Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

arrived in a foggy San Francisco to commence what cultural anthropologists regard as our foundational methodological enterprise: fieldwork. Based on the imperative of total immersion, its driving logic is that we can gain analytic insight by inserting ourselves in the social milieu of those we seek to understand. Fieldwork mandates long-term research, usually a year or more, and includes a host of activities such as participating, watching, listening, recording, data collecting, interviewing, learning different languages, and asking many questions.
    When I told peers of my plan to conduct fieldwork among hackers, many people, anthropologists and others, questioned it. How does one conduct fieldwork among hackers, given that they just hang out by themselves or on the Internet? Or among those who do not understand the name, given that they are all “outlaws”? Often playfully mocking me, many of my peers not only questioned how I would gather data but also routinely suggested that my fieldwork would be “so easy” (or “much easier than theirs”) because I was studying hackers in San Francisco and on the Internet.
    The subtext of this light taunting was easy enough to decipher: despite the transformations in anthropology that partially sanctioned my research as legitimate, my object of study nonetheless still struck them as patently atypical. My classmates made use of a socially acceptable medium—joking—to raise what could not be otherwise discussed openly: that my subjects of study, primarily North American and European (and some Latin American) hackers, were perhaps too close to my own cultural world for critical analysis, or perhaps that the very activity of computing (usually seen as an instrumental and solitary activity of pure rationality) could be subject only to thin, anemic cultural meanings. 5
    By the turn of the twenty-first century, although anthropology had certainly “reinvented” itself as a field of study—so that it is not only acceptable but one is in fact, at some level, also actively encouraged to study the West using new categories of analysis—Michel-Rolph Trouillot (2003, 13) has proposed that “anthropologists reenter the West cautiously, through the back door, after paying their dues elsewhere.” As a young, aspiring anthropologist who was simply too keen on studying free software during graduate school and thus shirked her traditional dues, I knew that for myself as well as my peers, my project served as an object lesson in what constitutes an appropriate anthropological “location” (Gupta and Ferguson 1997) for study—in particular for graduate students and young scholars.
    I myself wondered how I would ever recognize, much less analyze, forms of cultural value among a group of mostly men of relatively diverse class and national backgrounds who voluntarily band together online in order to create software. Would I have to stretch my ethnographic imagination too far? Or rely on a purely formal and semiotic analysis of texts and objects—a methodology I wanted for various reasons to avoid? Amid these fears, I took some comfort in the idea that, as my peers had indicated, my initial fieldwork would be free of much of the awkwardness that follows from thrusting oneself into the everyday lives of those who you seek to study, typically in an unfamiliar context. At the very least, I could communicate to hackers in English, live in a familiar and cosmopolitan urban setting, and at the end of the day, return to the privacy and comfort of my own apartment.
    As it turned out, my early ethnographic experiences proved a challenge in many unexpected ways. The first point of contact, or put more poetically by Clifford Geertz (1977, 413), “the gust of wind stage” of research, was harder than I had imagined. Although not always discussed in such frank terms among anthropologists, showing up at a public gathering, sometimes unannounced, and declaring your intent to stay for months, or possibly years, is an extraordinarily difficult introduction to pull off to a group of people you seek to formally study. More difficult is describing to these strangers, whose typical understanding of anthropology stems from popular media representations like the Indiana Jones trilogy, our methodology of participant observation, which is undertheorized even among anthropologists. 6 Along with the awkwardness I experienced during the first few weeks of fieldwork, I was usually one of the only females