Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

well as procedures. Important among these individuals are the FTP masters, who existed before there were Debian project leaders assigning teams; they review by hand all new submitted pieces of software packages for technical and licensing glitches, and integrate them into the “master archive.” 11
    I was repeatedly told that those who hold these nonelected positions do so because they initially undertook the work necessary to accomplish the tasks of the position. For example, some FTP masters hold their positionbecause they coded the software used to handle package uploads and verification, or the package repository software. Power, in other words, is said to closely follow on the heels of personal initiative and its close cousins: quality technical production and personal dedication to the project.
    Even if most developers prefer meritocracy to democracy—in fact, nearly every developer interviewed stated with pride that Debian is meritocratic—this form of power is nonetheless shrouded in some level of distrust. Positions of authority, like the FTP masters, undeniably represent a form of centralized and potentially lifelong authority, potentially subject to corruption or—just as dangerous—knowledge specialization and hoarding. Hackers generally tend to honor decentralization and the distinct power of the individual to trump authority, so
any
centralized authority is bound to act as a lightning rod for reflection and debate.
    There is a more specific reason for distrust, though. To fully appreciate the texture of controversies that emerge over authority, we must revisit the argument laid out earlier. Debian developers operate within a social imaginary rooted in a Millian conception of liberal individualism that requires them to cultivate their skills, improve technology, and prove their worth to other hackers within their elite fraternity. Figures of central authority, such as team members and delegates, represent a potential threat to the conditions for this perpetual process of technical self-fashioning. As Donner (1991, 152) maintains in her discussion of Mill’s model of self-development, those who gain authority because of merit nonetheless “can only act as guides to others,” never as “authorities”; if they attempt to impose “judgments of value on others,” this “paradoxically undermines that claim to development.” Everyone, not a select order of people, must be able to exercise their capacity for thought, discrimination, and critical intervention, and at all times.
    The anxiety that power could potentially corrupt those who enjoy privileges and block conditions for public self-development (by making choices) as well as institute a rigid form of vertical authority emerges from time to time, although in a less coherent and sustained fashion than the critiques of Debian’s democratic elements. It is far more common to joke about the existence of what is called the cabal, usually stated as a denial: “There is no cabal.” Long before Debian existed, this was a running joke on Usenet, where a similar discomfort over the potential for corruption by meritocratic leaders played out (Pfaffenberger 1996 ) . 12
    In Debian joking enjoys a wide purview, and playful joking about the cabal is littered everywhere. For example, the evening before the 2005 Debian project leader winner was to be announced, a group of developers, including a project leader candidate and the release manager, casually slipped jokes about the cabal into the discussion, unprompted by anything except the announcement by the project secretary that there were twenty-four hours to go until the voting period was over:
     less than 24 hours to go
     cue sinister music
     I expect it all to be a conspiracy
     The cabal will already have chosen their candidate
     mickmac: Nah, there’s still time; got your last-minute bribes ready? ;)
     JabberWalkie: Well, uh, no.
     Damnit.
     mickmac: Better luck next year. :)
     I can offer you beer if you come to Debconf?
    *vapor-b shakes his fist at the cabal
    Developers use cabal humor to express chronic anxieties about the general corruptibility of meritocracy and their distrust of top-down authority. More specifically, it points to the way Debian “must reconcile the central notion of each developer’s autonomy [ … ] with the constraints deriving from the complex system with quality standards of the