Thus far, the approach adopted in this book has been careful—examining multiple facets of hackers and hacker culture. While initially separate analyses, the chapters included in part 1 all point toward a common end. Proceeding from the individual level to the subcultural to the philosophical, this analysis has attempted to deeply explore hackers and hacking culture in a way that builds toward a broader structural understanding. Since hacking has been identified as (1) a class-based phenomenon, (2) a kind of labor (craft), and (3) linked to technological liberalism, the evidence indicates hacking is best understood from a political economic perspective. In particular, radical criminology and the Marxist theoretical tradition provide a robust body of knowledge from which to situate hackers in the broader dynamics of capitalism and the forces of crime control.
Before proceeding, we should revisit the definition of hacking developed in chapter 2. Hacking was determined to be a kind of late-modern technological transgressive craft or, in other words, craft(y). As such, the hacker is a laborer (either working for themselves or others) in the technological sphere (particularly in programming) who engages in creative, skillful, and often transgressive computational feats. Included are various free and open-source software programmers, security hackers, hardware hackers, and other members of the hacker community. Hackers can be hobbyists or professionals, criminal or non-criminal, but in all capacities they are laborers. In recognizing hackers as a collective of intellectual laborers, it thus makes sense to adopt nomenclature previously suggested by Wark (2004), to recognize hackers as a particular class of worker, which he refers to as “the hacker class.” The use of such a term, however, may be mystifying in that it aggregates widely variant forms of labor ranging from the cubicle-confined-yet-virtuosic programmer to the underground security hacker. The reader, therefore, should bear in mind that “hacker class” is meant to represent a diverse pool of technological labor.
The following discussion is divided into six sections, which situate hacking in the dialectical nuances of capital accumulation from a Marxist perspective and thus present “a searing cultural assault on the accepted meanings of crime, law, and justice” (Ferrell 2013, 262).1 First, the implications of hacking as a middle-class phenomenon are discussed in the context of Marxism. Then, hacking is discussed as a craft, filtered through Marx’s discussions of skill, social structures, and labor experiences. Third, narratives concerning a split from the Protestant ethic called the hacker ethic are explored as they potentially contribute to the immiseration and the exploitation of the hacker class. Specific ways in which hackers are exploited are then explored. Fifth, technological liberalism is situated in the greater history of economic liberalism with particular attention to liberalism’s entrenchment in the contradictions of capitalism. Finally, hacking is briefly discussed as a blurring of production and consumption in late-modern capitalism. Chapter 5 then expands on this analysis, providing what is perhaps the most radical criminological component of this analysis, exploring how the image of hackers, technology, and intellectual property are arranged in such a way to permit the implementation of legal mechanisms towards hackers and the technological realm generally.
Early in chapter 1, hacking was established to be a largely a middle-class phenomenon (though, by no means, exclusively). While this conclusion may be obvious to some, as Karl Polanyi (1944, 133) has stated, “The emphasis on class is important.” The middle classes, for Marx, were a group precariously situated in capitalist society. They reap relative benefits from their class positioning in society, yet are constantly in peril of trickling into the proletariat. As capitalism has evolved over time, the distinction between middle and working classes have only become more blurred and permeable. Because of their relative privilege over other members of the proletariat or non-bourgeois classes, they are often willing to defend capitalism. When they confront the political economy, they “fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history” (Marx and Engels [1848] 2005, 20). Hackers find themselves in similar class positioning under late-modern capitalism—caught in the wheels yet often relatively privileged compared to lower and working classes.
Many previous analyses of hackers and other social and cultural issues surrounding the rise of the information economy have fallen into what Michael Perelman (1998, 9) has described as a “willful disregard for the nature of class.” Class helps shape the narratives of peoples’ lives. The analysis of hacker background and developmental factors showed that, while the cost of technology is rapidly declining, there are particular advantages afforded to hackers as largely members of the middle class relative to the working class and poor including (1) the ability to readily access computers, (2) surplus time to spend learning the ins-and-outs of programming and other computer-related tasks, and (3) existing in an environment that is more likely to nurture behaviors conducive to learning about computers and programming. These advantages matter as much in their early stages of development as they do in adolescence and adulthood.
