[silk] Hacking the World

[Udhay Shankar N]

Interesting piece on Aaron Swartz, and on Biella. Biella, want to say more?

Udhay

https://chronicle.com/article/Hacking-the-World/138163/

April 1, 2013
Hacking the World
An anthropologist in the midst of a geek insurgency

By Nathan Schneider
Hacking the World

To hold an event in the Great Hall at Cooper Union in New York City is
to lay claim on history. The typical invocation at the start of an
evening there, whatever the occasion, includes recounting that Abraham
Lincoln once made an important speech in the same room. And such was the
opening ritual on January 19.

Hundreds of eminent geeks, start-up-ers, reporters, radicals, and
admirers gathered that evening among the stone arches and white columns
to remember the life of Aaron Swartz. At the age of 26, after living
under the threats of federal prosecutors trying to pressure him into a
plea bargain, he had hanged himself. Several times in January, his name
was on the front page of The New York Times. His former girlfriend, the
Wired writer Quinn Norton, observed in her remarks that "Aaron has left
us and entered the realm of mythmaking." David Segal, who with Swartz
founded the organization Demand Progress, said from the stage of the
Great Hall, "He wanted to hack the whole world, in the best way."

The forces that seem to have hastened Swartz's death were very much
haunting the room. In the audience was a mischievous, greasy-haired
hacker known as "weev," who faces as much as a decade in prison for
embarrassing AT&T by publicizing a flaw in its system that compromised
users' privacy. A member of Occupy Wall Street's press team handed out
slips of paper about the case of Jeremy Hammond, an anarchist and
Anonymous member who was in prison awaiting trial for breaking into the
servers of the security company Stratfor. There was Stanley Cohen, a
civil-rights lawyer representing some of Hammond's fellow Anons, and
there was a T-shirt with the face of Bradley Manning, the soldier
charged with passing classified material to WikiLeaks.

Just behind weev sat Gabriella Coleman, an anthropologist, occasionally
jotting notes in a notepad. She teaches at McGill University. Coleman
first met Aaron Swartz when he was just 14, and over the years she had
come to know many others in the room as well. Even more of them were
among her 17,500-strong Twitter following or had seen her TED talk about
Anonymous. Part participant and part observer, she began fieldwork on a
curious computer subculture while still in graduate school. Now, more
than a decade later, her work has made her the leading interpreter of a
digital insurgency.
Hacking the World

Onstage, speakers recounted Swartz's exploits in acronyms: As a
teenager, he co-created the RSS specification and Reddit and Creative
Commons, and in 2012 he helped organize the widespread and successful
opposition to the Congressional intellectual-property bills SOPA and
PIPA. His conviction that information wants to be free was what led him
to liberate scholarly articles from behind JSTOR's paywall en masse.
That brought on the prosecutors determined to make an example of him,
whose reaction in turn reveals just how dangerous the geek crusaders'
cry of freedom has come to seem.

Swartz's crusade has been much celebrated since his death, if not very
well understood by those not also taking part. It's a peculiar kind of
politics. Why would someone care so much, and take such risks, to set
information free? That question, in certain respects, is what Gabriella
Coleman has spent her career studying.

Coleman started to care about open-source software because she cared
about something else. At Columbia University in the early 90s, a friend
of hers wouldn't stop talking about a CD-ROM he'd brought home of
Slackware, an early Linux-based operating system. She didn't see what
the big deal was, so the friend explained it to her this way: He knew
she was interested in drug patentsbin particular, how
intellectual-property laws prevent medicine from being available to
people who need it but can't pay inflated prices. This kind of software
was the opposite. Not only was it free of cost, but the license ensured
that the source code behind it was freely available for people to copy,
modify, and share. Computer companies were making billions by
controlling proprietary operating systems, yet here was one anyone could
use for nothingbanyone, at least, willing to put in the effort to make
it work.

"I was just floored," Coleman recalls. "It wasn't a pipe dream. It was a
reality, and that was exciting to me: an actually existing alternative
in place."

