Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking - Softcover

Coleman, Enid Gabriella

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0691144613 ISBN 13: 9780691144610

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2012

Synopsis

Who are computer hackers? What is free software? And what does the emergence of a community dedicated to the production of free and open source software--and to hacking as a technical, aesthetic, and moral project--reveal about the values of contemporary liberalism? Exploring the rise and political significance of the free and open source software (F/OSS) movement in the United States and Europe, Coding Freedom details the ethics behind hackers' devotion to F/OSS, the social codes that guide its production, and the political struggles through which hackers question the scope and direction of copyright and patent law. In telling the story of the F/OSS movement, the book unfolds a broader narrative involving computing, the politics of access, and intellectual property.


E. Gabriella Coleman tracks the ways in which hackers collaborate and examines passionate manifestos, hacker humor, free software project governance, and festive hacker conferences. Looking at the ways that hackers sustain their productive freedom, Coleman shows that these activists, driven by a commitment to their work, reformulate key ideals including free speech, transparency, and meritocracy, and refuse restrictive intellectual protections. Coleman demonstrates how hacking, so often marginalized or misunderstood, sheds light on the continuing relevance of liberalism in online collaboration.

About this title

About the Author

E. Gabriella Coleman is the Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University.

From the Back Cover

"Coleman knows, understands, and lives free culture. No one is more credible or more fascinating when describing the lives of the women and men whose mission is an open, free information age."--Cory Doctorow, author of Little Brother and coauthor of The Rapture of the Nerds

"Coleman's book is definitive--everything in it is lovingly detailed, exhaustively researched, fluently written, and packed with provocative insights. A monument of scholarship, it combines the best of anthropology with an unconventional and fresh approach to law, political theory, and ethics. From the conference-going world of software programmers to the humor and pleasures of code-fu, and from the phantasms of free speech to the passion and pathos of technical committees, Coleman is an extraordinary guide to the world of contemporary hacking."--Christopher Kelty, University of California, Los Angeles

"Coleman's book on free and open source software programmers and hackers is desperately needed and will be a significant, landmark contribution to our understanding of the current technologically mediated moment. Coleman mixes case studies with learned treatments of this community, changes in the legal environment, and other relevant dimensions."--Thomas M. Malaby, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

"This is a revelatory ethnographic look at the origins and evolution of the free and open source software subculture. Coleman provides entirely new insights into the humor, aesthetics, and social life of hackers, while exploring the philosophical implications of open source for ideas about personal freedom, labor, and markets. Coding Freedom is an essential study of the technological revolution of our times."--Joseph Masco, University of Chicago

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Coding Freedom

THE ETHICS AND AESTHETICS OF HACKINGBy E. GABRIELLA COLEMAN

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2013 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-14461-0

Contents

Acknowledgments....................................................................ixIntroduction A Tale of Two Worlds.................................................1Chapter 1 The Life of a Free Software Hacker......................................25Chapter 2 A Tale of Two Legal Regimes.............................................61Chapter 3 The Craft and Craftiness of Hacking.....................................93Chapter 4 Two Ethical Moments in Debian...........................................123Chapter 5 Code Is Speech..........................................................161Conclusion The Cultural Critique of Intellectual Property Law.....................185Epilogue How to Proliferate Distinctions, Not Destroy Them........................207Notes..............................................................................211References.........................................................................225Index..............................................................................249

Chapter One

The Life of a Free Software Hacker

* * *

One may say that true life begins where the tiny bit begins—where what seems to us minute and infinitely small alterations take place. True life is not lived where great external changes take place—where people move about, clash, fight and slay one another—it is lived only where these tiny, tiny infinitesimal changes occur. —Leo Tolstoy, "Why Do Men Stupefy Themselves?"

The Basic "Specs" of a Lifeworld

A life history, by definition, belongs uniquely to one person, textured by innumerable details, instances, events, idiosyncrasies, and happenings. As such, the writing of a "typical" life history is an impossible, quixotic task, seeking to standardize and represent what evades such a neat distillation. Nonetheless, to the best of my ability, here I provide some fairly typical experiences derived primarily from seventy interviews and other sources, such as blogs, conversations, and autobiographical tales.

