Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

narrative (Ricoeur 1996, 6). Other conversations center on more somber matters, such as sharing stories over one of the many lunches, dinners, and bar visits about a developer who has since passed on, like Joel “Espy” Klecker of the Debian project, who died at the all-too-young age of twenty-one after fighting an illness that left him bedridden for many years.
    For some developers, the awareness of a shared social commonwealth takes on a decidedly moral character, leading some developers to reappraise their virtual interactions and behavior with fellow developers. Take, say, this memorable email sent during Debconf4, titled “Here at DebConf4,” where one longtime developer, Texan Ean Schuessler, known for his argumentative tone on emails, offered the following collective apology to the entire project:
    Well folks, I’m here at Debconf4 and I’ve had some firm feedback that I am not as funny as I think I am. I knew this was the case in advance but the irritation some people feel with the brand of my comedy has given me pause.
    I’ve argued that since I’m a volunteer that you all have to put up with my attitude. I realized that attitude sucks. It sucks up your valuable volunteer time reading the insulting, acidic emails I throw off when I am frustrated with people. [ … ]
    So I’m going to do something unprecedented. [ … ]
    I would like to apologize, without reservation, for the accounting flamewar I started on spi/debian-private [a private email list for Debian developers]. 30
    Some developers who collaborate on a piece of software take the opportunity to sequester themselves for a couple of days and overcome some particularly stubborn technical hurdle, thus accomplishing more in two days than they had during the previous two months. To nonhackers, the value of this in-person collaboration may seem odd when the collaborators tend to work pretty much as they do at home—that is, alone on their computers. This is a consequence of the single-user design and function of computers. While at a con, collaborators might physically sit next to the person they work with online (and so never see), and will frequently stop and talk with them, or hammer out a problem over a meal, the actual actof “working” on a project is determined by the object-necessitated state: in a state of interacting with their computer, more often than not, alone. This is occasionally mitigated by the shoulder-surfing and “check this out” stuff that brings people together to look at the same screen, but typically for any substantial work to get done, only one person can operate the machine at a time. The time spent looking at someone else typing, making mistakes that one wouldn’t make, solving a problem in a way that seems inefficient, or bumbling around unable to fix something makes people quickly gravitate back to being in control of their own machine in a state of mental isolation. The operative object necessities of a computer are particularly interesting at a con, because the con fundamentally challenges yet never overcomes completely these necessities.
    FIGURE 1.4. Debconf7, Edinburgh
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    What makes the shared sociality of projects so interesting is that people do end up working together—in fact relying on each other—even though their instrument usually demands only one operator. Take, for example, the following developer, Martin Kraft, who wrote about running into “a wall” when working on his software package, but was rescued by two developers who “dedicated their time to listen to my design and the problems and helped me clear the mess up.” 31 Or Tom Marble, who highlighted on his blog “why attending these conferences is great,” for he got to “spend some time discussing the future of Xorg with Debian’s maintainer, David Nusinow.We talked about how to work around the infamous XCB bug with Java and also about the future of X including OpenGL support.” 32
    Other hackers, who had hoped to get a significant amount of work done, entirely fail to do so, perhaps because socializing, sightseeing, nightclubs, and the occasional impromptu concert (after fixing an old church organ) prove a greater draw than late-night hacking.
    FIGURE 1.5. Hackers on Planet Earth, New York
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