Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

words, it affirms a lifeworld. The very expression of humor is seen as proof that despite their physical dispersion and sense of independence, hackers nonetheless cohabit a shared social terrain built around a lifelong intimacy with technology and technical thinking—one they have come to celebrate.
    Among hackers, humor functions in multiple capacities and undoubtedly reflects the value they place on productive autonomy as well as the drive to perform cleverness. Much of their humor is ironic—a play with form. Its purpose is to arrive on the scene of the joke (often a technical object) unexpectedly. This is also the ideal nature of a great hack, insofar as it should surprise other hackers into a stance of awe. Humor, as Douglas (1975, 96) reminds us, is “a play upon form that affords an opportunity for realizing that an accepted pattern has no necessity.” This definition bears a striking resemblance to the pragmatics of hacking; hackers are constantly playing on form, revealing that there is no single solution to a technical problem. And although hackers claim it is abominable to reinvent the wheel, in practice, they are constantly doing so as they follow their own creative instincts and visions.
    In its ability to concurrently accentuate inclusiveness and exclusiveness, and make and level hierarchies, humor shapes conventions of sociality, ideals of creativity, and hackers’ attitudes toward one another and outsiders. Now let’s take a closer look at the tension between individuality and collectivism to which humor so delectably points us.
    Communal Populism and Individual Elitism
    If hacker pragmatics oscillate between a respect and disrespect for form, hacker sociality alternates between communal populism and individual elitism. Largely by way of F/OSS philosophy, hackers laud mutual aid andcooperative reciprocity as vital features of technical collaboration. They spend an inordinate number of hours helping each other. But there is also an elitist stance that places an extremely high premium on self-reliance, individual achievement, and meritocracy. 8 While the populist stance affirms the equal worth of everyone who contributes to an endeavor, the elitist one distributes credit, rewarding on the basis of superior accomplishment, technical prowess, and individual talent—all judged meticulously by other hackers. Hackers will spend hours helping each other, working closely together through some problem. Yet they also engage in agonistic practices of technical jousting and boasting with peers, and in turn, this works to create hierarchies of difference among this fraternal order of “elite wizards.” Ullman (1997, 101) condenses this tension into few words: “Humility is as mandatory as arrogance.” The line between elitism and populism is not simply an intellectual afterthought posed by me, the anthropologist, but also a living, relevant, affective reality discussed and dissected by hackers.
    This duality arises during the course of their work, and is openly discussed in ethical and pragmatic terms. On the one hand, hackers speak of the importance of learning from others and construe knowledge production as a collective enterprise—and this rhetoric is frequently matched in practice by truly generous and copious acts of sharing. In any given minute of the day, I can log into one of the developers’ IRC channels, and there will be some developers asking a question, getting an answer, and giving thanks, as this example illustrates:
     does anybody know how to configure sound in KDE4? [KDE is a desktop environment.]
     Zugschlus: in systemsettings
     pusling: applications => settings?
     but AFAICT [“as far as I can tell”], what you have in svn helped me build various thingies against libqt4-dev and friends.
     Zugschlus: computer > s-ystemsettingns
     KiBi: I think qt4 is now waiting in new.
     pusling: that part only has home, network, root and trash.
     pusling: oh, ok :(
     Zugschlus: do you have the package systemsettings installed?
     KiBi: so if you have special contacts to ftp team, feel free to use them.
     pusling: yep, seen it.
    * kibi can try
     Ganneff: mhy: ^^^ if you want to help kfreebsd-* folks get more packages built, fast-tracking qt4-x11 would really be great. Thanks for considering. :)
     pusling: no, that was missing. thanks.
     Zugschlus: you then probably want to make