Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

turn next to one such moment of group crisis.
    Crisis and Ethical Renewal
    Punctuated moments of distrust and despair are responsible for a great deal of the existing framework of Debian itself. Crises occur when there are fundamental disagreements over some issue. These can range from governance to legality, but many consistently revolve around a limited set of themes: project transparency, major technical decisions, the meaning and scope of freedom, and the relations between ordinary developers and those with vested power. These grievances are expressed on mailing lists, IRCs, and blogs; the writing that unfolds during moments of crisis is both voluminous and markedly passionate.
    These punctuated moments are eminently precarious: the nomos is under threat, populated by all sorts of pitfalls and dangers. The drama of dis-ease can spread uncontrollably like a virus, channeling the potent energy of dissatisfaction into a pit of destabilizing disgust or despair. Tempers flare, leading to inflammatory remarks that burn bridges, and people sometimes cling too literally to codified norms, blinding them to a unique situation that yearns for its own unique response. The crisis may be of such great magnitude that it overshadows the positive energy that moves the project toward a solution.
    Despite their riskiness, however, periods of crisis are also among the most fertile instances of ethical production, articulation, and transformation; their mere expression is proof that people are ethically “on call.” People would not be willing to take sides if they did not feel personally invested in changing what is collectively diagnosed as a problem. Crisis periods are incipient calls for movement and realignment, and hence reveal commitmentsthat, if acted on, can lead to positive solutions and a profound renewal of the organization.
    The formal attributes of crisis—its drama, high-pitched emotional nature, and kinetic energy—have an ethical subtext that speaks to the fact that an altered situation or unsatisfactory event has arisen that demands immediate, overt attention. A crisis demands a response —one that a charter or code cannot fully provide but rather must be sculpted through a fraught process of voicing, debate, and action.
    Because the emotional tone of communication induced by a crisis can diverge significantly from the way many developers expect or desire communication to unfold, I run the risk of portraying crisis as a positive force that can contribute to moral cohesion. Many developers adhere to a Habermasian (and so quite liberal) ideal of communicative interaction that requires participants to shed personal interest and passion in favor of sober rational discussion, where clarity is achieved because “all participants stick to the same reference point” (Habermas 1987, 198). While communication can certainly happen along those lines and be ethically productive, it downplays the inherently risky nature of many communicative acts (Butler 1997; Gardiner 2004). Judith Butler (1997, 87–88) in
Excitable Speech
probably states this most poignantly when she argues that the Habermasian project is self-limiting, possibly undermining its democratic aspirations, because of its insistence on eliminating personal interest and the inherent risk in the act of communication:
    Risk and vulnerability are proper to the democratic process in the sense that one cannot know in advance the meaning that the other will assign to one’s utterance, what conflicts of interpretation may well arise, and how best to adjudicate the difference. The effort to come to terms is not one that can be resolved in anticipation but only through a concrete struggle of translation, one whose success has no guarantees.
    Now let us take a look at one legendary “concrete struggle of translation”—one whose resolution looked quite tenuous at the time of its unfolding.
    Portrait of a Crisis
    The first story of ethics in Debian that I presented began with an ending: the NMP was a solution to a crisis over the integration of new members. In fact, it created a social architecture that, while imperfect, continues to sustain a baseline level of trust and coherence, and helps to absorb and lessen the shocks of future crises. Yet punctuated periods of distrust or malaise invariably recur, and here I focus on one of the most memorable to have hit Debian in the last ten years. So as the opening of this section on ethical moments began with the story of