Although the exact details vary, many hackers reminisced about their technological lives using a relatively standard script that traces how their inborn affinity for technology transformed, over time and through experience, into an intense familiarity. A hacker may say he (and I use "he," because most hackers are male) first hacked as an unsuspecting toddler when he took apart every electric appliance in the kitchen (much to his mother's horror). By the age of six or seven, his actions ripened, becoming volitional. He taught himself how to program in BASIC, and the parental unit expressed joyous approval with aplomb ("look, look our little Fred is sooo smart"). When a little older, perhaps during adolescence, he may have sequestered himself in his bedroom, where he read every computer manual he could get his hands on and—if he was lucky enough to own a modem—connected to a bulletin board system (BBS). Thanks to the holy trinity of a computer, modem, and phone line, he began to dabble in a wider networked world where there was a real strange brew of information and software to ingest. He could not resist. He began to drink himself silly with information on UFOs, bomb building, conspiracies, and other oddities, downloading different categories of software, shareware, sometimes warez (pirated software), and eventually free software. Initially he spent so much time chatting he would "pass out on his keyboard, multiple times." The parents, confusing locked doors and nocturnal living with preteen angst and isolation, wondered whether they should send their son to a psychologist.

Once he met like-minded peers in high school, college, or online, the boy's intellectual curiosity ballooned. He initiated a quest to master all the ins and outs of a technical architecture like the Linux OS, one or two computer languages, and the topographical terrain and protocols of a really cool new virtual place called the Internet. He soon discovered he could never really master all of this, and that he actually exists in an asymptotic relationship to technology. Nonetheless, he grew to adore the never-ending, never-finished nature of technological production, and eventually fell, almost entirely by accident, into a technical movement.

That movement, the free software movement, seemed to describe his personal experiences with technology in a sophisticated yet accessible language. It said that sharing was good for the community, and that access to source code is not only handy but also the basis by which technology grows and improves. Eventually, he understood himself to be connected to a translocal community of hackers and grew increasingly peeved at their stereotyped representation in the media. As he grew older and more financially independent (thanks to lucrative information technology jobs as a programmer or system administrator that gave him the financial freedom, the "free time," to code for volunteer projects, or alternatively paid him explicitly to work on free software), he consistently interacted with other geeks at work, over IRC, on a dozen (or more) mailing lists, on free software projects, and less occasionally, at exhausting and superintense hacker conferences that left him feeling simultaneously elated and depressed (because they invariably have to come to an end).

Over time, and without realizing when it all happened, he didn't just know how to hack in Perl, C, C ++, Java, Scheme, LISP, Fortran, and Python but also came to learn arcane legal knowledge. His knowledge about technology had become encyclopedic, but ironically he was still wholly dependent on the help of his peers to get just about anything done. He firmly came to believe that knowledge access and transactions of sharing facilitate production, that most types of software should be open source, and that the world would be a better place if we were just given choices for software licensing. Although not exactly motivated to engage in F/OSS production to fulfill a political mandate, he understood the political dimension of coding in an entirely new light. In fact, since reading Lawrence Lessig's Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, and through his daily reading of Slashdot and Boing Boing, popular Web sites reporting technology news and geek esoterica, he came to understand that code is law; code regulates behavior. But so do the copyright industries, which are using everything in their arsenal to fundamentally shape legal policy and even behavior. They suck.

* * *

This chapter expands the narrative introduced above to present some consistent features of the hacker lifeworld by visiting the sites, practices, events, and technical architectures through which hackers make as well as remake themselves individually and collectively. Drawing on a rich set of sources, I typify common life experiences of many F/OSS developers. I have attempted to include the sense of excitement, humor, and sensuality that I witnessed as hackers told me about their adventures in hacking.

Following the anthropologist Michael Jackson (1996, 7–8), I understand a lifeworld as "that domain of everyday, immediate social existence and practical activities with all of its habituality, its crises, its vernacular and idiomatic character, its biographical particularities, its decisive events, and indecisive strategies." The account I present of the hacker lifeworld might be better described as a tempo-historical phenomenology. My concern is not to privilege one of its elements (such as a detailed description of the experience of administering a server, programming, or hacking with peers) but instead to paint a panoramic picture of hacking over a fairly large swath of time. Through this, it will be clear that hackers make and remake themselves in a slow, piecemeal rhythm as they engage in diverse activities (coding, debating, reading, gaming, playing, and socializing) in equally diverse settings and institutions (the Internet, conferences, development projects, places of work, and at home).