From a Marxist perspective, the early exposure to technology that such class positioning affords is vital in learning to work. In Capital Volume 1, Marx ([1867] 1967, 421) describes that to be an effective machinist, it is best to start young: “To work at a machine, the workman should be taught from childhood, in order that he may learn to adapt his own movements to the uniform and unceasing motion of an automaton.” Of course, Marx was writing at a time where the machine was being used to deskill labor and reduce the worker to a simple cog in the productive process. While deskilling still occurs—most notably with advances in artificial intelligence—there is a strong need for skilled laborers in the technological domains, particularly computers. Even in these circles, there is a pressure to start young as exemplified through efforts to pull children into computer programming training or “coding camps” and other related programs.
In describing the rise of knowledge and technology workers in the current era of capitalism, David Harvey (2014, 188) states: “They needed, however, to be well educated in analytic and symbolic skills and much of this begins in the home where, loaded down with electronic gadgets, children learn at an early age how to use and manipulate data and information adequate for an emergent ‘knowledge-based’ economy.” Then, connecting such early development with technology to middle-class status, Harvey (2014, 188) continues: “This group forms the core of a relatively affluent though highly mobile upper-middle class within capitalism.” The ability to access technology early and often—found more often among middle and upper classes—is thus associated strongly with developing proclivities into hacking.
Though the cost of technology is continuously declining, and many hackers have engaged in practices to overcome cost barriers, pricing and availability still constitute a barrier for large swathes of the population. For instance, even if one were to fully take advantage of F/OSS software, acquiring hardware alone could make things difficult. If one is poor then practices like dumpster diving or “trashing” for old computers and components are available to circumvent cost barriers. These practices, however, indicate that additional (and sometimes significant) efforts are unnecessary for middle or upper classes.
In addition, as chapter 1 previously indicated, the relative privilege of middle-class status also is conducive to a pre-adolescent environment that favors learning and interest in technology. “Middle-class households,” Perelman (1998, 9) explains, “can offer their children access to powerful new learning opportunities, such as computers and online services, which families of poorer children cannot dream of affording.” Much of this learning happens within the context of play for the young and “the economics of play works in favor of the well-to-do” (12). Children in relatively affluent environments are not only more likely to have access to computers but also to people who offer instruction and advice in technology—poor children are often at a disadvantage in this regard. As a result, “class status is crucially relevant in understanding the role of information within the information economy” (13). In other words, many hackers have the advantage of various environmental, intellectual, and material resources indicating economic class as a key variable.
All human beings want the satisfaction of doing something well and want to believe in what they do. Yet at work, in education, in politics, the new order does not and cannot satisfy this desire.
(Sennett 2006, 194)
The second chapter of this book explored the essence of hacking. In doing so, this work found that hacking is perhaps best thought of as a kind of labor—craft. This finding points to the necessity of a political economic analysis. Craftwork has a conflicted history with the progression of capitalism—a conflict that Marx ([1867] 1967) himself noted while describing how machinery further intensified the exploitation of the worker through reducing the number of laborers necessary (thus increasing the surplus population and also deskilling work). This, in turn, increased dependency on the capitalist for employment and perpetuated the alienation between the worker and him/herself.2 He perhaps best summarizes this relationship by stating, “The number of tools that a machine can bring into play simultaneously, is from the very first emancipated from the organic limits that hedge in the tools of a handicraftsman” (374). Sennett (2008, 80) echoes this sentiment: “The greatest dilemma faced by the modern artisan-craftsman is the machine. Is it a friendly tool or an enemy replacing work of the human hand?” Three components of craftwork are discussed here as relevant from a Marxist perspective—useful for situating hacking in the dialectics of capital accumulation. The first concerns skill, followed by hacking and guild structures, and ending with the experience of craftwork and hacking.
