Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

upon form.” Before expanding on the role of humor among hackers, it is key to highlight that hackers are able to joke with such facility because of the habituated dispositions (Bourdieu 1977) of thought along with tacit knowledge (Polanyi 1966) acquired through a lifelong and routine practice of logic-oriented problem solving. Hackers liberally enjoy hacking almost anything, and because their cultivated technical practice requires an awareness and rearrangement of form, they are able to easily transfer embodied mental dispositions into other arenas. To put it bluntly, because hackers have spent years, possibly decades, working to outsmart various technical constraints, they are also good at joking. Humor requires a similarly irreverent, frequently ironic stance toward language, social conventions, and stereotypes (Douglas 1975).
    The mastery and craft of hacking, however, do not fully account for the
craftiness of hackers
. 4 Many of the engineering arts and sciences are guided by similar aesthetic-solving sensibilities, mandates, and preoccupations (Galison 1997; see also Jones and Galison 1998). Engineers and othercraftspeople, such as repairpersons, also deploy similar problem-solving skills rooted in tinkering: they must engage with the limits, possibilities, and constraints of various material objects, and fiddle around to find a nonobvious solution (Orr 1996; Sennett 2008).
    Hacker aesthetics share these above-mentioned dispositions, but differ in that hackers see ingenuity and cleverness, often expressed though humor, as far more than a means to regiment and guide technological innovation. 5 Among hackers, humor has a substantial life of its own. Hackers value craftiness and cleverness for their own sake. Whereas academic scientists tend to value referential cleverness as it concerns their work, hackers value cleverness as self-productive, and thus make it appropriate to nearly any context (mathematicians, though, are well known for their prolific humor that exceeds their discipline). Hackers idealize cleverness as a characteristic par excellence that transforms what they spend all of their time doing—creating technology and fixing problems in a great maelstrom of complexity and confusion—into an activity of shared and especially sensual pleasure.
    Before extending my theoretical discussion on cleverness and humor, permit me to provide a few examples that are embedded in technical artifacts and one that arose during social interaction. Since much of hacker wit is so technically coded, it is difficult to translate it in any meaningful manner to a lay audience, and I am afraid it might not strike nongeek readers as all that humorous. Analyzing humor, after the fact, is also nearly never humorous, but hopefully it can still be analytically illuminating. I have chosen four examples that are more accessible to a nontechnical audience and supply at least a taste of the types of jokes common among hackers.
    Peppering technical artifacts with clever quips occurs quite commonly in hacker technical naming conventions or documentation. For instance, most software applications also come with some sort of description of their purpose and functionality. Jaime Zawinski, the author of a software application called BBDB, portrays his creation via a smattering of jokes (most software applications include a description of their functionality):
    BBDB is a rolodex-like database program for GNU Emacs. BBDB stands for
Insidious Big Brother Database
, and is not, repeat,
not
an obscure reference to the Buck Rogers TV series.
    It provides the following features:
    Integration with mail and news readers, with little or no interaction by the user:
    easy (or automatic) display of the record corresponding to the sender of the current message; automatic creation of records based on the contents of the current message; [ … ]
    While the “Insidious Big Brother Database” is an obvious and playful recognition of the common hacker mistrust of governmental authority, the Roger’s reference is more esoteric and thus only a small fraction of hackers willbe able to decipher it: those hackers who have watched the television series. With the cue offered in the documentation, those hackers will immediately catch the author’s irony (that
this is
a reference to the show) and recognize that BBDB refers to the series’ pint-size robot Twiki, whose preferred mode of communicating is a noise that sounds remarkably like “B-D-BBBB-D.”
    I am