Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

all social domains, is shot through with a series of notable tensions. These oscillate between individualism and collectivism, elitism and humility, and frustration and deep pleasure, among others. There are various codes—informal and formal—by which hackers negotiate the tensions that characterize their productive landscape.
    The next two chapters attend to what hackers value as well as the tensions that are part and parcel of hacking, and the social codes by which these tensions are partially resolved. Chapter 3 will examine the pragmatic and aesthetic demands of writing code. Humor figures prominently since it mirrors the formal/pragmatic and poetic/aesthetic dimensions of coding, and gets us closer to the most palpable tension in the hacker world—that between individualism and collectivism, which is necessary to grasp notions of creativity and authorship.
    Chapter 4 steps away from the craft and aesthetics of hacking toward the workshop where hacking now unfolds—the free software project. Focusing on the Debian project, I continue to give attention to the central contradictions that mark hacking, notably that between elitism and populism. A new thread concerning ethical commitments to information freedom and free speech also appears. Free software projects, while most famous as the place where technical coordination unfolds, is also where significant ethical work transpires. It is here where commitments to free speech are inculcated, thorny issues of meritocracies are resolved, and hackers embody and live out a dense ethical practice.

CHAPTER 3
    The Craft and Craftiness of Hacking

    I have nothing to declare but my genius.
    —Oscar Wilde
    I, for the first time, gave its proper place among the prime necessities of human well-being, to the internal culture of the individual.
    —John Stuart Mill,
Autobiography
    H ackers value cleverness, ingenuity, and wit. These attributes arise not only when joking among friends or when hackers give talks but also during the process of making technology and writing smart pieces of code. Take, for example, this short snippet of what many hackers would consider exceptionally clever code written in the computer language Perl:
    #count the number of stars in the sky
    $cnt = $sky =~ tr/*/*/;
    This line of Perl is a hacker homage to cleverness; it is a double entendre of semantic ingenuity and technical wittiness. To fully appreciate the semantic playfulness presented here, we must look at the finer points of a particular set of the developer population, the Perl hacker. Perl is a computer language in which terse but technically powerful expressions can be formed (in comparison to other programming languages). Many Perl coders take pride in condensing long segments of code into short and sometimes intentionally confusing (what coders often call “obfuscated”) one-liners (Monfort 2008). If this above line of code were to be “expanded” into something more traditional and accessible to Perl novices, it might read something like:
    $cnt = 0;
    $i = 0;
    $skylen = length($sky)
    while ($i < $skylen) {
    $sky = substr($sky,0, $i) . ‘*’ . substr($sky, $i+1, length($skylen));
    $i++;
    }
    $cnt = length($sky);
    We see that the Perl programmer has taken six lines of code and reduced them to a single line by taking advantage of certain side effects found in the constructs of the Perl language, and the very act of exploiting these side effects is a great example of a hack. With this transformation of “prose” into terse “poetry,” the developer displays a mastery of the technical aspect of the language. This mastery is topped on the semantic level by a quip. The programmer has named the variable $sky, and the star is the asterisk (*) character. 1 The counting function in this program counts any appearance of the asterisk symbol—hence, “counting the number of stars in the sky.” This code has a technical function, but within a community of peers, its performance is also a declaration and demonstration of the author’s savvy.
    Hackers will publicly acknowledge such acts of “genius” and are thus fiercely meritocratic—in ideology and practice. Yet given that so much of hacker production is collective, a fact increasingly acknowledged and even celebrated in the ethical philosophy of F/OSS, a commitment to individuality, meritocracy, and independence is potentially subverted by the reality of as well as desire to recognize their fundamental interdependence. The belief in