V2TXZi

26 CHAPTER 1
He could not resist. He began to drink himself silly with information on
UFOs, bomb building, conspiracies, and other oddities, downloading different
categories of software, shareware, sometimes warez (pirated software),
and eventually free software. 2 Initially he spent so much time chatting he
would “pass out on his keyboard, multiple times.” The parents, confusing
locked doors and nocturnal living with preteen angst and isolation, wondered
whether they should send their son to a psychologist.
Once he met like- minded peers in high school, college, or online, the boy’s
intellectual curiosity ballooned. He initiated a quest to master all the ins and
outs of a technical architecture like the Linux OS, one or two computer
languages, and the topographical terrain and protocols of a really cool new
virtual place called the Internet. He soon discovered he could never really
master all of this, and that he actually exists in an asymptotic relationship to
technology. Nonetheless, he grew to adore the never- ending, never- � nished
nature of technological production, and eventually fell, almost entirely by
accident, into a technical movement.
That movement, the free software movement, seemed to describe his personal
experiences with technology in a sophisticated yet accessible language.
It said that sharing was good for the community, and that access to source
code is not only handy but also the basis by which technology grows and
improves. Eventually, he understood himself to be connected to a translocal
community of hackers and grew increasingly peeved at their stereotyped
representation in the media. As he grew older and more � nancially independent
(thanks to lucrative information technology jobs as a programmer or
system administrator that gave him the � nancial freedom, the “free time,”
to code for volunteer projects, or alternatively paid him explicitly to work
on free software), he consistently interacted with other geeks at work, over
IRC, on a dozen (or more) mailing lists, on free software projects, and less
occasionally, at exhausting and superintense hacker conferences that left
him feeling simultaneously elated and depressed (because they invariably
have to come to an end).
Over time, and without realizing when it all happened, he didn’t just
know how to hack in Perl, C, C ++, Java, Scheme, LISP, Fortran, and Python
but also came to learn arcane legal knowledge. His knowledge about
technology had become encyclopedic, but ironically he was still wholly dependent
on the help of his peers to get just about anything done. He � rmly
came to believe that knowledge access and transactions of sharing facilitate
production, that most types of software should be open source, and that
the world would be a better place if we were just given choices for software
licensing. Although not exactly motivated to engage in F/OSS production to
ful� ll a political mandate, he understood the political dimension of coding in
an entirely new light. In fact, since reading Lawrence Lessig’s Code and Other
Laws of Cyberspace, and through his daily reading of Slashdot and Boing
Boing, popular Web sites reporting technology news and geek esoterica, he