Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

https://secure.flickr.com/photos/ioerror/196443446/in/set-72157594211715252 (accessed August 2, 2011). Photo: Jacob Appelbaum.
    Most hackers, however, intermix play with hacking, giving themselves ample opportunity to see the sights, dance the dances, play the games, eat the local cuisine, hit the parks and beaches, and stay put with computers on their laps, hacking away next to others doing the same, generally into the early morning.
    During hacker cons, there is a semiotic play of profound sameness and difference. Signs of sameness are everywhere. Most people are attached to their computers, and share a common language of code, servers, protocols, computer languages, architectures, LANs, wireless, kernels, man pages, motherboards, network layer, file sharing, stdout and stderr, Debian, and the FSF. Many hackers wear geeky T-shirts. With each passing day, the semiotics of sameness are enlivened, brought to a boiling point, as participants increasingly become aware of the importance of these personal relations, this form of labor, and F/OSS—in short, the totality of this technical lifeworld.
    Within this sea of sameness, eddies and tides of difference are sculpted by individual personalities, the unique existence of physical bodies in proximate space, and political and cultural differences. Mixtures of different thick accents cascade over endless conversations. The melodic Italian competes withthe enchanting Portuguese. The German “Jaaaaaa” always carries a more weighty affirmation than the American English “yeah.” Everyone adopts the basics (“please,” “yes,” “no,” and “thank you”) in the native language of the home country hosting the event. Italian anarchists work alongside US liberal democrats. Bodies sleeping, eating, and interacting make themselves known without asking, with the peculiar corporeal details—green hair, a wheelchair, gray beards, red-flushed cheeks, a large toothless smile, the Texan drawl, a freckled face, and the paucity of females—all making a lasting imprint, and captured in the thousands of photos that are taken and posted on the Debconf gallery. 33
    FIGURE 1.6. Debconf3, Oslo
    Public domain, https://gallery.debconf.org/v/debconf3/wolfgangklier/amk.jpg.html (accessed August 2, 2011). Photo: Wolfgang Klier.
    By the end, the play of sameness and difference no longer can make their mark, for bodies exist deflated, slightly corpselike. Unable to process signs of life or even binary, some hackers experience a personal systems crash.
    At the airport, awake but often a little dazed, participants engage in one final conversation on technology, usually mixed with revisiting the notable events that transpired at the con. Before the final boarding call is made, some voice their commitment to return to next year’s Debconf, which is usually already being planned by excited participants who want to ensure another great (possibly better) event: “I’ll be back in Argentina unless something goes seriously wrong,” one developer wrote on his blog after Debconf4. 34 Another mentioned that “I look forward to attending additional DebConfs in the future and encourage everyone to experience DebConf—they won’t regret it!” 35 For those who return annually, the hacker con takes on the particular ritual quality of a pilgrimage.
    If immediacy and immersion set the tone of the con experience, as soon as one leaves, a new experiential metabolism takes its place: one of heightened reflexivity. As noted by Victor Turner (1986, 2; see also Turner 1967, 105), ritual allows for an acute form of apprehension in which social actors reflect “upon themselves, upon the relations, actions, symbols, meanings,codes, roles, statuses, social structures, ethical and legal rules, and other sociocultural components which make up their public ‘selves.’” After the sheer intensity of action recedes and a feeling of nostalgia kicks in, hackers start to reflect on the importance and meaning of the conference.
    Small bits of this process are openly shared on mailing lists and blogs, especially by con neophytes:
    It was the first Debconf for me and it was very exciting and brought many different views on software development and deployments, even though I’m now hacking for over 12 years. [ … ] 36
    I don’t think I could ever have had a better first debconf experience. I think it was as close to perfect as possible, everyone was friendly and that was the most important thing. [ … ] There is