Although the following life history uses the first-person point of view of phenomenology, I follow Alfred Schutz (1967, 1970) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962) in maintaining that experience is intersubjective. Personal experience is frequently rooted in collective and practical activities whose nature is stable, coherent, and patterned, although constantly, if minutely, in flux. Even if transformations are rarely detectable to those immersed in the everyday flux of living, an existing lifeworld, says Merleau-Ponty (ibid., 453), is "never completely constituted," for action and reaction occur in shifting contexts, and thus "we are open to an infinite number of possibilities." While lifeworlds are most often experienced as free of contradiction and ambiguity (in contrast to the large-scale events and tribulations usually thought to make up the stuff of history, which I visit in the next chapter), they are invariably stamped by particular events, material conditions, and time.

There is one event, however, which is generally experienced as startlingly unique and special—the hacker conference, which I cover in detail at the end of the chapter. The conference is culturally significant because it allows hackers to collectively enact, make visible, and subsequently celebrate many elements of their quotidian technological lifeworld. Whether it is by laying down cable, setting up a server, giving talks about technology, or hacking up some new source code, these actions at the hacker conference unfold in an emotionally charged setting. What the conference foremost allows for is a "condition of heightened intersubjectivity" (Collins 2004, 35) where copious instances of hacking are brought into being and social bonds between participants are made manifest, and thus felt acutely. Taking what is normally experienced prosaically over the course of months, hackers collectively condense their lifeworld in an environment where bodies, celebration, food, and drink exist in excess.

Even if most of the chapter affirms Tolstoy's maxim cited above, the hacker conference allows participants to celebrate this very quotidian life in more exceptional terms. In short, for a brief moment in time, the ordinary character of the hackers' social world is ritually encased, engendering a profound appreciation and awareness of their labor, friendships, events, and objects that often go unnoticed due to their piecemeal, mundane nature.

The Thousand-Mile Journey Starts with a Personal Computer

Most F/OSS developers got their start with technology at a fairly young age, usually around seven or eight, although sometimes as young as four or five. When asked in formal interviews about when they first used computers, F/OSS developers would almost without fail volunteer the name and model number of the specific device (Atari 130xe, Radio Shack Tandy 1000 286, Apple IIe, Commodore 64, and the Sinclair Spectrum). As they spoke of these early computers that commanded so much of their youthful attention, it was unmistakable that they held a deep fondness for the anchor—the computer—that pulls hackers together as a collective.

Many would use and eventually colonize a computer purchased by their parents. Those who came from working-class families used a school, library, or friend's computer. Later on, some would attribute their ability to climb up the class ladder because of capacities and skills acquired through computer use—a climb that many claimed they were not intentionally seeking. Rather, the climb was a by-product of economically valuable knowledge gained by following their personal passion for computing. They wrote their first programs often by using some source code they copied from a manual or from one of the early electronic magazines, such as Nibble, Popular Computing, Byte, or Dr. Dobbs. Retrospectively, they came to understand this as their first act of sharing code. Those who started to hack in the late 1970s or 1980s did most of their learning through magazines or friends, by "memorizing" manuals they borrowed from teachers, or later on, at the workplace.

Nearly all of the developers I interviewed learned some of the basics of programming, many with the computer language BASIC, by writing software for some of the first mass-marketed, relatively affordable personal computers. While some only dabbled with BASIC, others became quite proficient in it. Child programmers would often write short programs from scratch, or modify some existing piece of software to enhance its power and features. Johan explained that "by sixth grade, I had pretty much reached my peak with the Atari, writing controller software for the joysticks and trackball, using trickery like character set redefinition to make games at a higher resolution than any of its graphics mode supported." During this period, many hackers spent much of their time learning about computers by themselves, coding small bits of software mostly for fun, excitement, learning, or self-use. Some hackers alternated between coding and playing games, and they frequently coded games or traded more sophisticated game software with friends at school. Many recalled enjoying programming because it provided "immediate gratification" or was "instantly rewarding"—features that many still find seductive.

Although many of their childhood experiences with programming were personal and noncommercial, a surprising number of geeks, by the time they reached high school (sometimes as early as late elementary school), wrote software that was used or purchased by peers or superiors. Whether via informal uses (a teacher using a student's program to randomize the homeroom seating arrangements, for example) or more formal ones (a local public library purchasing a child's math program), many child programmers witnessed their creative outputs being used in the real world. They experienced early on that programming was not just personally gratifying but also that it held a form of social utility and/or economic power that solved real-world problems.

