Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

world,” they augment interactivity (Hakken 1999; Miller and Slater 2001; Taylor 2006). And hackers have grown adept at fluidly moving between them, cultivating a peculiar incorporated competence—a
hexis
, or “durable manner of standing, speaking and thereby of feeling and thinking” (Bourdieu 1977, 93) used to negotiate this movement. Even while typing away furiously, eyes scan various open windows on the computer, but ears are usually perked up, listening to the chatter and ready to contribute to the conversations unfolding in the room. Here and there, material and virtual, bodies sit at an intersection, processing bits and bytes as well as other physical bodies, who do the same.
    Cons offer ample opportunity for individuals to present their own work or new, fledging ideas to a larger audience. After laboring either in isolation or with a handful of others in person, developers feel a rush of pride and honor in presenting their work to a roomful of collaborators and peers who are keen to learn more or lend a helping hand. Despite the fact that many participants stay up until the crack of dawn, many still manage to put aside biological imperatives to stay awake to attend the talks. Though many talksare on technical matters, they usually span multiple topics, such as technology, law, politics, and cooperative sociality, among many others.
    While the experience of a con may ostensibly evade representation (or strike participants as entirely fleeting), they are nonetheless important historical conduits—perhaps one of the most significant places for simultaneously experiencing the past, present, and future of a project. During cons, participants make crucial decisions that may alter the character and future course of the developer project. For example, at Debconf4, the few women attending, spearheaded by the efforts of Erinn Clark, used the time and energy afforded by an in-person meeting to initiate and organize Debian Women Project, a Web site portal and IRC mailing list to encourage female participation by visibly demonstrating the presence of women in the largely male project.
    Following the conference, one of the female Debian developers, Amaya Rodrigo, posted a bug report calling for a Debian Women’s mailing list, explaining the rationale in the following way:
    From:
Amaya Rodrigo Sastre
    To:
Debian Bug Tracking System
    Subject:
Please create debian-women mailing list
    Date:
Tue, 01 Jun 2004 22:12:30 +0200
    Package:lists.debian.org
    Severity: normal
    Out of a Debconf4 workshop the need has arisen for a mailing list oriented to debating and coordinating the different ways to get a larger female userbase. Thanks for your time :-). 28
    While decisions, such as the creation of Debian Women, address present conditions to alter the future history of a project, cons also imbue projects with a sense of history. Different generations of hackers intermix; older ones recollect times past, letting the younger hackers know that things were once quite different. At Debconf4, younger developers added their own stories about how they ended up working on Debian. 29 Though information may strike outsiders as mundane, for those involved in the project, learning how its social organization radically differed (“the New Maintainer Process [NMP] for me was emailing Bruce Perens”) or finding out where key Debian servers were once housed (“under x’s desk in his Michigan dorm room”) is nothing short of delectable and engaging. Murdock, who attended his first Debconf in Porto Alegre, explained to a captivated audience, for instance, how he came to start the project—a treat for those who knew little or nothing about Debian’s birth. Over days of conversation, younger developers become acquainted with their project’s history, whichgrows increasingly complicated each passing year. Younger developers, in return, respond to stories of the past, adding their own accounts of how they became involved in the project and what role they may have played in changing its procedures. This back-and-forth storytelling, especially when based on personal memories and project history, provides an apt example of the “second-order stories” that Paul Ricoeur identifies as part of an intersubjective process of “exchange of memories.” These, he writes, “are themselves intersections between numerous stories,” the effect of which is a more pronounced form of entanglement through