We opened this book with the claim that hacking is not primarily about technology. Rather, an idea of freedom propels the urge for change. Hacking holds out the possibility that such freedom can be achieved by repurposing tools and circumventing constraints of different kinds. Tied to this practice is the acclaimed outsider position of the hacker. Popular culture is intoxicated by tropes about the hacker as an outcast. Self-representations of hacker culture are awash with the same outlaw imagery, a good example being the Jolly Roger flag that decorates hackerspaces and makerspaces and their associated websites. A case in point is the emblem of the Chaos Computer Club, designed by Way Holland in 1981, which distorts the horn-and-lightning logo of the Deutsche Bundespost (German Federal Postal Service) to make it look like a pirate’s cranium.
The catch is that the symbolic outsider position of the hacker is increasingly at odds with the structural position of hacking within present-day informational capitalism. The plausibility of the hacker’s claim to be an outsider rests on the position of the hacker standing outside of contractual employment relations and the associated, professional identities. In the early days of the computer underground, regulated and lifelong employment was the norm in society. Those who opted out from this legally secure arrangement were true outliers. But over the last thirty years or so, an ever larger segment of the workforce has had to make a living under the same precarious conditions as the hacker. In the so-called “gig economy,” everyone is an outsider.
“Open” is the sibling word to “outside.” Openness is the means by which the outsider becomes included in capital’s accumulation regime. As capitalism restructures itself around open innovation processes, the hacker becomes emblematic for how value is produced and captured everywhere in this economic system. The disruptive hack has always already been anticipated in this open innovation model. Whole academic fields are developing and refining the methods whereby firms can “harness the hacker” in ever more cost-efficient and risk-averse ways (Tapscott and Williams 2006; von Hippel 2016; Flowers 2008 are representative examples). Consequently, the promise that the repurposing of technology will unsettle constituted power and incumbent interests serves as a honeytrap for idealistically minded engineers. Their longing for freedom is absorbed and fed back into the maelstrom of Schumpeterian creative destruction.
As the methods for capturing value from open innovation processes are increasingly anticipated and refined by both firms and academics, the meaning of hacking is also undergoing a transformation. From this follows the need to reassess the way in which this subject matter is studied. Forty years ago, the original ethnographic works about hackers, notably Steven Levy’s classic Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (1984), offered peepholes into an otherworldly and self-enclosed cosmos. When we peep through that same hole today, what we see is our own future selves, at work. The future, unevenly distributed as we know it to be, is disclosed to us in the utopias of hackers. The catch is, however, that those visions tend to be realized in an inverted and nightmarish form. This idea has founded the methodological assumption behind the studies in this book. Hacker culture can be interrogated as an early warning system of the structural reforms of the labor market that are yet to be unleashed on the rest of us.
Of course, having such warnings would be pointless unless it was also possible to identify points of intervention. Ultimately, the purpose of theorizing hacking, or, indeed, theorizing anything at all, is to guide collective action. The anticipation of the disruptive hack must itself be anticipated, for the hack to result in something truly disruptive. To anticipate the anticipation requires theory. For instance, the theoretical concept of recuperation alerts us to the traps of the purported outsider position ascribed to the hacker in popular culture. In keeping with the tradition of Hegelian and immanent critique that underpins the present inquiry, we track down the points of possible intervention to cracks and fissures within the contradictory social totality.
To substantiate this rather lofty claim, recall the foundational move of the free software movement, the creation of the General Public License (GPL). With this legal hack, copyright law was turned against itself to protect the information commons from exclusive proprietary claims. The prerogatives invested by state and law in the individual author, with the expectation that authors’ rights would in a short time be alienated and put up for sale, were thus redirected toward collective authorship of source code. That being said, if one puts too much trust in the protection of the law from itself, then one risks succumbing to legal formalism. The enforcement of the GPL relies on it being backed up by community norms. Those norms need to be in place in order to ensure that individual members and would-be entrepreneurs fall back into line at critical junctures during the course of a hacker project—that is to say, at times when business opportunities loom large or legal deterrents weigh in on collective decision-making processes. The principal importance of the GPL is as a rallying point for collective action. From this, it follows that it is not in the absence of society, but quite the opposite, in the plethora of the social bonds and the commitment to common goals, that the conditions of freedom may flourish under the constraints of class antagonism, exploitation, and commodification.
