Read Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking for Free Online

interface between a more rational liberal calculus and a more aesthetic, inward-looking one.
    Hackers are not alone in embracing this aesthetic, expressive sensibility, which philosopher Charles Taylor (1992) argues persuasively is a fundamental part of our contemporary imaginary, or what he calls the “expressive self.” First visibly emerging in the eighteenth century, this sentiment formed the basis for “a new fuller individualism,” and places tremendous weight on originality, sentiments, creativity, and at times, even disengagement. What must be noted is that expressive individualism and the moral commitments it most closely entails—self-fulfillment, self-discovery, and self-improvement—can be secured, as many critics have shown, through consumption, self-help, human enhancement technologies, and body modification (Bellah et al. 1985; Elliott 2003; Hogle 2005), and thus can converge seamlessly with elements of possessive individualism. Today to liberate and express the “authentic,” “expressive” self is usually synonymous with a lifelong engagement with consumption, fine tuned by a vast advertising apparatus that helps sustain the desire for a seemingly limitless number of consumer goods and, increasingly, human enhancement technologies such as plastic surgery.
    The example set by free software (and a host of similar craftlike practices), however, should make us at least skeptical of the extent to which an ethic of consumption has colonized expressive individualism. Free software hackers undoubtedly affirm an expressive self rooted not in consumption but rather in production in a double sense: they produce software, and through this technical production, they also sustain informal social relations and even have built institutions. Given the different ethical implications entailed in these visions of fulfillment, expression, and self-development (consumerist versus productive self), it behooves us to analytically pry them apart.
    While the liberal articulations made by free software hackers, notably those of free speech, carry a familiar political imprint, their material experiences, the frustrations and pleasures of hacking, (including the particularities of making, breaking, and improving software) might seem politically irrelevant. Yet the passionate commitment to hacking and especially the ethics of access enshrined in free software licensing, express as well as celebrate unalienated, autonomous labor, which also broadcasts a powerful politicalmessage. A number of theorists (Galloway 2004; Söderberg 2007; Wark 2004) have previously highlighted this phenomenon. Hackers insistence on never losing access to the fruits of their labor—and indeed actively seeking to share these fruits with others—calls into being Karl Marx’s famous critique of estranged labor: “The external character of labour for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own, but someone else’s, that it does not belong to him, that in it he belongs, not to himself, but to another” (Marx and Engels 1978, 74). It evokes Marx’s vision precisely because free software developers seek to avoid the forms of estrangement that have long been nearly synonymous with capitalist production. Freedom is thus not only based on the right to speak free of barriers but also conceived as (although primarily through practice) “the utopian promise of unalienated labor, of human flourishing through creative and self-actualizing production,” as Barton Beebe (2010, 885) aptly describes it.
    F/OSS hacker morality is therefore syncretic—a quality that is also patently evident in its politics. It enunciates a liberal politics of free speech and liberty that speaks to an audience beyond hackers as well as a nonliberal politics of cultural pleasure and political detachment, which is internally and intensely focused on the practice of hacking only and entirely for its own sake, although certainly inspiring others to follow in their footsteps.