Objects in Flux - RMIT Research Repository - RMIT University

tion’ (2001). Within the FOSS movement, freedom is expressed as both
freedom of the individual to act without censorship or outside control,
and, freedom of information that privileges open dialogue and shared
ownership. This attitude of openness forms an ethical underpinning for
FOSS and hackers alike. As Raymond notes in his writing on ‘how to be
a hacker’, hackers should resist ‘artificial technical, legal, or institutional
barriers (like closed-source code) that prevent a good solution from
being re-used and force people to re-invent wheels’ (2001). The Free
Software Foundation’s (FSF’s) General Public Licence (GPL), developed
by Stallman, has itself been described as a ‘hack of the copyright
system’ in that it uses the copyright system to produce free and open
resources rather than private property (Söderberg, 2008).
Firmly connected to hacking’s conception of freedom is the notion of
‘creative play’. Within playful acts we find a privileging of individual
agency and the challenging of rules and boundaries. Likewise, hacking’s
focus on the circumvention of barriers is not motivated solely by
a desire to access restricted information, but also by the challenge such
barriers offer. Through playful engagement, hackers derive joy from exploring
and testing the limits of their environments. Many MIT hackers
were employed by the university to maintain and develop the university
computer system and this playful approach often led to conflicts
between the hackers and university administrators. As Levy notes, ‘the
[university] planners were concerned with applications using computers
to go beyond computing, to create useful concepts and tools to benefit
humanity. To the hackers, the system was an end in itself’ (1984). The
hackers’ exploration of this system was driven by personal desire rather
than administrative goals, and hackers did not confine their explorative
activities to the computer system. The MIT hackers engaged a diverse
array of domains, from ping-pong to campus security, applying the
‘hacker attitude’ to every aspect of their lives. 13
Although resistant to the university’s demands for ‘real world’ applications,
MIT hackers were also at odds with the theoretical approach
adopted by grad students within the artificial intelligence (AI) labs.
Levy recounts how tensions developed between the ‘official’ research
community and the hackers: ‘the grad students viewed the hackers as
necessary but juvenile technicians’ and regarded hacking as ‘unscientific’,
while hackers thought the grad students lacked real world expe-
Hacking, Modding and DIY
13/ The expanded domain of hacking
is particularly apparent in Stallman’s
account of ‘hacking a use of 5 chop-
sticks’ during a meal at a restaurant
in Seoul (2002).
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