In invoking the functional autonomy of hacker communities, we are indebted to how this concept has been deployed in the literature of labor process theory. The concept of “autonomy” is decisive in the distinction, proposed by Karl Marx in the “Results of the Direct Production Process,” between the formal and the real subsumption of labor (1994). A total domination by capital over the production process (i.e., the real subsumption of labor under capital) is checked by the functional autonomy and effective control that workers exercise collectively over their workplaces, in part by possessing knowledge about how to put their tools to productive use (Aronowitz 1978). The historical parallel between struggles over tools and skills on the shop floor and such struggles unfolding in hacker culture at present is justified by the observation made above: having been put to work by the open innovation model, hackers are thenceforth formally subsumed under capital. The recursiveness attributed to hacker politics, by which is meant their orientation toward safeguarding the technical and legal preconditions for their own continued, collective existence qua hackers, resonates with this analysis. Hackers are called to action in response to an incessant pressure to subsume hacking under processes of capitalist accumulation.
The political orientation of hackers is toward the preservation of their own autonomy. That being said, the outcome of those struggles often has consequences for many communities and sectors beyond hacker culture. On those struggles depends the extent to which hacker projects can nurture critical engineering practices and processes of communization. Conversely, the alternative pathways in the development of technology are narrowed down when hackers fail to resist recuperation attempts.
An advantage of adopting this interpretative framework is that it steers a middle course in the dispute between one camp in academia that debunks the technological determinism of hackers and their many privileges and another camp that boosts the promises and hopes (and hype) surrounding information technologies and so-called “making.” We do not side with one or the other of these camps. Our proposal is instead that the meaning of a hacker practice or application depends on the outcome of struggles against recuperation. Furthermore, this question cannot be decided once and for all, since both recuperation processes and the resistance to them are always only inconclusively settled. Each advance or defeat lays the groundwork for the next cycle of struggle. With a nod to Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, we intend this interpretative framework to not only describe hacker culture, but also lean in on how hackers narrate their own past and orient themselves toward the future.
This is effectively what scholars in the field of innovation studies do already. They intervene by advising firms on how to fine-tune the open innovation model and harness the hacker ever more cost-effectively. We hope that hackers will find ideas in this book for how they can counter such approaches. Theorizing recuperation makes a difference because recuperation often works by stealth, behind the backs of the actors, as it were. An attempt at recuperation can easily be detected in those instances when it is carried out as a discrete enclosure of the information commons and in open violation of community norms. It is harder to challenge the relentless and gradual pressure on the community’s norms and goals, whereby the framing conditions of individual hacker projects become aligned with the requirements of the open innovation model. As the hacker community is made over, the development processes nurtured in this milieu will come to gravitate toward market demand, mass production constraints, and various kinds of legal deterrents.
The recuperative logic of informational capitalism is hard to glimpse in the local setting because the actual act of enclosure of the information commons might still be pending. For instance, the ever-growing capacity to aggregate and triangulate user data enables firms to assert control over and extract revenue from information in ways that were impossible to foresee twenty years ago. The continued expansion of such capacities and opportunities is anticipated by firms and feeds back into their present-day market strategies. Struggles over recuperation that unfold on this strategic and anticipatory level are located within the second time horizon in our classificatory scheme. It is chiefly when contesting the recuperation that takes place at this level of temporality that the interpretative framework proposed here could make a difference.
