Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

to cultivate technical independence. For example, one developer offered the following advice:
    I think you made two mistakes. [ … ] The first is looking to other people for problems to be solved. You’ll never find the inspiration in solving problems that don’t affect you. Since you don’t feel the itch, you don’t get much satisfaction from the scratch. Speaking for myself, I picked up a programming manual for my first computer and started reading; well before I was finished, I had two dozen ideas for programs to write. Those programs and their spinoffs kept me busy for a couple of years, and I loved it. Second, when an itch hits you, don’t research to see if someone has already solved the problem. Solve it yourself. Mathematical texts aren’t filled with answers right beside the problems; they teach you by making you work out the answers yourself. 10
    Simply in marking the question as misguided (because he looks to other people for problems to be solved), this developer asserts the value of self-determination. The original question violated what is the predominant(though not unquestioned) norm of self-sufficiency among developers—a norm that captures the isolated and individualistic phenomenology of much of their labor, which for many hackers commenced in childhood.
    One developer, in answering a question I had about the significance of free software, expressed this stance of technical self-determination and independence in the following terms: “If I am cut off from the world, then in theory then I can maintain my own domain over software. I don’t have to depend on anyone else; I can do it all myself. If my computing environment diverges from everyone else’s in the world, I can still keep on going.” This commitment to a fully autonomous, sovereign self who shuns any obvious signs of dependence on others is a common trait among developers. Given this mode of laboring, it is not surprising that hackers place so much emphasis on autonomy and self-sufficiency—qualities that are congenial to many hackers as they resonate so strongly with the very experience of intense periods of isolated labor.
    Yet this statement of independence is based on a hypothetical scenario of being “cut off from the world”—something even this developer qualifies as unlikely. 11 In most practical instances, hackers are constantly plugged in, connected through various technical structures of communication. They work together as well as in complete isolation, for personal and joint public projects. Software theorist Matthew Fuller (2008, 5) describes how the freedom of coding gets subsumed by a host of conditions that always lay outside code proper: “Computation establishes a toy world in conformity with its axioms, but at the same time, when it becomes software, it must, by and large [ … ] come into combination with what lies outside of code.”
    Generally, the need to both work alone and with others is experienced free of contradiction, because the two needs are complementary and readily recognized as such by most hackers. To take another example from the mailing list discussion on what transforms a mediocre hacker into a great one, a developer captured this duality by describing how hacking tacks between two productive extremes—the collaborative and individual—that are not mutually exclusive:
    Creating a linux distribution is a group activity, but creating art is fundamentally a solitary, private experience. Turn off your internet connection; sit in a dark room, with nothing but the glow of a monitor, the warmth and hum of your computer, and the ideas will flow: Sometimes a trickle, sometimes a torrent. 12
    These two modes can clash, however. This is powerfully signaled through a form of stylized boasting that contrasts one’s intelligence with the idiocy of “mere users” of software. While users of free software are often lauded as essential participants in the broader project of technical development because they provide insightful queries and bug reports (and also are seen as possible future hackers), at other times they are deemed second-classtechnical citizens. 13 This designation is frequently accomplished through the only way in which socially uncomfortable topics can be routinely discussed: by joking. On developer IRC channels, hackers playfully mock users. By complaining about stupid questions and queries, hackers depict users as less worthy contributors for lack of technical proficiency, or may