Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

awareness and shared sociality. Given these two properties, we can define humor, in the most general terms, as a play with form whose social force liesin its ability to accentuate the performer, and which at times can work to delineate in-group membership.
    Apart from this, the meaning of humor is otherwise quite culturally specific. The power to enrapture and entangle people can lead to entirely contrary social effects. In certain cases and types of groups, joking can establish and maintain hierarchies as well as social boundaries by, say, delineating social roles (Gusterson 1998; Mulkay 1988; Radcliffe-Brown 1952). In other cultural and historical contexts, humor pushes the envelope of conceptual boundaries in ways that may be fleeting and frivolous (Douglas 1975), or politically subversive (Bakhtin 1984; Critchley 2002). In other words, because the effect, purpose, and even form of humor are deeply context dependent, culturally inflected, and historically moored, it is a useful tool for analyzing broader forms of cultural meaning.
    Among hackers, humor is a distilled and parsimonious instantiation of the adoration of cleverness. It is an especially effective way of enacting hackers’ commitment to wittiness precisely because, unlike the objects of hacker technical production, joking has no strict functional utility, and speaks to the inherent appeal of creativity and cleverness for their own sake. Joking is a self-referential exercise that designates the joker as an intelligent person and cleverness as autonomously valuable.
    It bears repetition that hackers draw on their pragmatic ability to manipulate form to engage in this type of joking. These two elements—being good at hacking and valuing cleverness for its own sake—exist in a tight and productive symbiosis, a mutually reinforcing relation that produces an abundance of humor among hackers. There is a close kinship between hacking and humor.
    Insofar as humor is tethered to the moment of its utterance, it exudes an auric quality of spontaneous originality (Benjamin [1936] 2005), which among hackers authenticates the self as a distinctive and autonomous individual. Humor is one of the starkest expressions of the hacker “ideal self.” By telling jokes, hackers externalize what they see as their intelligence and gain recognition from technically talented peers.
    Like hacker technological production, humor also works to implicitly confirm the relational self who is joined to others by a shared domain of practice, and a common stock of implicit cultural and explicit technical knowledge. Recall that many jokes, such as technical Easter eggs, are received as pleasurable gifts. They not only break the monotony and grind of sitting at the computer, usually for hours a day as one churns out code or resolves problems, but also remind hackers of their shared experiences. “One might say that the simple telling of a joke,” writes philosopher Simon Critchley (2002, 18), “recalls us to what is shared in our everyday practices. [ … ] So, humor reveals the depth of what we share.” If humor creates fine distinctions, it also levels the ground, because in the very moments of laughter, hackers implicitly recognize and celebrate the shared world of meaning in which they work. After all, like many instances of joking, much of hackerhumor is so culturally coded (which here means technically inflected) that the only people who can routinely receive, and as such appreciate, their wit are other hackers. One must rely on the acknowledgment and judgment of those who can appreciate the performance of wit, because they share at least some of one’s implicit values, explicit technical knowledge, and standards of creative evaluation.
    To the extent that everyone enjoys laughter, humor functions much as a communal gift—the performance of which beckons others to follow suit. Indeed, once one hacker starts joking, many others will dive in. It also breaks the monotony and eases the strains of hacking, and so can also be seen as a mechanism to preserve hackers’ humanity (and sanity) in the face of the merciless rationale of the machine they engage with everyday. When humor is woven into the actual code or technical artifacts animating the machine, it brings otherwise-mechanic language directly and unmistakably into the realm of human communication. 7 Once part of the apparatus of human communication, humor powerfully confirms a shared mode of being in the world; in other