Review: Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking by Gabriella Coleman
Book Review
Gabriella Coleman
Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013. 268 pp.
ISBN 978-0-691-14460-3 (hbk. : alk. Paper)
What is the terrain of information capitalism in terms of internet connectivity, access to information, and creative abstract production? What do relatively unfettered flows of commodified and non-commodified information mean for political constructions such as democracy and liberalism? How can we better understand neoliberal capitalism’s tension between enclosure and openness? Gabriella Coleman attempts to address these questions through an ethnographic exploration of the open-source software movement and the hackers who strove to maintain it through the late 90’s and early 2000’s. Her inquiry is a well-articulated exploration of the implications of hacker culture and work, as she identifies the tension between liberalism and romantic individualism inherent in the hacker ethic and identity. Most importantly, Coleman points out a glaring contradiction inherent to information capitalism. She identifies that speech, notably the exchange of ideas upon which information capitalism depends for its vitality, must remain free. However, intellectual property, or the commodification of these ideas, is one of the fundamental tenets of the neoliberal system. For Coleman, the portrait of the Open Source hacker is an illustration of this tension and the potential for its resolution.
The book is organized into three main themes: 1) the history of hackers, hacking, and the open-source movement, 2) a close ethnography of an Open Source hacker collective, and 3) an exploration of the politics and law of the open-source movement, which probes most deeply the contradictions of neoliberal capitalism in the information age. While her thesis is a direct interrogation of this tension, Coleman advances several tangential arguments and questions through her engagement with ethnographic data. She sheds light on the role of affect in online community formation, notably humor in hacker culture and history. She explores the immersive potential of the abstract labor of hacking and its evocation of romantic idealism, and the implications of these on the identity and self-concept of the individual within a neoliberal individualizing labor structure. She questions the poetry and language of code writing itself, and its relationship to speech, freedom, and expressivity. These topics, while seemingly distinct, are all connected to Coleman’s foundational context: information capitalism depends on ideologies founded in the liberalist tradition, such individualism, rationality, competitiveness, and private property. And yet the work of information capitalism demands a degree of freedom from privatization (enclosure) in order to facilitate the exchange of ideas. Open Source Software is an excellent example through which to articulate this contradiction. What’s more, the hacker aesthetic defies the simplifying ideologies of the liberal tradition, in that hackers find themselves collaborating AND competing, distinct individual laborers AND immersed romantic subjects lost in their labor, rational AND emotional beings. They are laborers who are fighting the structure that demands their labor, for the right to keep laboring, and yet not be alienated from this labor.
Coleman’s first chapter gives us a snapshot of who a hacker is: their history, aesthetics, affect, values, and ethics. She does this through a synthesis of the stories of her informants, and is careful to acknowledge the limitations of this method in capturing the rich diversity of the personalities surveyed. She contextualizes her portrait of the hacker in the canon of lifeworld ethnography, in the tradition of anthropologist Michael Jackson (1996), emphasizing the intersubjective dynamic nature of actors within the networks they inhabit.[1] Coleman’s second chapter takes us into the history of the Open Source movement and its engagement with corporations and intellectual property law. The extension of intellectual property law and copyright law through the 1990’s is sometimes referred to as “the second enclosure movement,” signifying a move within information capitalism to commodify (enclose) the most abstract products, such as ideas, writing, art, and source code. Open Source Software and the hackers that produce it are extremely invested in the idea that in order for good code to continually be produced, it must be shared and built upon as a communal and open process. According to this ethic, this is how the best code gets written. Coleman further explores this productive process in her third and fourth chapters, as she investigates the hackers of the developer collective Debian.
It is in her third chapter where Coleman takes the most liberty from her driving questions, as she finds herself exploring hacker aesthetics and affect. In her words, she connects the dots by explaining that “examining humor and cleverness will allow me to more richly demonstrate how tensions (say between individualism and collectivism) arise through the course of intellectual practice, and how hackers partially resolve them.” (95) In her view, discussing the excess to the rational logic of capitalist production, in this case humor and art, belies some of the contradictions inherent in the person of the hacker, who is simultaneously espousing liberal ideals such as meritocracy and individualism. Individualism is of particular interest to Coleman, as she finds that hackers oftentimes combine romanticist ideals such as personal creative fulfillment with liberal ideals such as individualism in a somewhat Mills-inspired version of liberal democratic idealism. For me, this was an interesting illustration of yet another tension within information capitalism at our present moment, and somehow it was still tangential to the question of enclosure and openness. What does come up in the third chapter that I think is most relevant to this question is the fact that hackers are living proof that profit is certainly not the only motivator of the labor of production, contrary to arguments advanced in intellectual property cases. This “excess” to capitalist rationality is beautifully illustrated by Coleman as she shares the artistic cleverness of her subjects. For the hacker, the most valorized form of production is that which is both functional and beautiful, and of course, is recirculated.