She went on to study anthropology at the University of Chicago. Her goal
was to write a dissertation on spiritual healing in Guyana. But the
notion of free software was still on her mind, and the community that
produced it started to interest her more and more. What just about
settled it, though, was an illness during graduate school that kept her
homebound for a year. She couldn't take classes or go on trips to
Guyana, but she could get on the Internet. Through chat rooms and online
bulletin boards, she learned a lot about free software. Soon after, and
despite her advisers' hesitation, she was ready to put aside her plan
for more-traditional fieldwork and take up this one.

Faye Ginsburg, an anthropologist and director of New York University's
Center for Media, Culture and History, where Coleman taught in the late
2000s, says, "I think she was a bit ahead of the curve, in terms of the
field recognizing the significance of media generally and digital media
in particular."

For dissertation research, as others in her cohort shipped off for
more-exotic, farther-flung places, Coleman moved to the San Francisco
Bay Area with Linux running on her computer. "It was painful at first,"
she says, remembering the buggy early versions of the operating system.
"It was the equivalent of having to live with the snakes." She took
classes in copyright law and system administration while making her way
into communities of geeks and hackers, as she refers to them, and as
they refer to themselves. She volunteered at the Electronic Frontier
Foundation and infiltrated the ranks of those creating the Linux-based
operating system Debian. In that male-dominated world, she suspects that
her gender helped: "This little, tiny woman shows up, and they're just
in awe that someone cares."

At the time, in the early 2000s, Silicon Valley was infatuated with the
idea of free and open-source software; futurists promised an overnight
revolution, and venture capitalists schemed about how to turn the wisdom
of crowds into profits. Coleman's scholarship on the phenomenon, newly
compiled in her Princeton University Press book Coding Freedom: The
Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking, stands well beyond either brand of
enthusiasm. Her tone is mostly sober, even as she pays close attention
to her subjects' jokesbabout the cluelessness of "(l)users, or a program
called Mutt that has fleas instead of bugs." What impresses her most,
however, is what she learned from the geeks about doing politics.

The first chapter of Coding Freedom opens with a gloss on the
prototypical autobiography of a free-software hacker. (It always bears
repeating that "hacker" does not necessarily mean someone who hacks
illegally or nefariously.) That story begins with tinkering, with taking
apart household appliances as a child and quickly graduating to whatever
primitive computing machines become available. At last the
hackerbusually a hebcomes across the world of free software, which is
actually just a name for what he'd been pining after all along: infinite
tinkering with like-minded people and no external constraints. Through
chat rooms and e-mail lists and conferences, he finds a community of
others like him, and, even as they find lucrative jobs in the tech
sector, their real passion is collaborating on projects that are free
and open from the ground up. The programs really work, too. Over the
years, they wind up running a good chunk of the Internet's back end.

Then, one day, some company or some law comes around and tries to stop
the whole show in order to protect an antiquated business model. That
makes our hacker angry. In defense of his work flow and his tinkering,
he finds himself in a political movement.

Coleman herself has activist instincts, and she expected to find them
among the free-software hackers. (While doing her fieldwork, she
participated in Indymedia, disseminating news about the
counter-globalization protests of the period.) What she found instead
was a group of people who were engaged in the grueling legal battles and
organizational infighting that would be familiar to any activist, but
were here put to the service of mainly technical ends.

The community as a whole, she says, "was having this political impact,
but individuals weren't necessarily politically motivated."

The Debian Project is among the more ideological of open-source
organizations, yet its several thousand volunteer "maintainers" are held
together not so much by revolutionary spirit as by a carefully
constructed, overlapping consensus about how to create "the universal
operating system." Debian has its own "Social Contract," "Constitution,"
and "Free Software Guidelines," which serve to coordinate a vast spread
of subprojects. Officers are elected according to criteria posited by an
18th-century French mathematician. Coding Freedom chronicles the
intensive training process that Debian maintainers must undergo to enter
the community. Their programming chops are evaluated, of course, but so
is their fluency in the legal and ethical jargon of free software.

This legal curriculum is something that geeks and hackers had to learn
themselves, and in many cases invent, just to keep doing what they
wanted to do. Over time, scholars like Lawrence Lessig realized that
they had a point and helped develop legal tools to protect "free
culture"btools that cover everything from the Firefox browser's source
code to the Creative Commons license on Coleman's book. (It was
downloaded around 20,000 times in its first week of being freely
available online.) For a hacker, she points out, law is code; legal
reform is just another hack.

