Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

Indeed, the F/OSS case reveals broader insights about what is possible in the prevailing political atmosphere, especially in the United States, where the media and other actors can dismantle, literally in the blink of an eye, the import of a message or politics through spin, insufficient attention, or spectacle (Kellner 2003; Postman [1985] 2006). The mass media, closely aligned with imperatives of capital (McChesney 1997), routinely reduce events to well-established ideological categories (in the United States, this is usually along the lines of liberal versus conservative, and since 9/11, patriotic versus antipatriotic, with red baiting also being a common tactic).

One might add that constitutional laws (like those of the First Amendment and intellectual property in the United States) are often revered and cherished, for being the foundational laws of nations, they carry with them the extra weight of widespread patriotic respect, and are commonly invoked during times of national crisis and rituals of commemoration. What is important to keep in mind is that Stallman, in the process of creating a legal alternative to a constitutional mandate, bypassed the usual channels (the courts and judges) by which one would question or change a law, especially constitutional law. In so doing, he also partially punctured the authority of the law, laying bare the assumption that only institutions of legal authority (the courts and congress) have the right to alter the law. To be sure, lawyers and legal council were and still are essential to making free software law legally binding. The point, however, I am trying to convey is that Stallman did bypass some traditional routes, such as lawsuits, in order to challenge patents and copyrights, instead devising a license that cleverly reformatted copyright by its very use. The GNU GPL and similar copyleft licenses hence rupture the naturalized form of intellectual property by inverting its ossified, singular logic through the very use of intellectual property.18 Let’s recall how F/OSS licenses work: they simultaneously use and defy the core tenets of copyright law. To make software open source or free software, one first applies a copyright and then adds any one of a number of F/OSS licenses, which then disables the restrictive logic of copyright law. In this capacity, the use of these F/OSS legal artifacts behave as a “destructive analysis of the familiar” (Sapir 1921, 94), to use an old but famous anthropological phrase.

IBM’s adoption of F/OSS, while uniquely visible, represents a much larger corporate espousal that translates F/OSS principles into a neoliberal language of market agility, consumer choice, and an improved bottom line.

If court case after court case, economist after economist, and all sorts of trade associations stipulate that economic incentives are absolutely (or self-evidently) necessary to induce labor and secure creativity, hackers counterstipulate such views, not simply through the power of rhetoric, but also through a form of collective labor that yields high-quality software (software that happens to power much of the Internet). Thousands and thousands of individual developers’ laboring to make software libre constitutes a social performance of collective work that contrasts with as well as effectively chips away at some of the foundational assumptions driving the continual expansion of intellectual property law.

in the words of free software’s most famous legal counsel, Eben Moglen: “Practical revolution is based upon two things: proof of concept and running code.”1 Returning to the terminology offered by Bruno Latour (1993, 87), F/OSS production acts as a “theater of proof” that economic incentives are unnecessary to secure creative output—a message that attained visibility as various groups were inspired to follow in the footsteps of free software, and extend the legal logic of free software into other domains of artistic, academic, journalistic, and economic production.

‘[F]ree beer’ represents something that is without monetary cost.”4 This differentiation between free beer and free speech is the clearest enunciation of what, to these developers, are the core meanings of free—expression, learning, and modification. Freedom is understood foremost to be about personal control and autonomous production, and decidedly not about commodity consumption or “possessive individualism” (Macpherson 1962)—a message that is constantly restated by developers: free software is free as in speech, not in beer.

Hackers recognize production as the extension or rearrangement of inherited formal traditions, which above all requires access to other people’s work. This precondition allows one to engage in constant acts of re-creation, expression, and circulation. Such an imperative goes against the grain of current intellectual property law rationalizations, which assume that the nature of selfhood and creativity is always a matter of novel creation or individualized inventive discovery.

Furthermore, accountability and credit are built into many of the technical tools that facilitate collaboration, such as CVS and Subversion—software systems used to manage shared source code. These systems give developers the ability to track (and potentially revert to) incremental changes to files and report the changes to a mailing list as they are made, and are often used concurrently by many developers.

statements are unmistakably correct. In most accounts on hackers, however, the meaning of this individualism is treated as an ideological, unsavory cloak or is left underspecified. Why the pronounced performance of individualism? What does it say about how hackers conceptualize authorship? What tensions does it raise? Because hackers do not automatically treat software as solely derivative of one laboring mind but instead see it as derivate of a collective effort, the constant drive to perform ingenuity reflects the formidable difficulty of claiming discrete inventiveness. After all, much of hacker production is based on a constant reworking of different technical assemblages directed toward new purposes and uses—a form of authorial recombination rarely acknowledged in traditional intellectual property law discourse. Because of the tendency, especially now more than ever, for hackers to recognize the reality of collaboration, it may seem that they are moving toward the type of politics and ethics of authorship that flatly reject the ideal of individualism altogether—a rejection famously explored in the works of Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Dick Hebdige. In the F/OSS domain, hackers have not moved, even an inch, to decenter the persona of the author in the manner, say, most famously exemplified by Barthes, who in 1967 sought to dethrone the authority of an author: “To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing.”19 Instead, among hackers the authorial figure seems to speak slightly louder, clamoring for and demanding credit and recognition, established through oral histories of software or etched into the infrastructure of production.

In Heidegger’s cartography, an object strikes its users as familiar and beyond the scope of critical awareness. Its social meaning is held in place through regular patterns of use and circulation. But when we misuse an object (a spoon used as a knife or a can opener utilized as a hammer) or when an object malfunctions, its thingness is laid bare in the sense that its material characteristic becomes evident. As noted by scholar of things and stuff Bill Brown (2001, 4), “the story of objects asserting themselves as things is the story of how the thing really names less an object than a particular subject-object relation.”

Programming and similar technical activities require extremely rigorous logical skills, an unwavering sensitivity to detail (a single wrong character can render a program useless), and such an intimate command of a system that one can, if need be, exceed the conventional or intended constraints of the system. It requires, in the words of programmer Ellen Ullman (2003, 177), a “relentless formalism.” Given the accelerated pace of technological change, hackers also have to perpetually learn new technologies as old ones are phased out due to obsolescence, in order to remain competitive in a marketplace.

your language is defined by the environment and not vice versa.

Indeed, hacking, like all social domains, is shot through with a series of notable tensions. These oscillate between individualism and collectivism, elitism and humility, and frustration and deep pleasure, among others.

“It is in the nature of beginning that something new is started,” writes Hannah Arendt (1998, 157), “which cannot be expected from whatever may have happened before. This character of startling unexpectedness is inherent in all beginnings.” What Arendt conveys is that because at some level the present is always in the process of becoming, we live in a temporal state with some degree of elasticity and underdetermination that allows for an experimental engagement with the world.

Analyses that either call for more political orientation or assume fundamental, widespread democratic effects tend to paper over the empirical dynamics animating the political rise of free software.

As noted by Victor Turner (1986, 2; see also Turner 1967, 105), ritual allows for an acute form of apprehension in which social actors reflect “upon themselves, upon the relations, actions, symbols, meanings, codes, roles, statuses, social structures, ethical and legal rules, and other sociocultural components which make up their public ‘selves.’”