One of the key features that qualifies hacking as a craft is an appreciation of skill. Skill is the marker of a true hacker and craftsperson. No legitimate claim to either can be made until one accrues the skill necessary to be recognized by one’s peers as such and, even so, there is always the lingering impetus for greater skill development. Marxist analyses of labor, however, have long noted “capital’s penchant for deskilling,” thus pitting the elements of craft against the interests of capital (Harvey 2014, 119; see also Braverman 1974; Marx [1867] 1967; Perelman 1998). In the early periods of industrialization, craftwork was eroded, giving way to the efficiency and control demanded under advocates for Taylorism, Fordism, and similar deskilling regimes. For these laborers, “their specialized skill is rendered worthless by the new methods of production” (Marx and Engels [1848] 2005, 16). To increase the ability of capital to extract greater surplus value from the worker, labor had to be broken into its constituent tasks, which could then be efficiently strung together along a series of “specialists” and machines to accomplish the manufacture of a product more rapidly than any single craftsperson could. Such approaches did make many goods affordable for the masses—indeed, such has been one of the canonized social goods wrought through industrialization.
There are problems with the industrialized labor process, however, which Marx was more than keen to point out. One is that these processes—particularly the inclusion of machinery—makes it so the worker has to spend less time generating the value it takes to pay their wages for material subsistence or, as Marx describes it, to reproduce their labor. This process then means that more of the time the worker toils at the machine is more surplus value generated which the capitalist gets to reap. In this way, the worker is said to be exploited. Another consequence of this process is that the worker becomes alienated. While this alienation occurs in various ways, one is that the worker becomes alienated from their work. In other words, in the era of craftwork, the laborer was in greater control of the process of production and this process was also more internalized. The movements of the craftperson, the skill developed, and the knowledge acquired through time and effort were all integral to the process. Thus it was difficult to separate labor from laborer. Under industrialized capital production, however, the skill and knowledge of the craftperson are removed. Skill is replaced by task specialization, such as screwing on a single bolt to a car chassis ad infinitum, and through machines capable of performing intricate tasks with relatively little human input. Knowledge is replaced by a concentrated caste of machine builders and designers. In this way, the worker is alienated from their labor in that it is now something external to them and, through the process of exploitation, hostile.
Of course, the emphasis on deskilling has not been total. Indeed, there have been many forms of skilled labor that have endured. After all, if skilled labor were completely eradicated, who would design and build new technologies? This presents a contradiction for capital because it has a vested interest in the products of skilled labor but there is “a direct relationship between the degree of skill required to perform any given task and the scarcity of that skill,” according to Ursula Huws (2014, 28). Further, skill possession increases “the ability of the workers who possess it to negotiate with employers . . . for high wages and decent working conditions.” While machinery has been traditionally used to resolve this problem, until artificial intelligence advances sufficiently, machines cannot replace the skilled and creative labor necessary to design new technologies.
Where capital cannot eradicate skill, it instead attempts to reduce its monopolization. Harvey (2014, 120) describes the abolition of monopolizable skills in computer programming:
When new skills become important, such as computer programming, then the issue for capital is not necessarily the abolition of those skills (which it may ultimately achieve through artificial intelligence) but the undermining of their potential monopoly character by opening up abundant avenues for training in them. When the labour force equipped with programming skills grows from relatively small to super-abundant, then this breaks monopoly power and brings down the cost of that labour to a much lower level than was formerly the case. When computer programmers are ten-a-penny, then capital is perfectly happy to identify this as one form of skilled labour in its employ, even to the point of conceding a higher rate of remuneration and more respect in the workplace than the social average.
In this way, capital is said to deskill the domains that provide the best return on surplus value without the need for skill and to proliferate skill in areas where it is necessary. This strategy is, as Harvey (2014) describes, to essentially saturate the market with skilled labor so as to prevent its monopoly power.
Hacking then presents a two-folded reaction to capital’s efforts. First, it is a clear reaction to the deskilling of labor generally. By embodying many characteristics of craft, hacking runs against the banality of modern work environments and seeks a return to a time when the craft was worth pursuing in and of itself—developing one’s skill in a trade and seeking satisfaction through that labor. From the hacker working on the edges of programming development to the security researcher seeking new and innovative ways to bypass or obliterate digital security systems, the phenomenological objective is to find satisfaction in ones work—through flow, excitement, or other emotional outcomes. In many ways, it is a struggle against the tedium and banality of late modernity.