As kids, many programmers had already started to collaborate. Some of these youthful collaborations became the basis of close friendships that entailed playful public contests. Bill told me that in high school, "there were two or three folks who I really developed long-lasting relationships and friendships with. [...] We would stay after school and mess with the computer for hours. It was just an intense number of hours playing with systems and goading each other on." Others went to math camp, where they found like-minded technical companions. Or as explained by Doug, it was not uncommon to "emulate" a friend's software by writing one's own version (which he told me with pride ran "more efficiently"). Thus young programmers engaged in a practice of "mimesis" (Benjamin [1933] 1999) that combined competitiveness with at least a practical (if not yet ethical) acknowledgment that one is bound to peers, often friends, through coproduction. Later on, they would encounter a social movement that brought intelligibility to these early childhood experiences.

By the time programmers reached high school, many of them came to adopt the identity of hacker or programmer—an identity now acquired at progressively younger ages because of access to the Internet, where discussion about the cultural and technical facets of hacking is common. Many hackers did not awaken to a consciousness of their "hacker nature" in a moment of joyful epiphany but instead acquired it imperceptibly. In some cases, certain books, texts, movies, and places of interaction sparked this association. Some came to identify their personal relationship to computers as hacking by, for example, watching a movie (War Games), reading a book (Hackers) or manifesto ("The GNU Manifesto"), or during interactions with other people who also called themselves hackers in various locations such as a user group meeting, conference, math camp, or most especially a BBS where hackers congregated in droves during the 1980s and early 1990s.

Meeting Other Hackers on BBSs

A BBS is a computerized meeting and announcement system where users can upload and download files, make announcements, play games, and have discussions. Many were run and frequented by hackers, and hence discourses and texts about hacking were ubiquitous (Scott 2005; Sterling 1992; Thomas 2003). While the Internet existed in the 1980s, and its architecture was open, practically speaking it operated under a lock, with the keys available only to a select number of hackers, engineers, administrators, and scientists gainfully employed at research labs, universities, and government agencies (Abbate 1999). Given this, BBSs played an important role in hacker history because they were the basis for one of the first expansions of hacking through which hackers could interact autonomously, anonymously, and independently of official institutions. Although this networked expansion entailed a movement outward and beyond institutions (such as the workplace and university), the use of the BBS on a personal computer also represented an inverse move in the other direction, into the privacy of the home. Prior to the 1970s and even for much of the early 1980s, most computing occurred at work or the university.

So long as they could pay the phone bill and temporarily bracket off basic biological needs like sun and sleep, hackers could explore BBSs to their heart's delight, with each BBS independent like a virtual pond. BBSs were not networked until FidoNet came along, creating a first taste of global networking for those who did not have Internet access. BBSs were exciting, for they were informal bazaars where one could access and trade rare as well as sometimes-seedy information. Files traded there spanned lowbrow conspiracy theory, hard-hitting political news, playful nonsense, low-grade and more rarely high-octane noir, voyeurism, personal gossip, and one of the most important cultural goods among hackers, software (including shareware, warez, and eventually free software). Before free software was widely known, many young programmers acquired their software primarily on BBSs, and many used this medium to release their own software into the world, usually as shareware.

Since BBSs were unconnected to each other until FidoNet, and long-distance phone bills were expensive (especially for kids and teenagers), many boards were quite rooted in place, with users living in the same city, suburb, region, or local calling area (within which calls didn't incur intrastate long-distance charges). The location of many BBSs was clear, as much of the online information was about local politics, news, and so forth. Many hackers recall BBSs as places of audacious social interactions that readily spilled into the real world during "BBS meet ups," when participants would get together at someone's home or "the local Denny's at 3 in the morning" to continue doing what they did online: talk and trade software. Many BBS members became close friends. It is not farfetched to describe some areas has having a dynamic, complex BBS scene in which hackers, as one of them told me, would "haunt the multiliners and knew most everyone in the scene in the LA area."

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Coding Freedomby E. GABRIELLA COLEMAN Copyright © 2013 by Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0691144613
• ISBN 13: 9780691144610
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 272