The example of how big data and AI allow preexisting datasets to be mined in ways that were inconceivable at the time when the data was first collected concretizes a more general tenet about recuperation. Namely, that recuperation works by surprise. This was William Morris’s core insight as conveyed in the quote cited at the beginning of this book. In his account of historical struggles, Morris laid stress on naming practices. What is meant by a name is in a state of flux. The same goes for the (theoretical) concepts and categories by which we try to identify and put a name to “recuperation.” Those categories are caught up in the same whirlwind of capitalist restructuring as that affecting the things to which they refer. This point bears stressing. When the meaning of a concept is taken to be fixed and a matter of course, then this is an invitation to unpleasant surprises.
Differently put, recuperation cannot be exhaustively summarized in a bullet point list. Hence, the discussion of theory needs to be complemented with the study of historical cases and experiences derived from past struggles. In saying this, we are freely reinterpreting Immanuel Kant’s famous notes on “reflective judgment.” In the introduction to his third critique, and as a justification for the aesthetic theory that followed immediately after, he conceded the limitations of predicatively structured reasoning. The exploration of the world could not do without the cognitive subject’s ability to form higher-order analogies drawing on contextualized experiences. It was thus that the subject made the jump from knowledge of the past to judicious, future-oriented action. In the context of our present inquiry into hacker culture, we reinterpret Kant to say that it is by cultivating an aesthetic judgment that hackers may learn to “sniff out” ongoing recuperation attempts. Ultimately, we have written this book with the aspiration of making a contribution to this exercise. It follows that the interpretative framework proposed here must be put to the test, in part through a discussion of historical case studies, in part through praxis (Kovel 2008).
The four case studies presented in this book demonstrate different possible outcomes in the struggle over the recuperation of hacker practices. In addition, the four cases illustrate the different time horizons within which struggles over recuperation unfold. Overall, we historicize the case study genre through shifting the analytical attention away from snapshots of the present toward tendential developments in hacker culture unfolding over extended temporalities.
The first case study, concerning the Ronja project, is centered on a schism in the hacker community that was triggered by attempts to commercialize free space optics (FSO) technology. Although there were many proprietary spin-offs from the invention, the most ambitious and enduring enterprise went by the name “Crusader.” Ronja and Crusader are interesting to compare because both development projects were informed by articulated political visions. Hence, they can be treated as representatives of divergent ideas about how to do politics through engineering, and what role to assign to the market in this scheme. For the inventor of Crusader—as for a large segment of the Czech wireless network community at the time—the monopolistic practices in the telecommunications sector were the principal targets. The objective was to challenge the monopoly by equipping wireless network communities and for-profit internet service providers with Crusader FSO links. The communication network as a whole would become more resilient to state censorship and surveillance through the diversification of providers. This blend of Schumpeterian entrepreneurialism with political activism has gained much traction over the years, not only in the hacker movement, but also in technology- and product-oriented social movements in general (Hess 2005).
In contrast, the inventor of Ronja was convinced that devising an alternative business model would not be conducive to his political vision. His ideal of a user-controlled technology was antithetical to the very idea of the market. If he took the customary route of financing Ronja development through the market and the patent system, the technology would end up perpetuating the ills of commercial development that it was meant to combat in the first place. He sought to make his development work economically sustainable by asking for donations from the many users of the product. The donation model provides a touchstone for reflecting upon how technology development can be scaled up without relying on the conventional, market- and industry-based means for doing so. A handful of updates to Ronja were successfully financed through donations. The model hinged on the reputation of the inventor within the Czech wireless network community. Donations stopped coming in as the community disintegrated. This outcome was in part due to shifts in the policy landscape, which led to communication networks becoming widely available as a commercial service. In part, the user-controlled technology failed to keep up with commercial developments due to escalating, internal strife among the hackers over conflicting proprietary claims. In relation to our interpretative framework, we could say that the recuperation attempt of Ronja resulted in a draw. The hacker community imploded, and the development of the technology stalled, but neither was any commercially viable innovation derived from the proprietary forks.
