Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

only one thing that I am sorry about and that is that I had to leave so soon. 37
    The best moment of the whole event was the formal dinner with the rain, the mariachi, the mole, and the animations. I could never have been so happy. That’s the way I see Debian: alive. 38
    For weeks afterward, the IRC channel remains highly active as people who spent the week together reach out over virtual channels to try to regain the social interactivity they have lost. Conversations detailing particular events work as inscription devices (Latour and Woolgar 1979), making sure that such events are transformed into collective memories in order to outlast the place and time of their occurrence. The duller (and for some, oppressive) atmosphere of the office makes the con more wondrous, bringing into sharper relief its creative, open potentials and fueling the strong desire to return, yet again.
    If cons cement group solidarity, they also usher in personal transformations. Liberated “from the prevailing point of view of the world [ … ] and established truths, from cliches, from all that is humdrum and universally accepted” (Bakhtin 1984, 24), people embark on decisions and actions that they probably would not have considered otherwise. Some hackers decide to formally apply to become a Debian developer, while longtime developers decide not to quit the project—just yet. Others may tone down their mailing list flaming after meeting the developers in person. Some fall in love during the con, sometimes with another participant, and at other times with a local. A few may quit their jobs working on proprietary software, feeling that if others can make a living from free software, they ought to be able do so as well.
    Conclusion
    The hacker con is a condensed, weeklong performance of a lifeworld that hackers usually build over decades of experiences and interactions connected to various media, institutions, and objects. And as long as a hacker continues to connect to others via IRC, submits patches to open-sourceprojects, reads about their technical interests on Web sites, argues with their buddies over the best-damn text editor in the world (Emacs), layers of experiential sedimentation are added to their lifeworld. Like a large geologic rock formation, a lifeworld has detectable repetitions, but it clearly exhibits patterns of change. In one era, hackers connected with others through BBSs; now they have transitioned into a larger space of interactivity, tweaking the Internet technology that, as Chris Kelty (2005, 2008) has argued, is the regular basis for their association.
    FIGURE 1.7. Debconf7, Group photo, Edinburgh
    Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0), https://secure.flickr.com/photos/aigarius/591734159/in/set-72157600344678016/ (accessed August 2, 2011). Photo: Aigars Mahinovs.
    In the last decade, the participants in and content of the hacker public have dramatically expanded and diversified (Jordan 2008; Coleman and Golub 2008). Over blogs and at conferences, many geeks engage in a discussion with lawyers and media activists about a range of legal as well as technical topics concerning the future of net neutrality, the digital commons, and the expansion of copyright into new domains of production. A day rarely passes without hackers creating or reading the publicly circulating discourse that, in text, represents this lifeworld, otherwise experienced in embodied interactions, maniacal sprints of coding, and laughter poured over the latest Dilbert, xkcd cartoon, or Strongbad video at work. Insignificant as each of these moments may be, taken together, they become the remarkable and powerful undercurrent that sustains a shared world.
    There are lines of continuity and discontinuity with times past. Hackers today are still tweaking and building technology like they did as children on their first beloved computer (the Apple IIe, Sinclair, or Atari), but now they are equipped with more technical know-how, their computer’s cpu is vastly more powerful, their online interactions are more frequent and variegated, and they have created and are always creating new lingo. Even though their technical lives have become more public, given that so many mailing list discussions are accessible to all after a simple search query, hackers’ social and technical production happens in the domestic and private space of the home. Publicity in this case is often matched by the privacy of the room or office, where