In chapter 4 Coleman continues her close reading of the developer collective in an effort to fill in a gap in the literature on Open Source Software, a gap that she believes ignores “the plasticity of human motivations and ethical perceptions.” (123) This chapter is an attempt to establish how hackers organize themselves via the process of labor, thereby illustrating hacker ethics in more detail. For me, it was the least useful chapter in terms of understanding the main thrust of the text, and provided little stimulation in terms of new ideas. Chapters 5 and 6 were an improvement in this regard, as they explore the legal and political facets of hacker ethics. It is in chapter 5 that code becomes speech, and the question of what is speech arises but is left to future scholars. Coleman here shows us the competition between legal regimes of free speech and intellectual property, as it plays out in the court system and the streets. She emphasizes that many developers have been careful to frame the open source movement as non-political, representing neither the left nor the right, but to frame it in terms of the ideology of freedom. “Software developers have now deployed and also contest the law to reconfigure central tenets of the liberal tradition-and specifically the meaning of free speech-to defend their productive autonomy.” (183) In her final chapter Coleman suggests that this use of the liberal tradition, which is at the center of American identity and in many ways is popularly unquestioned, allowed the movement to frame itself in terms that left it unscathed in debates between the left and the right typical in the contemporary neoliberal context (accusations of communism did not stick, for example). It is here that she returns to her originating question regarding the tension between enclosure and openness in information capitalism, and the case study of the Open Source Software hacker as illustrative of how it is most recently mitigated via the employment of the liberalist rhetoric of freedom (namely free speech) and autonomy within a neoliberal structure of productive relations.
Coleman’s success lies in several areas. She has a fluid and easy writing style, with a panache for storytelling that makes her theoretical arguments both robust and accessible. The organization of the text makes sense as a progressive introduction to the world of hacking-it’s history, context, personification, and contemporary implications. Her use of ethnographic data is well-executed and rhythmic, as she moves between in-depth analyses of the data and theoretical extrapolations. Her contributions to the field are novel and relevant, and she does the work of situating herself within the context of past and present work on internet communities and information capitalism, within Critical Theory, Anthropology, and STS. Where the book falls short is in Coleman’s attempt to support the main argument of her book throughout the text. The reader may find themselves lost in the middle chapters, without a trail leading back to the main argument. While Coleman weaves an intricately captivating web around the subjects of affect, expressive romanticism, poetry, the human, hacking as repurposing, and free speech, she sometimes neglects to return to her subject of inquiry.
Coleman leaves us with the sense that this tension between enclosure and openness is far from resolved, and indeed may one day move beyond a battle between intellectual property law and free speech law. Indeed, considering source code as free speech, artistic expression, and creative license may be a temporary condition within the legal regime. We are left to consider a number of questions that Coleman has evoked throughout her book. What is speech, really? What is the meaning of the word “free?” How will the internet continue to facilitate productive relations? What will come of this tension between enclosure and openness in and information capitalism, when it so relies on both processes for the accrual of capital? And finally, what is the future of internet communities and the Commons? Coleman has extended her own questions in her most recent work on the hacktivist Collective Anonymous[2], but it is up to contemporary scholars to set to work right away in resolving the others before this window of “freedom” closes.
References:
Jackson, Michael, ed. Things as they are: New directions in phenomenological anthropology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996.
Latour, Bruno. Science in action: How to follow scientists and engineers through society. Harvard university press, 1987.
Coleman, Gabriella. 2014. http://www.cigionline.org/publications/2013/9/anonymous-context-politics-and-power-behind-mask
[1] Latour 1987
[2] http://www.cigionline.org/publications/2013/9/anonymous-context-politics-and-power-behind-mask