In the second case study, we tell the story of the open-source desktop 3D printer called RepRap. Initially, the development process was self-organized by a community of hardware hackers and engineering students. The attempt by one start-up company, MakerBot Industries, to enclose the pool of common labor behind proprietary claims was a watershed moment. It qualifies as a textbook example of an overt, hostile recuperation attempt. In spite of the fuss that ensued in the extended open hardware movement, the violation of the free license was allowed to pass in the RepRap community. This indicates to us the importance of community norms for the protection of the information commons. We concede that the permissive attitude toward commercialization might have prevented the RepRap community from being torn into warring factions, as happened with Ronja in the previous case study. Nevertheless, soon afterward, the development of the open-source 3D printer came to a near standstill. Hackers in the core team silently dropped out of the project or channeled their efforts into private ventures. A couple of years down the road, most of the start-up firms had gone out of business, while others had been acquired by multinational corporations. This outcome contrasts sharply with the goal that was stated at the outset of the project: to devise a self-reproducing, general-purpose manufacturing unit that would render market exchanges superfluous and create wealth without money.
The flourishing consumer market in desktop 3D printers is a telltale sign that a successful recuperation attempt took place. That being said, the product innovation itself is rather insignificant compared to the organizational concept that lay at the heart of the RepRap project. The key idea behind the self-replicating universal constructor was that its manufacturing capacities would be recursively deployed in the production of more such units. MakerBot Industries put out feelers in this direction by enrolling the machine park of its former customers in the production of parts for new machines. The experiment was prematurely ended due to the lack of a means for asserting worker discipline (quality control) in the dispersed production network. Shortly afterward, the possibility of reducing production costs through open manufacturing was foreclosed by the company’s decision to revert to a conventional business model based on closed designs and intellectual property rights. Due to the contradictions of the open accumulation regime, the industry failed, at least for the time being, to incorporate the hacker community’s organizational inventions.
The third case study unfolds within the second time horizon and relates to a movement of numerous individual hacker projects. This story charts a series of transmutations of shared machine shops—the generic name we assign to physical spaces where manufacturing tools are made available to the public—that have unfolded over the last two decades. The successive order began with hacklabs, later to be replaced by hackerspaces, which soon afterward were rebranded as makerspaces; makerspaces inspired Tech Shops, and Tech Shops gave way to start-up incubators. The series ends in the accelerators. All of these settings serve to facilitate the circulation of tools and technical know-how outside the confines of professional identities and hierarchies. This commonality underlines the single trait that separates them—namely, the extent to which an autonomous political culture and critical engineering practice may flourish within a certain setting.
Hacklabs are located in occupied social centers. As such, they are both ideologically and spatially integrated into anarchist or autonomist social movements. One common task of hacklab participants is to support other political activists at the social center through maintaining and developing digital infrastructures. The heyday of hacklabs was during the early 2000s, with a geographical concentration around southern Europe. In contrast, hackerspaces are nonpartisan clubhouses for the cultivation of technological creativity. Typically, they are located in rented spaces financed through membership fees. A proportion of their members identify themselves as activists, who pursue various sorts of civil society activities. Historically, the upsurge of hackerspaces in many European and US cities can be dated to the 2010s.
Our central claim is that these different genres of shared machine shops evolved in tandem with a gradual buildup of recuperation, culminating in the start-up accelerator. This claim can most succinctly be demonstrated with reference to the different roles that these spaces have played in urban planning and real estate development. A tactic used by antisquatting agencies is to allow a few tenants to rent empty spaces below market price in what would otherwise have been empty buildings. Among such tenants are sometimes found hackerspaces. On the surface, much will look the same in a shared machine shop that is housed in a squatted building and one that rents the space from an antisquatting agency. And yet, the political significance of these two sites is diametrically opposed. One lesson that we draw from this case study is that making tools and skills accessible is insufficient on its own to nurture critical engineering practices. The other two “pillars of autonomy” must also be in place: the maintenance of shared values and the reproduction of a historical memory of past events and struggles.
The fourth case study also runs its course within the second time horizon, involving a landscape of sedimented infrastructures and communication protocols that make up the framing conditions for many contemporary, individual hacker projects. In this case, however, the hackers have successfully resisted attempts to incorporate their technology under a regular business arrangement. The case study focuses on Internet Relay Chat (IRC), a simple but flexible protocol for real-time, written conversations. It was first implemented in 1988, one year before the World Wide Web was launched. It served various functions that were later spun off and performed on dedicated, corporate-owned platforms, such as online dating, staying in contact with friends, and file sharing.
