Review: Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking by E. Gabriella Coleman

E. Gabriella Coleman. 2013. Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking. Princeton: Princeton University Press. $24.95 or free download under Creative Commons license. ISBN: 978-0-691-14461-0.

Situating Coding Freedom between age-old philosophical questions about the nature of freedom and the some of the newest cultural phenomena on the planet, Biella Coleman constructs the book and her place as researcher in it into a golden ratio of perspective. This ethnography of the cultural impact of technology pulls from the wit, aesthetics, and ethics of the people whose practices she studied: free and open source software (F/OSS) developers. The main thesis relies less on argument than on exposition as Coleman works to prove a negative: that the necessity of economic incentive for vibrant creative production is a false assumption of neoliberalism. In the thesis, F/OSS functions as a living counterexample to and thus a cultural critique of proprietary intellectual property law. The book’s timely publication contributes to several open discourses in academia and in international law about the growth of neoliberalism, the political power found in nameless crowds, and anthropology’s contribution to technology studies; however, the breadth of these discourses leaves the reader wanting more depth of critique.

Just as the title of the book doesn’t directly foreshadow the prominence of liberalism in its pages, neither does Coleman directly analyze liberalism as a theoretical or methodological device. She casually presents a pseudo-definition of liberalism via the cultural register on the third page of the introduction, a clever way of denying the term any analytical merit. The crux of her arguments revolves around a critique of this catchall term and the contradictions inherent within in. Her “hack” of liberalism relies upon its worship of two parallel conceptual subjects in Coding Freedom: private property and free speech. In drawing this critical parallel between the “free” aspects of F/OSS and intellectual property (IP), Coleman was not the first; Christopher Kelty presented a similar history and argument in his 2008 Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software (Durham: Duke University Press). What Coleman adds in Coding Freedom is a more thorough analysis of “the hack” in all its meanings. For Coleman’s coders, the hack is part technology (as codes hack each other), part humor (as jokes hack social expectations), and part law (as the rethinking of intellectual property alters classically proprietary law).

Coleman makes unexpected bridges between genres and scales; the eclecticism of the book’s references benefits from this talent. Her knowledge of literature outside the discipline of anthropology shines forth from philosophers (Plato, Kant, and Tolstoy, to name only a few) to literary giants (like Rilke and Faulkner). Each section of Coding Freedom is framed by quotes from such a backdrop that remind her reader of the timelessness of a timely study. She works simultaneously on large and small scales. Two large-scale histories run parallel amidst her contemporary ethnographic details of “information feudalism:” first, the growth of copyright over the last 50 years, and second, the growth of open access technology, online socializing, and alternative “copyleft” licenses. For her informants, this latter history is a history of speech, not property, and they thus consider themselves outside of and not subject to the neoliberal “marketplace of ideas.” On the small scale, Coleman details the lives of creative producers – hackers – for whom the aesthetic sense of self is not about possession but craft.

The distinctions between various hackers and “Web 2.0” peoples drawn in the epilogue of Coding Freedom may have been better used as a prologue. Throughout much of the book the ethics and aesthetics of hackers is represented in summary. The final note is crucial for the sharing of her book amidst a broad audience of undergraduate or graduate students, anthropology professionals or hobbyists unfamiliar with the myriad of ways people use computers and the Web. Coleman is not shy to despise the millennial-contemporary “Web 2.0” as a catchall term – a theme that catches her disgust – since it whitewashes serious debates of ethics and practice. Even between free software (FS) and open source software (OSS) proponents the stakes are heated. The one agreement between the two coding camps (hence F/OSS) is a belief that “productive freedom” is a legal right covered under freedom of speech. Coleman refers to the diversity of her informants as a mosaic but her larger goal of a “liberal critique of liberalism” requires that she talk about them as unified. It is in these very contradictions that both the hackers and Coleman appear to enjoy themselves.

How generalizable is the hacker’s experience? One of Coding Freedom’s most memorable metaphors is the collaborative individualism of the American Jazz band. In moments like jazz, what psychologists call “flow” and hackers call “deep engagement” obliterates the self-possessed self through complete self-possession. Can such an experience be extended beyond the worlds of jazz musicians and F/OSS coders? For Kelty and his Two Bits, he was particularly clear that it couldn’t. For Coleman, the exceptional status of her informants is key to the thrust of her argument, her critique of liberalism. The people of Coding Freedom are almost all men and they are almost entirely from the northern hemisphere (specifically Europe and the United States). While Coleman acknowledges the missing groups from her study – women, most obviously – she does not satisfactorily account for their absence in her conclusions. That said, she does well to elicit critiques of hackerdom as “freedom but not justice,” quoting Andrew Ross that the ethics and aesthetics of F/OSS are “artisanal.” Most people of the world are classed out of the white male access to market economies that they might then choose to deny.

Though much of the ethnographic detail is hidden from the reader, Coleman reveals her “ethnographic surprise” in the value of humor and joy to the phenomenology and intersubjectivity of the informants’ lived experiences. Much of the data analysis is hidden from the reader, who only receives a hodge-podge of ethnographic details from hacker conventions and the assurance that seventy life histories were collected. If ethnography’s foremost purpose is not to represent the voices of others (the data, in this case) but to capture the essence of a culture, the inclusion of online humor site XKCD’s cartoons as illustrations were a successful addition in this direction. It was a valiant undertaking to attempt to arrive at a negative proof for the necessity of economic incentives for creative production from a jumble of intersubjective ethnographic data, but I think that proof proves less impenetrable than her theoretical discussion on the interplay between ethics and politics, ethics and aesthetics, the politics of art and the politics of aesthetics.

Politically, Coleman places her stake in the defamiliarization of our contemporary liberal world system as natural. The ethnographic material presents in “copyleft” a viable alternative to private property and the recently powerful international legal structures of copyright. The reluctance of F/OSS coders to use their work for political purposes leads her to mark the value of defamiliarization, which she defines as a devitalization of hegemony. From this account, she identifies the work of anthropology with the work of hacking, doubly so because ethnographies are works of free speech. At stake in Coding Freedom’s ethnographic hack is information access. Coleman smartly walks a line between activism and academia, aware that for the anthropologist as for the F/OSS coder, “an ethical life demands constant attention, response, reevaluation, and renewal” (158).

Coding Freedom is an academic book published by an academic press with conclusions that read like activism. It crosses genres, drawing together the new techno-moral landscape with liberal historical trends. In the end, the success of Coleman’s book as ethnography is in the applicability of the lives of a small segment of the world’s population for the largest scale of human phenomena: philosophical, political, aesthetic, and ethical theory. The discussion of rights – the rights to tinker, to “figure it out,” to creative productive freedom – carries weight beyond the technical limitations of software development. Unanswerable questions further this generalizable significance of the work, i.e.: must the politics of visibility always rely on the very system by which one is limited? Is the law a friend or foe?

Coleman devotes a portion of the book’s introduction to the defense of her choice of field site, a defense against an old-school anthropology that is, in my opinion, getting tiresome in its necessity. The critical turn that anthropology took in the 1980s should be well understood by this point and, as such, ethnographies like this oneshould be welcomed to the field of literature with loving arms. Coleman tears down some of the ideological and methodological boundaries between hackers and herself without falling trap to speaking as one of them. She sees herself in hackers and thus anthropology in hacking. The lessons found within are not only for proponents of liberalism but for scholars as well. Coding Freedom leaves the reader with the best ethnography has to offer: the feeling of wanting more.