Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

this routine form of technical activity hackers have constituted an expansive pragmatic practice of instrumental yet playful experimentation and production. In these activities the lines between play, exploration, pedagogy, and work are rarely rigidly drawn. Sometimes hackers will be motivated by a work-oriented goal, as is/was the case with DMH. At other times, they are motivated to hack for the sheer pleasure of doing so, as Espe emphasized. In either case, frustration
and
pleasure are fundamental to hacking.
    A lifetime of creative and pleasurable technical production that often depends on computers also blurs the line between selves and objects. As famously phrased by Sherry Turkle (1984), computers are a hacker’s “second self.” The hacker relationship to computers and software, though, rarely exists in a steady state in which the self unproblematically melds with this object to catapult hackers into a posthuman, postmodern state of being. The hacker relationship with the computer is a far more finicky, prickly, and interesting affair in which computers themselves constantly misbehave and break down (as do the hackers, at times, when they burn out from such an intense and demanding craft). Hackers sometimes confront their computers as an unproblematic and beloved “object,” and at other times view them as an independent and recalcitrant “thing”—a differentiation posed by Heidegger ([1927] 2008) in his famous exploration of things and objects.
    In Heidegger’s cartography, an object strikes its users as familiar and beyond the scope of critical awareness. Its social meaning is held in place through regular patterns of use and circulation. But when we misuse an object (a spoon used as a knife or a can opener utilized as a hammer) or when an object malfunctions, its thingness is laid bare in the sense that its material characteristic becomes evident. As noted by scholar of things and stuff Bill Brown (2001, 4), “the story of objects asserting themselves as things is the story of how the thing really names less an object than a particular subject-object relation.”
    In order to appreciate the hacker relationship to computers, this subtle differentiation between an object and a thing is crucial. Hacker technical practices never enact a singular subject-object relation, but instead one that shifts depending on the context and activity. There are times when hackers
work with
computers, and in other cases they
work on
them. Much of hacker technical practice can be described as an attempt to contain the thingness of computers that arises through constant problems and constraints by transforming it back into a pacified, peaceful object that then becomes an ideal vehicle for technical production as well as creative expression. At times, their labor is characterized by grinding effort, and in otherinstances, it involves far more pleasurable streams of seemingly friction-free work. The “Python versus Perl Wars” above articulates the metapragmatic understandings of hacker labor that makes it possible to enter into this relational oscillation in the first place.
    Hacker Cleverness
    Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.
    —E. B. White,
A Subtreasury of American Humor
    As the examples provided by Espe and DMH display, hacker technical practice is rooted in a playful, analytic, and especially reflective stance toward form that switches between reverence and irreverence depending on individual preferences as well as the context of activity. Hackers routinely engage in a lively oscillation of respect and disrespect for form, often expressed in arguments over the technical idiosyncrasies, strengths, and weaknesses of a programming language, OS, or text editor. These disagreements are the subject of a range of humorously formulated “holy wars,” such as Perl versus Python (which we just got a glimpse of), vi versus Emacs (text editors), and Berkeley Software Distribution versus Linux (different Unix-based OS). Despite this, hackers otherwise share an ideal about how labor and production should proceed: with remarkable craftiness and wit.
    One important vehicle for expressing wit is humor. As Mary Douglas (1975, 96) famously theorized, joking brings together “disparate elements in such a way that one accepted pattern is challenged by the appearance of another,” and can be generally defined as “play