Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

1976 copyright statute, and nations could only grant narrowly defined exemptions to copyright and patents. Along with accepting these provisions, signatory nations had to commit to building the infrastructure (patent and copyright offices along with criminal units) needed to uphold and monitor intellectual property protection—a substantial financial investment for many developing nations. 13
    These extensive legal changes, mandated by global regulatory institutions, are an example of one of the central contradictions in the neoliberal instantiation of free trade. Neoliberalism champions the rights of individuals, deems monopolies regressive, and relishes establishing a world free of government regulation, so that goods, and especially capital, can cross national boundaries with little or no friction (Ong 2006). In practice, however, the actual instantiation of neoliberal free trade requires active state intervention, regulation, and monopolies (Harvey 2005; Klein 2008). And the global regulation of intellectual property law is perhaps one of the clearest instances of the contradictory underpinnings of neoliberal practice—a monopoly mandated by trade associations as a global precondition for so-called free trade.
    On the national front, many changes were also afoot. In 1995, the Clinton administration released a white paper, developed under Bruce Lehman, the assistant secretary of commerce and commissioner of patents and trademarks, which agreed with the assessment made by the copyright industries that their intellectual property holdings were under dire threat by new technologies. The ease of duplication and circulation enabled by new information technologies, the copyright industries insisted, would prevent them from releasing content digitally, thus retarding the Clinton administration’s goal of creating a commercially robust national information superhighway. Echoing Gate’s earlier admonishments against the Homebrew hobbyists, the administration’s rationale was that the information superhighway “will not be realized if the education, information, and entertainment protected by intellectual property law are not protected effectively. Creators and other owners of intellectual property rights will not be willing to put their interests at risk.” 14 Although Congress did not pass the maximalist copyright recommendations proposed in this white paper, it would implement similar ones a few years later with the DMCA’s passage.
    In this neoliberal climate, the message, politics, and artifacts produced by Stallman were barely audible, as media theorist Thomas Streeter (2011, 156; emphasis added) has aptly observed: “In a neoliberal world that was both in love with high technology and that seemed completely stuck in the assumption that innovation only sprung from the unfettered pursuit of profit, Stallman’s approach
was so different as to be almost invisible
.” However muted Stallman’s approach was in the early 1990s, free software would soon experience massive growth, breaking away from its geeky enclave to instigate a radical and fundamental rethinking of the assumptions that in the 1990s still worked to marginalize Stallman’s “crazy” ideals.
    While the increasing personal and business use of desktop computers along with the commercialization of the Internet contributed to a diverse, steady market for proprietary software firms, cheaper desktops and more affordable Internet access also lubricated the emergence of a novel form of network hacking in ways that altered the public face and future direction of free software. Indeed, in 1991, just a year before President Bushsigned legislation to reclassify a class of copyright infringement as felonies, Torvalds kicked off the development of the Linux kernel—a kernel being the liaison between the hardware and software of a computer, and therefore the core of the computer’s OS. At the time, Torvalds had no intention of developing a project that would eventually help form the nucleus of a fully operational and powerful OS—Linux—that could compete in the market with propriety products. Nor was he motivated by a politics of resistance or cultural survival, as was clearly Stallman’s impetus. Torvalds was simply trying to get some help with a personal project that had captivated his attention.
    Concurrent with the ongoing development of GNU applications, but independent of the FSF, Torvalds began to develop a basic kernel. He released the source