Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

shared historical awareness about who contributed what—one that brings attention to the conditions of production or the nature of the contribution. Furthermore, accountability and credit are built into many of the technical tools that facilitate collaboration, such as CVS and Subversion—software systems used to manage shared source code. These systems give developers the ability to track (and potentially revert to) incremental changes to files and report the changes to a mailing list as they are made, and are often used concurrently by many developers. Since developers all have accounts, these technologies not only
enable collaboration
but also provide
precise details of attribution
. Over time, this record accumulates into a richly documented palimpsest. Though individual attribution is certainly accorded, these technological palimpsests reflect unmistakably that complicated pieces of software are held in place by a grand collaborative effort that far exceeds any one person’s contribution. 20
    In contrast to many accounts on authorship, I find that a short description about the aesthetics of jazz and its “cruel contradiction” is eerily evocative of the hacker creative predicament:
    There is a cruel contradiction implicit in the art form itself. For true jazz is an art of individual assertion within and against the group. Each true jazz moment (as distinct from the uninspired commercial performance) springs from a context in which each artist challenges all the rest, each solo flight, or improvisation, represents (like the successive canvases of a painter) a definition of his identity: as individual, as member of the collectivity, and as link in the chain of tradition. Thus, because jazz finds its very life in an endless improvisation upon traditional materials, the jazzman must lose his identity even as he finds it. (Ellison 1964, 234; quoted in Gilroy 1993, 79)
    Among hackers this cruelty, this difficulty in establishing discrete originality, is in reality not so cruel. It is treated like any interesting problem: an enticinghurdle that invites rigorous intellectual intervention and a well-crafted solution within given constraints. Hackers clearly define the meaning of the free individual through this very persistent inclination to find solutions; they revel in directing their faculty for critical thought toward creating better technology or more sublime, beautiful code. The logic among hackers goes that if one can create beauty, originality, or solve a problem within the shackles of constraints, this must prove a
superior
form of creativity, intelligence, and individuality than the mere expression of some wholly original work.
    Not every piece of technology made by hackers qualifies as a hack. The hack is particularly the “individual assertion within and against the group” (Ellison 1964, 234), which may be easily attached to an individual even though it is still indebted to a wider tradition and conversation. Hackers certainly engage in a creative, complex process partially separated from hierarchy, enfolding a mechanics of dissection, manipulation, and reassembly, in which various forms of collaboration are held in high esteem. Much of their labor is oriented toward finding a good enough solution so they can carry forth with their work. But their form of production is one that also generates a practice of cordial (and sometimes not-so-cordial) one-upping, which simultaneously acknowledges the hacker’s technical roots and yet at times strives to go beyond inherited forms in order to implement a better solution. If this solution is achieved, it will favorably reveal one’s capacity for original, critical thought—the core meaning of individuality among hackers.
    Hackers recognize production as the extension or rearrangement of inherited formal traditions, which above all requires access to other people’s work. This precondition allows one to engage in constant acts of re-creation, expression, and circulation. Such an imperative goes against the grain of current intellectual property law rationalizations, which assume that the nature of selfhood and creativity is always a matter of novel creation or individualized inventive discovery.
    Among F/OSS hackers, the moral economy of selfhood is not easily reducible to modern “possessive individualism” (Graeber 1997; Macpherson 1962). Nor does it entirely follow the craftsperson or the stand-alone romantic author figured by intellectual property