As the population of the internet grew and market consolidation set it, IRC faded from public view. It continues to be used for everyday backstage communication by free software development communities (Coleman 2012) and among hackerspace members (Maxigas 2015), Wikipedia editors (Broughton 2008), and Anonymous hacktivists (Dagdelen 2012). Therefore, the question arises: Why do these groups of users—hailed as disruptive innovators and early adopters—stick with a chat technology that has become a museum piece, despite its technical limitations within the current media landscape? It suggests to us that the regular criteria for technology adoption, such as user convenience, functionality, and efficacy, all of which are heavily skewed in favor of network effects and the size of capital, can be overridden by ethical and aesthetic judgments in settings where the three pillars of autonomy are all in place.
Overall, we note that the first and second case studies follow the life cycles of individual projects, unfolding within the first time horizon, whereas the third and fourth case studies are located within the second time horizon of an evolving movement of hacker projects. The struggle over recuperation in the Ronja project ended in a stalemate in the sense that no hacker project has built on its results, but neither did the proprietary forks lead to any commercially viable innovations. The second case study of the RepRap 3D printer offers a textbook example of a hacker project that succumbs to a hostile recuperation attempt and seeds product innovations for capital as a result. The conclusion is much the same in the third case study of shared machine shops, with the difference being that recuperation did not culminate in a tangible, commodified product, but in a shift within hacker culture, creating favorable conditions for future recuperation attempts. The fourth case study of IRC demonstrates that hackers occasionally succeed in resisting the historical logic of recuperation over an extended period of time. This underlines the difference that collective action can make, even though it takes place under the structural constraints of informational capitalism.
Recuperation, being an evasive phenomenon, is often only detectable with the benefit of hindsight. That being said, the purpose of studying history is to draw lessons from it to guide actions in the present, with an eye on the future. Hence, we close this book by putting our theoretical and historical arguments to the test by attending to events that are unfolding even as we type these sentences.
The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 has brought some vulnerabilities in the capitalist economy to public attention. Confidence in global value chains was shaken when nation-states began to seize shipments of medical supplies, such as, for instance, face masks, destined for other countries. Another eyeopener has been the outspoken negligence of some heads of state, notably in the United States, Brazil, and Belarus, to act on the best available epidemiological knowledge in order to limit the spread of this infectious disease in their populations. From the highest quarters of political office, the message was sent to citizens that “you are on your own now.” It is a shocking message, if only because it was so indiscriminately broadcast. Even that segment of the citizenry that was formerly enfranchised by a healthcare system is henceforth exposed to the kinds of biomedical risks that unfranchised groups have grown accustomed to over the years.
What lessons the public will draw from the policy failures related to COVID-19 remain to be seen. Right at the outset of the pandemic, hackers were summoned to restate their old case for local self-reliance and decentralized supply and production chains. One DIY response to the pandemic has been the flooding of 3D design repositories with printable face shields and similar kinds of medical trivia. The expansion of hacker culture in the direction of open pharma will be hastened by this global health crisis, although this trend has already been waiting in the wings for a number of years.
Hacking pharmaceuticals is the logical next step for the biohacker movement, which branched off from hacker culture a decade ago. Biohacking emerged in tandem with the dissemination of cheap and user-friendly wetware laboratory instruments (Delfanti 2013). The punk aesthetic and underdog rhetoric championed by spokespersons of the incipient biohacker movement contrasted markedly with their eagerness to comply with predominant epistemological hierarchies and regulatory protocols. In the words of one unsympathetic observer, DIY bio quickly became the “backyard of the biotech industry” (Ikemoto 2017). A catalyzing factor was the alarm in the media over public security. Such anxieties tend to be aroused by hacking in general but were strongly reinforced by the frightening scenario of bioterrorism. Out of concern for its public image, biohacking community leaders teamed up with the FBI at the first opportunity. This alliance bestowed the biohackers with credibility and made them into eligible recipients of private investment and public funding. Tocchetti and Aguiton (2015) conclude their study with an ironic twist. Due to police involvement in the name of public security, DIY biolabs speedily evolved into becoming complicit in the institutionally sanctioned forms of hazardous and irresponsible innovation that goes on in the biotech industry.
