Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

cultural, technical, and political significance. It was a period of open experimentation and festive bewilderment, when developers slowly but surely started to inhabit a new ethical terrain.
    Critical to this enlargement was the widespread availability in the early 1990s of mass-produced technologies, like the personal computer, which hackers used to connect to a “novel” global network, the Internet. On computers, on the Internet, they could do what they found great pleasure in doing: tinkering, experimenting, and building software together. During this era, hackers developed new technologies and social mechanisms for working together virtually when not physically together. This brought hackers’ long-standing ideals and practices for collaborating to unforeseen heights, and accidentally shifted where and how hacking could occur.
    If F/OSS grew into a discernible technical movement that was global in scope between 1991 and 1998, then subsequent years (1998–2004) witnessed its diversification. It gained credibility and visibility across vast sectors of society, though in ways that sometimes conflicted. For example, while a linguistic name change from free software to open source made this arena “open” for business, at the same time, and in a different direction, free software inspired radical political activists to create free software to run technology collectives and grassroots media publishing Web sites. It was also during this period that hackers formed a more acute consciousness of the legal implications of F/OSS work and labor along with the laws and trends, such as those of the DMCA, threatening their productive autonomy. During the years that trade associations like the BSA pushed even more aggressively for the expansion of the existing global intellectual property regime, the social movement behind free software cohered, in many unexpected ways, to become a potent
legal counterpower
—one composed of legal agreements, free software, volunteer associations, conferences, journals, Web sites, and a worldwide group of hackers now ethically committed to the idea of F/OSS.
    In telling this history, I shared part of the story of what is frequently referred to as the second enclosure movement (Boyle 2003). These developments, especially the early ones concerning software, were part of the broader neoliberal context that helped engender free software in the first place. Indeed, the early application of copyrights and patents on software was the grain of sand that initiated the growth of the resulting pearl that is free software. And yet at that time, although Stallman (and most other hackers) were at some level cognizant of the impact of intellectual property on their productive autonomy, they barely understood the particular workings of copyright or patent law. The trade association representatives, of course, were completely unaware of what was brewing within a particularly esoteric and geeky enclave. Those hackers would, within twenty years, leave this enclave to throw monkey wrenches into the project of harmonization, sometimes intentionally, and at other times often unintentionally.
    By the late 1990s, this landscape of consciousness had undergone a massive and historically significant transformation. Both hackers and the spokespeople for these trade associations were not only aware of each other; many hackers also spoke a sophisticated legal language about the workings of intellectual property and free software law that ran into direct opposition to the dominant legal trends in intellectual property law. Two independent legal trends, once worlds apart, now stand together in a state of direct conflict.

PART II
    CODES OF VALUE

    FIGURE 3.1. WTFs/minute
    Credit: Thom Holwerda.
    A nthropologists often focus on cultural value—those ethical, aesthetic, and political attributes of social life that a group has come to deem important, and that ultimately help define it as distinct from other groups. The next two chapters tackle the question of cultural value as a starting point to address a host of questions about hacker technical and cultural production along with the tensions that mark hackers’ social dynamics, collaborative practices, and organizational forms.
    Although we might be able to identify some indisputable commitments among hackers, such as meritocracy and the form of individualism it entails, the foundation of value among hackers is never without dispute and friction. Indeed, hacking, like