Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

principles, and implementation of meritocracy along with their frequent challenge to intellectual property provisions. Indeed, the ethical philosophy of F/OSS focuses on the importance of knowledge, self-cultivation, and self-expression as the vital locus of freedom. Hackers bring these values into being through an astounding range of social and technical practices, covered in detail throughout this book.
    Because hackers challenge one strain of liberal jurisprudence, intellectual property, by drawing on and reformulating ideals from another one, free speech, the arena of F/OSS makes palpable the tensions between two of the most cherished liberal precepts—both of which have undergone a significant deepening and widening in recent decades. Thus, in its political dimension, and even if this point is left unstated by most developers and advocates, F/OSS represents a liberal critique from within liberalism. Hackers sit simultaneously at the center and margins of the liberal tradition.
    The expansion of intellectual property law, as noted by some authors, is part and parcel of a broader neoliberal trend to privatize what was once public or under the state’s aegis, such as health provision, water delivery, and military services. “Neoliberalism is in the first instance,” writes David Harvey (2005, 2), “a theory of political economic practices that proposes human well-being can be best advanced by liberating entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong property rights, free markets, and free trade.” As such, free software hackers not only reveal a long-standing tension within liberal legal rights but also offer a targeted critique of the neoliberal drive to make property out of almost anything, including software.
    While most of this ethnography illustrates how free software hacking critiques neoliberal trends and reinvents liberal ideals by asserting a strong conception of productive freedom in the face of intellectual property restrictions, it also addresses the material, affective, and aesthetic dimensions of hacking. In pushing their personal capacities and technologies to new horizons (and encountering many frustrations along the way), hackers experience the joy that follows from the self-directed realization of skills, goals, and talents. At times, hacking provides experiences so completely overpowering, they hold the capacity to shred self-awareness, thus cutting into a particular conception of the liberal self—autonomous, authentic, and rational—that these hackers otherwise routinely advance. Thus, at least part of the reason that hacker ethics takes its liberal form is connected to the aesthetic experiences of hacking, which are informed by (but not reducible to) liberal idioms and grammars. Hacking, even if tethered to liberal ideologies, spills beyond and exceeds liberal tenets or liberal notions of personhood, most often melding with a more romantic sensibility concerned with a heightened form of individual expression, or in the words of political theorist Nancy Rosenblum (1987, 41), a “perfect freedom.”
    Fieldwork among Hackers
    For most of its history, anthropology stuck close to the study of non-Western and small-scale societies. This started to shift following a wave of internal and external critiques that first appeared in the 1960s, expanded in the 1970s, and peaked in the 1980s. Now referred to as “the critical turn in anthropology,” the bulk of the critique was leveled against the discipline’s signature concept: culture. Critics claimed that the notion of culture—as historically and commonly deployed—worked to portray groups as far more bounded, coherent, and timeless than they actually are, and worse, this impoverished rendition led to the omission of topics concerning power, class, colonialism, and capitalism (Abu-Lughod 1991; Asad 1973; Clifford 1988; Clifford and Marcus 1986; Dirks 1992; Said 1978). Among othereffects, the critique cracked open new theoretical and topical vistas for anthropological inquiry. An anthropologist like myself, for example, could legitimately enter nontraditional “field sites” and address a new set of issues, which included those of technoscientific practice, information technologies, and other far-flung global processes stretching from labor migration to transnational intellectual property regulations.
    Partly due to these disciplinary changes, in winter 2000, I left a snowy Chicago and