When some biohackers begin to explore DIY medicine production, the question looms large as to whether this new field of investigation will succumb just as quickly to the mandates of state and industry. Will the medical branch of the hacker movement be turned into the pharmaceutical industry’s backyard? If loathing of Big Pharma offered any guarantees, then the answer would be a resounding “no.” The staggering malpractices in the sector, which have been extensively documented by scholars over many years (Abraham 2008; Mirowski 2011, chap. 5; Rajan 2017), are explicitly targeted by high-profile pharma-hacker projects. For instance, the Open Insulin Project was triggered by the extortionate pricing schemes for this lifesaving compound (Gallegos et al. 2018), and the Open Source Malaria project seeks to fill a void in medical research due to the lack of commercial interest in curing tropical diseases (Arza and Sebastian 2018). The Four Thieves Vinegar Collective entered the fray by reverse-engineering and disclosing to the public a lifesaving cure for parasitic infections called pyrimethamine, shortly after its price had been raised from $13.50 to $750 per dose by the holder of the intellectual property rights. The narrative of David versus Goliath is part of the standard repertoire of hacker culture, and, as the above examples attest, these roles were frequently enacted by the nascent biohacker movement too.
The spokesperson for the Four Thieves Vinegar Collective gave the following explanation as to why the biohacking movement had caved in as soon as it came under pressure. The movement around biohacking was summoned almost from one day to the next, he recalls, attracting members with only a superficial allegiance to the hacker ethic. This contrasts unfavorably with the hacking of computers in the early days, which only caught the public’s attention after a prolonged period of subcultural gestation. Furthermore, the first wave of software hacking benefited from having organic intellectuals among their ranks, who could articulate goals and clarify the rationales of the hacker movement (Mixael Laufer, September 4, 2020).
The above remarks resonate with our own observations of earlier controversies within hacker communities. Whereas FBI agents were welcomed to the biohacker movement without it causing much fuss, the decision by the organizers of a Dutch hacker camp in 2013 to let the police set up a tent at the site was met with fierce resistance (Maxigas 2014). The contestations originated in a core of old-school hackers whose involvement in the scene went back to the first hacklabs, established in the 1980s with close ties to the squatting movement.
The lesson about the importance of historical memory does not inspire confidence in the future trajectory of pharma-hacking. That being said, Four Thieves Vinegar Collective is cooperating with harm reduction activists and reproductive health activists on projects where their goals overlap. The former has a stake in, to give but one example, the diffusion of methods for the DIY manufacturing of an antidote drug against opioid overdosing (naloxone). Likewise, the latter welcomes information being disclosed to the public about how to manufacture abortion medication at home (such as, for instance, mifepristone). This suggests that the expansion of hacking to the field of medicine will have the secondary consequence that hacker culture will be exposed to new influences from established and often militant social movements. Arguably, this is analogous to the exchange of ideas and political values that once stemmed from the symbiotic relationship between hacklabs and the squatter movement.
Based on the discussions above, we believe that the outcome of the latest cycle of hacker struggles will depend on them successfully “anticipating the anticipation.” It is foreseeable that the pharmaceutical industry, which is well-versed in capturing patient groups and using them in its marketing and lobbying strategies (Mulinari et al. 2020), will try to do the same with hackers. Innovation scholars are standing by, ready to give pharmaceutical companies advice on how to extract ideas and mine data from users conducting nonauthorized experiments with the firms’ products. To ensure that the latest dream of freedom is not realized in a nightmarish form, pharma-hackers must prepare themselves for the encroachment that is coming, in order to resist being subsumed under an open innovation model.