The other reaction is to the erosion of monopolizable skills. Hacking is not just about developing skill. In its emphasis on doing inventive and unorthodox things, it pushes ahead—each hacker thus developing a kind of niche, a specialty. The problem is the moment they solve a particular problem or figure out a new approach and that knowledge becomes shared, it is open to proliferation among other programmers. For instance, the moment an innovative new program in Linux is created, others may be similarly crafted for proprietary operating systems.3 In the domain of security, when one person finds and publishes a new exploit, it can be appropriated into the literature used to train new security engineers and programmers.4 Or when a malware writer codes a new and inventive virus and releases it into the wild, that code is open for study by security researchers and potentially replication by other enterprising coders. When considered in tandem with the ever-expanding body of knowledge in these domains and the need for workers to continuously keep abreast of current developments in their fields—lest they fall victim to “skills extinction”—it becomes clear that the skills hackers develop are not “durable possessions” (Sennett 2006, 95). The continual emergence of new technology similarly threatens to antiquate accrued skills. In this way, hackers and similar laborers are always in a rush against their own obsolescence, seeking to stay on the cutting edge. In the workplace, this approach could be seen as a way to prevent their skills from becoming devalued through the mass training of other programmers. Such efforts are also necessary for hacker-laborers to prevent being rendered useless in late-modern capitalism and thus be relegated to the ranks of the surplus population (Marx [1867] 1967; Sennett 2006). These threats are all the more intense when considering that the growing pool of skilled labor domestically in the West is increasingly displaced by cheaper skilled labor in the areas of programming and human services elsewhere in the world through globalization of the market (Fuchs 2014; Sennett 2006).
To summarize, then, hacking and craftwork can be seen as ways to overcome the alienation of deskilled labor by internalizing the labor process through skill development and knowledge attainment. In addition, hacking also finds itself caught in a dilemma as the threat of deskilling is replaced with that of the devaluation of skill. Where the elimination of skill is not practical—such as in the domain of programming—capital strives to devalue skills through the proliferation of avenues for training. Hackers, as craftpersons, prevent total devaluation as they push for continual skill development and the creation of new and innovative tricks and solutions. The dilemma, however, is that the more hackers expand what can be done with computers (and share that knowledge) they potentially contribute to the pool of knowledge which can be used to train others. Thus, hackers are caught in a race against their own devaluation.
Capital and hacking have a relationship erected around the use, development, and control of skill and knowledge. Skill, however, is not just a relationship between a worker (or a machine) and the object of labor. It is also inherently a social relation. One such manifestation of this, as previously described, is alienation. Skill can also be a mechanism for erecting and stratifying social groups as evidenced among both craftpersons and hackers. Social learning structures are built based on the accruement and demonstration of skill and are thus stratified to some degree along those lines. Before capitalism, production was dominated by craftpersons often organized under guilds which “conferred monopoly power over access to a skill that was based on a specific technical expertise” (Harvey 2014, 117). As evident in the social relations of skill, guilds were important because they allowed workers to ensure at least a small degree of prestige and higher rates of compensation for their labor. One point of tension between craft and capitalism was in the destruction of guilds, thereby allowing capitalists to seize control of “labour processes in industrial production” from “a division of labour and skill structure that were strongly rooted in the trades, resting on artisan labour” (116–117). Thus the social relations of skill were transformed from guild structures to the logics of industrial capitalism.
In a late-modern resurgence of guild-like social relations of skill, the hacking community further indicates a kind of backlash against the productive powers of capitalism. Previously, in most occupational environments, capital sought to tear down the power of workers in collectives—first as guilds, then as unions—to ensure the greatest returns on investment through surplus value. While the hacking community has arisen with similarities to guilds, this subculture does not necessarily help secure the wages and the nature of technological work from capital. What the hacker community does accomplish, however, paralleling guilds, is to create social structures to control and propagate learning and the development of skills. While advances in artificial intelligence and other areas of technology may eventually render various technological positions relatively deskilled (Harvey 2014), hackers—through the constant emphasis on creativity, novelty, and skill—race ahead of such advances. In turn, hackers secure a position as craftpersons, and the hacking community then serves as a guild to promote the spread of such skills.