Like any countervailing subculture, the hacker community also depends on
fostering environments where, as Coleman puts it, "a different set of
lived ethics can incarnate into practice." In the solitary ecstasy of
coding they remind her of the 19th-century Romantics. No less ecstatic
are the hacker conferences, where online collaborators get to meet,
drink excessively, and write software together in the same room. Just as
vital are the rules that pervade such spaces, both formal and informal,
which seek a balance of individual autonomy and group consensus-seeking.
And the impact of these communities has been felt far beyond their geeky
membership.

That impact was especially visible on January 18, 2012, when signs of
protest appeared across large swaths of the Internet, including Google,
Wikipedia, and Twitter, to protest the proposed bills then in Congress
that stood to radically bolster copyright law, mainly on behalf of the
entertainment industry. Aaron Swartz and the many thousands of other
hackers who rallied against the bills were acting on behalf of ideals
that they had learned to cherish in practice, through their means of
collective production.

Some hackers, it's true, happen to be anticorporate activists. And the
open-source pioneer Eric S. Raymondb"the hacker culture's resident
ethnographer since around 1990," as he puts itbtakes Coleman to task for
not saying more about the libertarian rationale often held among those
of his ilk, which would object to copyright law as an affront to the
free market. In the end, though, hackers' varying justifications matter
less than what they actually do together. They became a force in
mainstream politics through the back door because there was no choice;
to the extent that file sharing, copying, and remixing aren't allowed,
free software cannot operate.

This is the insight that Coleman wants to bring to her fellow
anthropologists in Coding Freedom: While liberal values like
transparency, autonomy, and free inquiry may be cherished by many people
in the abstract, the geeks who have fought for those values most
assiduously on our behalf learned to care so much about them through
practice, by what those values enabled them to produce. And when hackers
are able solve technical problems by setting information free, they
start to imagine what other kinds of problems they might be able to fix.

By the fall of 2011, while Coleman was knee-deep in her work on
Anonymous and other political outgrowths of geek culture, a student of
hers named Leah Feder was about to encounter open-source ideals in the
streets.

Occupy Wall Street began in the last weeks of September, and Feder
started going down to occupied Zuccotti Park, in Manhattan, soon
afterward. She was excited by it but at first didn't know how to plug
in. That's where she met Devin Balkind, also in his mid-20s. Before the
movement started, he had incorporated an organization called Sarapis to
help nonprofits benefit from open-source software and other peer-to-peer
methodologies. Balkind is a wild-eyed true believer who talks about a
"sea change" and a "knowledge revolution" to comebsoon, like in six months.

Feder dropped out of NYU, and together they devoted themselves to
introducing the movement not just to open-source software but also to
other forms of free culture, like collaborative permaculture farming and
digital currencies. They were less interested in how Occupy could
protest than in what alternatives it could produce.

The Occupy movement's affinity with free culture expressed itself right
from the start; Occupy Wall Street's initial "Principles of Solidarity"
statement called for "wide application of open source." Open-source
organizing models also fit well with the movement's nonhierarchical and
directly democratic proclivities. People with backgrounds in free
software tended to have had more experience working in structures like
that, and they became involved in Occupy encampments across the country.
They also went to work building a digital infrastructure to unite the
disparate movement.

This infrastructure, much of it assembled in the months after the media
had deemed Occupy over and done, was tested when Hurricane Sandy struck
the Eastern Seaboard last October. Within days, a band of Occupy Wall
Street veterans and their allies had mounted a relief effort that
mobilized thousands of volunteers to help in communities where the
government response was far from adequate. The effort started with an
online platform that could direct people and supplies to sites where
they were needed. Soon, Feder and Balkind helped set up a largely
open-source system for managing resources and volunteers. "With Sandy we
already did it," Balkind says. "We had a better system up within a month."

As Occupy's most devoted participants have always believed, it is just
one part of a network of interrelated movements. Much is made of the
role of corporate social media like Facebook and Twitter on the recent
protest scene, including Cairo's Tahrir Square and Canada's #IdleNoMore
indigenous uprising, but less noticed is the commitment to free and open
information underlying so many of these movements. The narrow frame of
geek politics has found itself in much more mixed company.

