Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

hackers labor during the day, in the evening, on the weekend, and for some, all of these times. A lifeworld is situated within its historical times, even if rarely experienced as anything other than prosaic time, except during rare moments like the con.
    All conferences, despite their many differences, might be theoretically approached as the ritual underside of modern publics, in the sense theorized by Michael Warner (2002) and Taylor (2004). While theorists of publics have always noted that face-to-face interactions, such as meetings in salons, are part of the architecture of the public sphere and publics (Habermas 1989), there has been little detailed attention given to the ways that physical copresence might sustain and expand discursive forms of mediation. Perhaps the circulation of discourse captivates people so strongly, and across time and space, in part because of rare but socially profound and ritualistic occasions, such as conferences, when members of some publics meet and interact. Approaching the conference in terms of its ritual characteristics may also demonstrate how social enchantment and moral solidarity, usually thought to play only a marginal role in the march of secular and liberal modernity, is in fact central to its unfolding.
    The relations between the conference and the public have affective, moral, technical, economic, and political dimensions. Transportation technologies, trains in times past and planes in times present, are as much a part of the (often-unacknowledged) architecture of publics as are newspapers and the Internet, for they transport bodies, normally connected by discourse, to interact in an intense atmosphere for a short burst of time. It requires a significant amount of labor and money to both organize and attend these events. The contexts of labor and organization—Is it affordable? Should it be held in a downtown hotel or a small forest outside of Eugene, Oregon? How is the conference advertised? Is it open to all or based on invitation? What is the environmental impact of far-flung global travel?—shape their moral and political valence. Given that most conferences, even those that are consciously made affordable, usually require long-distance travel, the economics of conferences make them significantly less accessible to certain populations. The poor, the unemployed (or the overly employed who cannot get time off to attend these events), the young, the chronically ill, and thosewith disabilities often cannot attend. A political economy of the conference can illuminate how members of a public are poised differentially to each other because of their ability or inability to meet in person.
    Just as a public has different instantiations, the same can be said of the conference. If some publics, as Warner (2002, 119) perceptively argues, are counterpublics that maintain “at some level, conscious or not, an awareness of [their] subordinate status,” similar typologies might help us understand the social power and political force of a conference. While most conferences, at some level, share similar features (presentations, talks, and dinners), there are notable differences, especially as it concerns things like sleeping and eating. The differences between the American Psychiatric Association annual meetings, where doctors are dressed in suits and mill about during the day at San Francisco’s Moscone Center, retiring individually in the evening to a luxury San Francisco high-rise hotel after a nice dinner, and the outdoor festival held by European hackers, where bodies are clothed in T-shirts and shorts (if that), and many participants can be found sleeping together under the stars, are difficult to deny. Although many hackers find themselves in well-paid jobs (like doctors), they are cognizant of the controversial politics surrounding the term hacker—a name many take on willingly. The cultural ethos and class of a group is inscribed in where they are willing to meet, what they are willing to do with their bodies, what they are willing to do with each other, and what they are willing to express during and after these conferences.
    Despite the differences in their moral economy, conferences tend to be the basis for intense social solidarity that sustain relationships among people who are otherwise scattered across vast distances. For hackers, given the fierce celebration of some of their cons, these gatherings feel entropic. They experience a cathartic release of laughter