Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

encounters points to how they imagine the nature of and even limits to virtual interactivity. The hacker conference is not only a social drama that produces feelings of unity, as I will demonstrate below, but can also be fruitfully approached as ethical and social commentary—a native critique—that speaks to how hackers themselves imagine interaction. By emphasizing so strongly the human interactivity of the conferences, hackers are implicitly agreeing with the idea that virtuality, however meaningful, cannot ever fully replace or mimic face-to-face sociality.
    The Social Metabolism of a Typical Developer Con
    After hours of travel, hackers who tend to come from western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Latin America, the United States, and Canada (and a handful from Asia) trickle in throughout the first day and night to the venue. 26 The Debian developer conference, for example, is held every year in a new location for over a week and brings together around four hundred developers who work on maintaining this Linux distribution. Veteran attendees traveling significant distances arrive exhausted but enthusiastic, knowing what lies ahead. For first timers, the anticipation may be a little more amorphous yet no less significant. The prospect of finally meeting (actually in person) people you often interact with, although typically only through the two-dimensional medium of text, is thrilling. Many participants, unable to contain their excitement, skip the first (and maybe second) night of sleep, spending it instead in the company of peers, friends, alcohol, and of course computers.
    FIGURE 1.2. Debconf10, New York
    Photo: E. Gabriella Coleman.
    No respectable hacker/developer con could be called such without the ample presence of a robust network and hundreds of computers—the material collagen indisputably connecting hackers together. Thin laptops,chunky personal computers, reams of cable, fancy digital cameras, and other assorted electronics equipment adorn the physical environment. Animated by fingers swiftly tapping away at the keyboards, computers return the favor, animating faces in a pale blue hue. Most cons now host a hacklab, a room filled with long tables, nearly every inch occupied by computers networked together, available for experimentation, testing, playing, demonstrating, and so on. In the first few days, much of the technological chatter centers on the difficulties and solutions behind setting up the network, which in the case of the Debconfs is usually commemorated in detail in the final report:
    The building itself had to be wired from the 2nd floor to the basement, and we ended up stringing approximately a kilometer of cable for the network backbone. [ … ] Every room was interconnected with redundant links. This turned out to be fortunate: we did have wiring failures, but no one except the admins noticed and work continued uninterrupted. 27
    Virtually communicating with participants as well as those unable to attend, hackers continue to give due attention to their work and networked interactivity even while in the presence of others, as we see in the picture ( figure 1.3 ).
    Since coordinating the hundreds, sometimes thousands, of hackers at a con can be a bit challenging, geeks naturally turn to technology for help. Even before the start of a conference, organizers erect an IRC channel, mailing list, Web page, and wiki. Many geeks, who are coming from out of town, change their cell plans, rent a cell phone, or get a new chip for their cell phone to provide them with cellular service at the local rate. Some of themany technical discussions are, naturally, about the latest mobile technologies and local mobile network. These tools are prolifically used to locate people, spontaneously coordinate new events, collect all sorts of information, post slides, compile lists of where people are from, and find out where to do laundry, along with other coordination tasks.
    FIGURE 1.3. HackNY, New York
    Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0), https://secure.flickr.com/photos/hackny/5684846071/ (accessed October 23, 2011). Photo: Elena Olivo.
    During talks, IRC becomes the high-tech peanut gallery. Hackers unabashedly discuss the presentations as they unfold, giving those not there in person, but online, an often-humorous textual play-by-play. At the con, these networked and virtual technologies exist in much the same way they ordinarily do. Rarely used in isolation or to replace the “meat