Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Social Production of Productive Freedom

University Of Chicago, Chicago IL

Investigators

Abstract

This dissertation research project is an ethnographic analysis of the ethical and aesthetic commitments of free software computer hackers. It addresses the following questions: 1) How do free software hacker practices, legal codes, and social values reconfigure normative meanings of scientific knowledge, property, and creativity? 2) How do hackers' ethical commitments result from the interplay between their particular technical and aesthetic practices and the wider socio-economic and legal conditions that shape their activities? 3) What is materially and symbolically at stake in differing conceptions of knowledge production and protection? The free software movement, whose goal is to make software and its source code legally available, challenges the legal privatization of software production. Free software is developed by thousands of volunteer hackers. Working collectively over the Internet, they hold legal, open access to information indispensable to their craft, understood as a social practice and expressive activity fusing technological innovation with artistic creation. This research combines ethnographic and document-analysis research by following one software project and participation in a range of forums and conferences in the Bay Area. The researcher asks how knowledge, property, and creativity are reconceived by hackers, and she seeks to understand how their aims and practices emerged from specific institutional conditions at a particular historical moment.