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When assessing the liberal ethics and affective pleasure of hacking, we should not treat pleasure as the authentic face of hacking, and the other (liberalism) as an ideological veneer simply in need of debunking (or in need of celebrating). From an ethnographic vantage point, it is important to recognize many hackers are citizens of liberal democracies, and have drawn on the types of accessible liberal tropes—notably free speech—as a means to conceptualize their technical practice and secure novel political claims. And in the process, they have built institutions and sustain norms through which they internalize these liberal ideals as meaningful, all the while clearly upholding a marked commitment to unalienated labor.
    On Representing Hacker Ethics
    If I was comforted by the fact that hacking could be analyzed in light of cultural issues like humor, liberalism, and pleasure, and that I had some methodological tools at my disposal to do so, as I learned more about hacking, my ease vanished as I confronted a new set of concerns. I increasingly grew wary of how I would convey to others the dynamic vitality and diversity that marks hackers and hacking, but also the points of contention among them. To further illustrate this point, allow me to share a brief story.
    Soon after ending my official fieldwork, I was having dinner in Chicago with three local free software developers. One of them asked me about some of my memorable fieldwork experiences. There were many stories I couldhave chosen, but I started to tell the story of a speech by Kevin Mitnick—a more transgressive hacker (for he had engaged in illegal behavior) than most free software developers and one of the most infamous of all time—that I heard during summer 2004 at Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE)—a conference founded in 1994 to publicize his legal ordeals. Mitnick is known to have once been a master “social engineer,” or one who distills the aesthetics of illicit acts into the human art of the short cons. Instead of piercing through a technological barricade, social engineers target humans, duping them in their insatiable search for secret information. Because of various legendary (and at times, illegal) computer break-ins, often facilitated by his social engineering skills, Mitnick spent a good number of his adult years either running from the law or behind bars, although he never profited from his hacks, nor destroyed any property (Coleman and Golub 2008; Mitnick 2011; Thomas 2003).
    In July 2004, free at last and allowed to use computers again, Mitnick attended HOPE in New York City for the first time. He delivered his humorous and enticing keynote address to an overflowing crowd of hackers, who listened, enraptured, to the man who had commanded their political attention for over a decade as part of a “Free Kevin Campaign.” He offered tale after tale about his clever pranks of hacking from childhood on: “I think I was born as a hacker because at ten I was fascinated with magic,” he explained. “I wanted a bite of the forbidden fruit.” Even as a kid, his victims were a diverse lot: his homeroom teacher, the phone company, and even the Los Angeles Rapid Transit District. After he bought the same device used by bus drivers for punching transfers, he adopted the persona of Robin Hood, spending hours riding the entire bus network, punching his own pirated transfers to give to customers. He found transfer stubs while dumpster diving, another time-honored hacker practice for finding information that was especially popular before the advent of paper shredding. Despite the way that lawyers and journalists had used Mitnick’s case to give hackers a bad name, Mitnick clearly still used the term with pride.
    When I finished my story describing what I personally thought was a pretty engrossing speech, one hacker, who obviously disapproved of my reference to Mitnick as a “hacker,” replied, “Kevin is
not
a hacker. He is a cracker.” In the