bakhtin 1984; Gluckman 1963; Turner 1967).
    Instead, hacker conferences are rituals of confirmation, liberation, celebration, and especially reenchantment, where the quotidian affairs of life, work, labor, and social interactions are ritualized, and thus experienced on fundamentally different terms. Through a celebratory condensation, hackers imbue their actions with new, revitalized, or ethically charged meanings. Lifting life “out of its routine” (Bakhtin 1984, 273), hackers erect a semistructured but highly flexible environment, in which the kinetic energy is nothing short of irresistible and the interactivity is corporeal. These are profound moments of cultural reenchantment whereby participants build and share a heightened experience of each other.
    Since there are “only hosts for there are no guests, no spectators, only participants” (Bakhtin 1984, 249), most everyone arrives on an equal footing, ready to contribute their part to what can only be characterized as a dizzying range of activities. 24 These include formal talks, informal gatherings usually called “birds of a feather” (BOF) sessions, copious eating and drinking, maybe dancing, hacking, gaming, sightseeing, and nonstop conversations. 25 A little bit like a summer camp but without the rules, curfews, and annoying counselors, many hacker cons are the quintessential hacker vacation—one that often involves furiously exhausting work, a lack of sleep, and the need to take a real break afterwards.
    Though organizers spend many months of hard work planning these conferences, the participants tend to experience them as evanescent. Because very little beyond talks and a few planned events can be foreshadowed or predicted in advance, the social atmosphere is pregnant with possibility. Time takes on new qualities. Most especially, time in the ordinary and often annoying sense of having to keep it is unimportant, as are many other demands of day-to-day living. Participants can change the outcome of the con itself by self-organizing, announcing new sessions, planning events, or buying a lot of alcohol, which when drunk, inadvertently derails other plans. The con’s temporal potency resides in its sheer intensity, a feverish pace of life in which freedom of expression, action, interactivity, and laughter are let loose, and often channeled into securing the bonds behind the “intense comradeship” (Turner 1969, 95) undoubtedly felt by many. Reflexivity and reflection are put on momentary hold, in favor of visceral experience. Attention is given to the present moment, so much so that the totality of the conference is usually recalled as startlingly unique, with its subsequent representation—whether in text, photos, or video—a mere shadow lacking the granularity and depth of what actually transpired.
    But while its power seems to reside entirely in its temporal singularity, its effects are multiple, far outlasting the actual con itself. By the end, due to sleep deprivation, overconsumption, and interacting with peers, the hackers’bodies and minds are usually left worn out, torn, and entirely devitalized. Nonetheless, by witnessing others who share one’s passions and especially by freely partaking in those passions, the hacking spirit is actually revitalized in the long run, after the postcon recovery needed to return to normal life. Participants come to think of their relation to hacking or a particular project in a different light. Above all, any doubts about one’s real connection to virtual projects and relationships are replaced by an invigorated faith in and commitment to this world.
    It is clear that these events are significant for hackers, who are able to celebrate and appreciate their social world. For academics interested in the relationships between virtual and nonvirtual domains, the con can be used to pose important questions about how social actors like hackers, who are routinely immersed in networked digital media, might indigenously conceive of the relationship between the screen and the physical space where bodies meet. While hackers as a group rarely collectively theorize the nature of virtual interactivity, as academics are prone to do, the immense value these hackers place on these face-to-face