Skill, however, is also a trait intimately tied to the phenomenological experience of both craft and hacking. The feelings of satisfaction and excitement—through such mechanisms like flow—stem from a deeply engaging process of trial-and-error, learning, honing, and development (in some case, such as security hacking, risk plays an increased role in the emotional experience). In this sense, the labor process is largely internalized within the individual. This internalization is even evident in Marx’s ([1867] 1967) definition of labor-power: “By labour-power or capacity for labour is to be understood the aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities existing in a human being, which he exercises whenever he produces a use-value of any description” (emphasis added). Alienation occurs when those mental and physical capabilities are externalized from the individual labor through industrialization and machinery. This alienation provides insights into capital’s effects on hackers’ relationship to skill, as previously discussed, but it also—through externalizing the process of labor—serves to augment the experience of labor as well.
Throughout his work, Marx highlights that, in the unalienated form, the laborer gains satisfaction from the labor process. He asserted that it was not work itself that was the problem but the particular form of labor and the social relations that manifested around it. Alienation therefore generates a negative psychic experience for workers. The augmentation of the labor process through capital comes “at the cost of the mental, emotional, and physical well-being of the workers in its employ” (Harvey 2014, 125). Such alienation can create a deep sense of dissatisfaction with one’s work. For instance, Sennett (2006, 106) describes programmers who were frustrated by their company’s practice of pushing for early releases of software: “These programmers resented the firm’s practice of shipping out incompletely formulated software in versions then ‘corrected’ through consumer struggles and complaints. While deeply antithetic to unions, the programmers were developing a loose professional movement called craft in code, demanding that the company desist from this highly profitable but poor-quality practice. They wanted the time to get the programs right; their sense of meaningful work depended on doing this job well for its own sake.” The company pushed to streamline the production process while the programmers wanted to work intimately with the code—to perfect it. It is in this investment of time and themselves that they found meaning in their work. When software development is sped up and decoupled from the interests of the programmer-laborer, meaning begins to trickle away. These programmers were experiencing a degree of alienation from their labor.
As previously stated, both skill and knowledge are components of the labor process that were once deeply internalized within the individual, becoming increasingly externalized through changes in production, particularly the introduction of machines. Of particular importance, skill and knowledge—collectively called “intelligence” (Harvey 2014)—once removed, eliminate parts of the experience vital for intrinsically satisfying work: “To the degree that intelligence is increasingly incorporated into machines, so the unity between mental and manual aspects of labouring is broken. Workers are deprived of mental challenges or creative possibilities. They become mere machine operators, appendages of the machines rather than masters of their fates and fortunes. The loss of any sense of wholeness or personal authorship diminishes emotional satisfactions. All creativity, spontaneity and charm go out of the work. The activity of working for capital becomes, in short, empty and meaningless. And human beings cannot live in a world devoid of all meaning” (Harvey 2014, 125). In other words, the alienation process in labor deprives the worker of those elements that give work meaning—namely creativity, mental challenges, and autonomy. We can understand then why Marx ([1867] 1967, 427) noted that “only since the introduction of machinery has the workman fought against the instrument of labour itself, the material embodiment of capital.”5
Some of this may sound familiar to the reader. When previously describing hacking as craft, the experiential components of craftwork were discussed. In particular, craftwork was described as an intimately satisfying process of labor where the person would eventually be able to lose themselves in the activity. The ability to exercise skill, be creative, and develop oneself alongside the product is what makes both craftwork and hacking meaningful. Under capital production, efficiency and mass production are favored over the aspects of labor that give it significance for the worker. In this way, hacking can be seen as a kind of reaction to industrialized production—a sort of sanctuary for satisfying labor and flow in late modernity. In its continual race to avoid the monopolization of skill, hacking also becomes a craft-like process of labor that preserves the innate satisfactions of work.
