Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

discourses about liberty run rampant, many developers come to view F/OSS as the apex of writing software, as we will see in the next chapter. It has, they say, the necessary legal and material features that can induce as well as fertilize creative production. In contrast to the corporate sphere, the F/OSS domain is seen as establishing the freedom necessary to pursue
personally
defined technical interests in a way that draws on the resources and skills of other individuals who are chasing down their own interests. In other words, the arena of F/OSS establishes all the necessary conditions (code, legal protection, technical tools, and peers) to cultivate the technical self and direct one’s abilities toward the utilitarian improvement of technology. While many developers enjoy working on their corporate projects, there is always a potential problem over the question of sovereignty. One developer told me during an interview that “managers [ … ] decide the shape of the project,” while the F/OSS arena allows either the individual or collective of hackers to make this decision instead. F/OSS allows for technical sovereignty.
    The hacker formulation of individuality, as the pursuit of one’s interest for the mutual benefit of each other and society, is an apt example of the general characterization of modern individualism as defined, according to Taylor (2004, 20), by “relations of mutual service between equal individuals.” While much of liberal thought understands mutual service in terms of economic exchange, hackers relate to it through the very act of individual expression and technical creation—the only sound ways to truly animate the uniqueness of one’s being.
    Conclusion
    As noted in the previous section, even though hackers tend to approach other hackers as equals, they also construct themselves as high-tech cognoscenti creating the bleeding edge of technology. This elitism follows from their commitment to the organizational ideal of meritocracy, a performance-based system that applauds individual skill, encourages respectful competition between peers, and sanctions hierarchies between developers, especially in the F/OSS project to be discussed at length in the subsequent chapter.
    The meritocratic ideal, ubiquitous in liberal thought, has particular resonance in the US popular imaginary. The United States is often thought of as a living embodiment of meritocracy: a nation where people are judged on their individual abilities alone. The system supposedly works so well because, as the media myth goes, the United States provides everyone with equal opportunity, usually through public education, to achieve their goals. As such, the hierarchies of difference that arise from one’s ability (usually to achieve wealth) are sanctioned by this moral order as legitimate.
    In many senses, hackers have drawn from what is still a prevalent trope of meritocracy to conceptualize how they treat one another and self-organize. In his classic account of hackers, Levy (1984, 43) includes this principle as one of the six elements that define the hacker ethic, noting that “hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position,” in which “people who trotted in with seemingly impressive credentials were not taken seriously until they proved themselves at the console of the computer.”
    Though written twenty years ago, this commitment to meritocracy still holds undeniable sway in the way F/OSS hackers construct norms of sociality and envision selfhood, not because it exists in the same exact way, but rather because hackers have given it new meaning by organizationally building the institution of the free software project guided by a dedication to meritocracies. Hackers who participate in free software projects routinely asserted that F/OSS projects are run as meritocracies. The doors are open to anyone, they insist; respect and authority are accorded along the lines of superior and frequently individual technological contribution. As we will see in the next chapters, F/OSS hackers may not build perfect meritocracies and yet they are certainly motivated to implement them.
    For F/OSS hackers, it is imperative to constantly and recursively equalize the conditions by which other hackers can develop their skills and prove their worth to peers. As part of this equalization process, one must endow the community of hackers with resources like documentation and the fruits of