Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

comment “You are not expected to understand this” (on the theory that every Unix-like system should have such a comment somewhere, and now I have to find somewhere else to put it). I then offered this function as a challenge to Jim Blandy. At that time only the six comments in the function and the description at the top were present.
    Jim produced the following brilliant explanation.]
    The static variable q points to a sorted array of the first l natural prime numbers. k is the number of elements which have been allocated to q, l <= k; we occasionally double k and realloc q accordingly to maintain this invariant.
    The table is initialized to contain a few primes (lines 26, 27,
    34-40). Subsequent code assumes the table isn’t empty.
    When passed a number n, we grow q until it contains a prime >= n
    (lines 45-70), do a binary search in q to find the least prime >=n
    (lines 72-84), and return that. [ … ]
    If some hackers are ready to pounce on what they deem as the idiocy of others, they are also as likely to dole out recognition where they see fit. Hence, even while hackers are on a path toward
self-development
, this self-fashioning is intimately bound to others, not simply because of a love of tinkering or the dependence derived from collaboration, but because any meritocratic order based on expertise fundamentally requires others for constant evaluation as well. Hackers use the path of humor, taunt, jousting, boasting, and argument for such expressions of technical taste and worthiness, and in the process, cultivate themselves as expert hackers.
    Just Freedom
    Given hackers’ proclivity for expressing cleverness, acknowledgment that they build on the shoulders of giants, need to garner recognition from others, and dual penchant for lauding populist collectivism and individual self-determination, what might these attributes reveal about hacker notions of personhood, creativity, and authorship?
    It is not surprising that in so much of the literature, hackers are treated as quintessentially individualistic (Levy 1984; Turkle 1984). “The hacker,” Turkle (1984, 229) writes, “is the defender of idiosyncrasy, individuality, genius and the cult of individual.” Some authors argue that this individualism is a close variant of a politically suspicious libertarianism (Borsook 2000). Hackers are perpetually keen on asserting their individuality through acts of ingenuity, and thus these statements are unmistakably correct. In most accounts on hackers, however, the meaning of this individualism is treated as an ideological, unsavory cloak or is left underspecified. Why the pronounced performance of individualism? What does it say about how hackers conceptualize authorship? What tensions does it raise?
    Because hackers do not automatically treat software as solely derivative of one laboring mind but instead see it as derivate of a collective effort, the constant drive to perform ingenuity reflects the formidable difficulty of claiming discrete inventiveness. After all, much of hacker production is based on a constant reworking of different technical assemblages directed toward new purposes and uses—a form of authorial recombination rarely acknowledged in traditional intellectual property law discourse.
    Because of the tendency, especially now more than ever, for hackers to recognize the reality of collaboration, it may seem that they are moving toward the type of politics and ethics of authorship that flatly reject the idealof individualism altogether—a rejection famously explored in the works of Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Dick Hebdige. In the F/OSS domain, hackers have not moved, even an inch, to decenter the persona of the author in the manner, say, most famously exemplified by Barthes, who in 1967 sought to dethrone the authority of an author: “To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing.” 19
    Instead, among hackers the authorial figure seems to speak slightly louder, clamoring for and demanding credit and recognition, established through oral histories of software or etched into the infrastructure of production. Hackers record contributions and attributions in common files included with source code, such as the Authors and Contributors files (Yuill 2008). This archival drive helps partially explain why certain hackers can also receive the legendary status they do. This everyday discourse and inscription develops a