"There is a meta-relationship," says Coleman. "These movements enacted a
shared set of values in their organizing."

Some quarters of the encampment movement in Spain, for instance, have
embraced talk of "the commons," and a "European Charter of the Commons"
has been drafted in Italy. Harking back to the pre-industrial
arrangement of villagers' holding farmland in common, and inspired by
the free-software phenomenon, these people envision freeing more of
society's vital resources from private control to be shared among those
who depend on them.

Luis Moreno-Caballud, who teaches in the Hispanic-studies program at the
University of Pennsylvania, was closely involved in the movements in
both Madrid and New York. He has been tracing a "return of the
commons"ba tendency, he explains, "not to see our dependency on others
as a weakness, or a lack, but a potential." This impulse was able to
manifest itself especially easily in software over the past few decades;
it was a new realm where the rules hadn't been made yet. But in the
protest movements, Moreno-Caballud has noticed similar commons emerging
as people self-organize to resist their governments' austerity policies.

"The state is abandoning people," he says. "We need to reclaim what is
ours."

In the years since the fieldwork that led to Coding Freedom, Gabriella
Coleman has found herself playing a new kind of role: that of the
world's foremost scholar of Anonymous.

"Studying Debian was a pure joy," she says. "It was a safe playground.
And then all of a sudden I went to what felt like a nightmare
playground, where there were spikes and booby traps and grenades." While
before she had only to be careful to keep her Linux operating system
from crashing, now she has to make sure not to collect data that could
be used in investigations by law enforcementbnot learning where subjects
live, for example, and leaving chat rooms if discussions of illegal
activity begin.

"I've definitely had to create boundaries," she says.

Coleman discovered Anonymous while investigating, as a side project, the
particular disdain that a number of geeks she'd interviewed over the
years had for the Church of Scientology. She started to realize that
Scientology is "this perfect inversion" of the hacker ethos. It is
secretive, litigious, dogmatic, and freely blends its dogma with
technology in ritual gizmos like the "E-meter." This was on her mind
when something called "Project Chanology" appeared in early 2008: People
in matching masks, calling themselves Anonymous, started protesting at
Scientology centers around the world.

Among these crowds, Coleman says, the cause of information liberation
took on "a distinct modality." Some Anons were skilled coders from the
free-software community, but many didn't have technical backgrounds.
They were drawn to the cause by a culture and an aesthetic.

Anonymous is part prank but also part activism; it led to a lot more of
both. Within a couple of years, Anonymous was fighting big banks on
behalf of WikiLeaksbthe information-freedom spree of the hacker Julian
Assangeband bringing down dictators' Web sites during the Arab Spring.
It played key roles in the Occupy movement. Corporations and governments
alike had their security breached by this amorphous and often reckless
band of information liberators. All along, Coleman turned her
ethnographic attention to online chat channels and Twitter hashtags that
Anonymous members frequented, and she met with leading Anons. Outlets
including CNN, the Guardian, Wired, and Boing Boing use her has a
source, and her insights on how Anonymous functions have made the
phenomenon a little less mysterious. Anonymous will be the subject of
her next book.

The success that Anonymous and WikiLeaks have had in spooking the
powerful is surely part of what motivated the scare tactics used against
Aaron Swartz. Such tactics won't necessarily work. Over the course of
the memorial for Swartz in New York, the remembrances swelled into calls
for action, and then standing ovationsbagainst the power of corporations
in the legal system, against the Citizens United Supreme Court decision,
against mass incarceration. One cause led to another. The hackers were
connecting the dots.

"If people experience a taste of what political action is," Coleman said
afterward, "whether it's the power of consensus, whether it's the power
to change something, whether it's the power of getting media
attentionbthey're hooked."

Nathan Schneider is the author of Thank You, Anarchy: Notes From the
Occupy Apocalypse and God in Proof: The Story of a Search From the
Ancients to the Internet, both forthcoming from the University of
California Press in 2013.

Copyright 2013. All rights reserved.

    The Chronicle of Higher Education
    1255 Twenty-Third St, N.W.
    Washington, D.C. 20037


-- 
((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))


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