Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

present during hacker gatherings, and as a result felt even more out of place. And while I may have recognized individual words when hackers talked shop with each other—which accounted for a large percentage of their time—they might as well have been speaking another language.
    At the start of my research period, then, I rarely wanted to leave my apartment to attend F/OSS hacker social events, user group meetings, or conferences, or participate on email lists or Internet relay chat channels—all of which were important sites for my research. But within a few months, my timidity and ambivalence started to melt away. The reason for this dramatic change of heart was a surprise to me: it was the abundance of humor and laughter among hackers. As I learned more about their technical world and was able to glean their esoteric jokes, I quickly found myself enjoying the endless stream of jokes they made in all sorts of contexts. During a dinner in San Francisco’s Mission district, at the office while interning at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, or at the monthly gatherings of the Bay Area Linux User Group held in a large Chinatown restaurant, humor was a constant bedfellow.
    Given the deep, bodily pleasures of laughter, the jovial atmosphere overcame most social barriers and sources of social discomfort, and allowed meto feel welcome among the hackers. It soon became clear to me, however, that this was not done for my benefit; humor saturates the social world of hacking. Hackers, I noticed, had an exhaustive ability to “misuse” most anything and turn it into grist for the humor mill. Once I began to master the esoteric and technical language of pointers, compilers, RFCs, i386, X86, AMD64, core dumps, shells, bash, man pages, PGP, GPG, gnupg, OpenPGP, pipes, world writeable, PCMCIA, chmod, syntactically significant white space, and so on (and really on and on), a rich terrain of jokes became sensible to me.
    My enjoyment of hacker humor thus provided a recursive sense of comfort to a novice ethnographer. Along with personally enjoying their joshing around, my comprehension of their jokes indicated a change in my outsider status, which also meant I was learning how to read joking in terms of pleasure, creativity, and modes of being. Humor is not only the most crystalline expression of the pleasures of hacking (as I will explore later). It is also a crucial vehicle for expressing hackers’ peculiar definitions of creativity and individuality, rendering partially visible the technocultural mode of life that is computer hacking. As with clever technical code, to joke in public allows hackers to conjure their most creative selves—a performative act that receives public (and indisputable) affirmation in the moment of laughter. This expression of wit solidifies the meaning of archetypal hacker selves: self-determined and rational individuals who use their well-developed faculties of discrimination and perception to understand the “formal” world—technical or not—around them with such perspicuity that they can intervene virtuously within this logical system either for the sake of play, pedagogy, or technological innovation. In short, they have playfully defiant attitudes, which they apply to almost any system in order to repurpose it.
    A few months into my research, I believed that the primary anthropological contribution of this project would reside in discussing the cultural mores of computer hacking, such as humor, conjoined with a methodological analysis of conducting research in the virtual space of bits and bytes. Later in my fieldwork, I came to see the significance of another issue: the close relationship between the ethics of free software and the normative, much broader regime of liberalism. Before expanding on this connection, I will first take a short ethnographic detour to specify
when
it became unmistakably apparent that this technical domain was a site where liberal ideals, notably free speech, were not only endowed with concrete meaning but also made the fault lines and cracks within liberalism palpably visible.

    It was August 29, 2001, and a typical San Francisco day. The abundant morning sun and deep blue skies deceptively concealed the reality of much cooler temperatures. I was attending a protest along with a group ofabout fifty programmers, system administrators, and free software enthusiasts who were demanding the release of a Russian programmer, Dmitry Sklyarov, arrested weeks earlier