Read Online Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking by E. Gabriella Coleman - Free Book Online

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 allowshackers 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