Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

jurisprudence but rather evinces other sensibilities that point to competing liberal concepts of individualism and freedom. While hackers envisage themselves as free and rational agents, in the context of free and open-source hacking, most hackers place less emphasis on the freedom to establish relations of property ownership and exchange. Instead, they formulate liberty as the condition necessary for individuals to develop the capacity for critical thought and self-development. 21
    While the hacker interpretation of labor, creativity, and individuality strays from influential liberal understandings of personhood—possessive individualism—it does not represent a wholly novel take on these themes.It aligns with the type of person presupposed in free speech theory, perhaps most lucidly in Mill’s writings, which influenced the shape, content, and philosophy of free speech jurisprudence as it now exists in the United States (Bollinger and Stone 2002; Passavant 2002). Mill, influenced by the Romantic tradition (Halliday 1976), defines a free individual as one who develops, determines, and changes their own desires, capacities, and interests autonomously through self-expression, debate, and reasoned deliberation (Donner 1991). It is a vision that fuses utilitarian and romantic commitments, and is built on the idea of human plasticity and development—the ability of the self to grow and develop through creative expression, mental activity, and deliberative discussion, usually by following one’s own personally defined path. As Wendy Donner argues, this form of liberal self-cultivation also requires the establishment of standards by which to judge the development of the human faculties. Mill’s “transformed conception of utility necessitates a new method of value measurement which relies heavily on the judgment of competent agents,” writes Donner (1991, 142), “and thus essentially rests on a doctrine of human development and self-development.” What is notable is how Mill ([1857] 1991, 93) contends in his famous
On Liberty
that an individual must follow their own path of development, because “persons [ … ] require different conditions for their spiritual development.” Even if this Romantic inclination prioritizes the individual, one can only develop the critical faculties along with moral and aesthetic standards via a process of training and open-ended argumentation in debate with other similarly engaged individuals.
    Much of free software legal philosophy and moral sensibilities bear remarkable similarities to this Millian (and thus also Romantically informed) vision of personhood, self-development, and liberty, although there are differences and specifications tied to hacking’s unique relations between persons, labor, and technology. Hackers place tremendous faith in the necessity and power of expressive activity that springs from deep within the individual self—an expression that acts as the motor for positive technical change. Progress depends on the constant expression and reworking of already-existing technology. Thought, expression, and innovation should never be stifled, so long as, many developers told me during interviews, “no one else is hurt”—a sentiment that is part and parcel of Millian free speech theories.
    Free software developers have come to treat the pursuit of knowledge and learning with inestimable high regard—as an almost sacred activity, vital for technical progress and essential for improving individual talents. As one software developer observed, “I can use the code for my own projects and I can improve the code of others. I can learn from the code so that I can become a better programmer myself, and then there is all my code out there so that you can use it. It is just freedom.” The spirit of this statement is ubiquitous among F/OSS developers. A utilitarian ethic of freedom andopenness is increasingly seen as not only obvious but also indispensable in order to develop the “state of the art.”
    For developers, technical expression should always be useful. If it isn’t, it denies the nature of software, which is to solve problems. Yet hackers also place tremendous value on the aesthetic pleasures of hacking, producing technology and software that may not have any immediate value but can be admired simply on its own elegant terms—as a conduit for personal self-expression.
    Over years of coding software with other developers in free software projects where