As stated earlier, in his descriptions of industrialized capital, Marx ([1867] 1967) indicated that machinery—technology—was one of the primary mechanisms used to deprive the laborer of the satisfactions of meaningful work: “The lightening of the labour, even, becomes a sort of torture, since the machine does not free the labourer from work, but deprives the work of all interest” (423). It is interesting, then, that technology does not destroy the satisfactions found in the experience of working for the hacker per se. Instead, work with technology becomes a source of meaning. The way this happens is through the craftwork dimensions described previously, allowing satisfaction through work with technology rather than through technology. Through the method of craft, hackers attempt to push the limits of what can be done with technology through skill, knowledge, and creativity. Conversely, industrialized labor uses technology to deprive these qualities to the worker. As such, hackers are able to maintain the satisfactions of labor through the very devices used to strip labor of meaning elsewhere. This experience, however, becomes an issue when it contributes to the exploitation of hacker labor (as described later in the discussion of the hacker ethic).
Through capital, labor has become devoid of meaning for many workers. Hackers and other technologists may struggle against this by finding satisfaction in working directly with technology, flipping the relationship between labor and technology on its head. In this manner, hackers and similar technologists challenge what Max Weber ([1905] 2002) refers to as the Protestant ethic. For Weber, this ethic stemmed from a widespread Calvinist anxiety that a person could do little to alter their fate for the afterlife—one’s post-death destiny was predetermined. The method for resolving such dread was to labor toward prosperity. Consistent with the biblical passage that “for there is no good tree which produces bad fruit, nor, on the other hand, a bad tree which produces good fruit” (Luke 6:43), laborers who subscribed to the Protestant ethic believed that it would be impossible for a damned person to thrive in the living world. Wealth became a sign of Godliness. Under the Protestant ethic, work is not a source of satisfaction in and of itself; enjoyment of labor was of little concern. Rather, labor and wealth are valued first and foremost as measures of afterlife predestination. In recent decades, scholars have argued that this Protestant ethic has been supplanted as the dominant ethos of work in late modernity, particularly in tech industries, by the hacker ethic. Much as the Protestant ethic promoted the exploitation of labor, so too does this hacker ethic in the context of late-modern capitalism. It is towards this ethic the analysis now turns.
In the introduction of this book, the idea of the hacker ethic was briefly explored. If the reader will remember, numerous writers have attempted to detail a common subcultural ethos permeating the hacker community. These attempts have described this ethos in multiple ways such as a do-it-yourself orientation (Levy 1984), underpinned with a sense of liberalism (Coleman and Golub 2008), laced with a technological ontology (Warnick 2004), and filled with a sense of technological utopianism (Barbrook and Cameron 2001). Of particular importance, some authors argue hacker culture embodies a break from the Protestant ethic, which mandates a divide between time at work and time spent at recreation (Brown 2008; Himanen 2001; Kirkpatrick 2002). Instead, hackers are said to implode this ethic and engage in labor and leisure simultaneously. Such a perspective on work has been referred to as “the hacker ethic.”
As previously demonstrated, these authors are correct in their assessment of hacking as a form of labor. These writings on the hacker ethic, however, are theoretically and conceptually myopic in that—loosely drawing from Weber—they often view the hacker ethic in a manner that can be considered utopian. Indeed, if these writers are to be believed, the hacker ethic is a beacon of hope against the droll mundanities of everyday labor under the Protestant ethic. Now the worker is to enjoy their productive time. What these arguments fail to see is that the hacker ethic—from a Marxist perspective—does not stop the exploitation and alienation that occur under capitalism. Instead, these relations only shift while maintaining their hierarchical rigidity.
In their work, these authors wax poetic about the liberating potentialities of the blurring of labor and leisure (Brown 2008; Himanen 2001; Kirkpatrick 2002). The problem is that, for workers under the hacker ethic, their labor is not simply blurred with leisure—this blurring creates an exploitable pool of additional surplus value for capital. During the work day, part of the time spent laboring is dedicated towards labor paying for itself, generating enough value to maintain its material existence—which Marx calls necessary labour time. Once that is taken care of, the rest of the time spent producing is value the capitalist pockets, as Marx ([1867] 1967, 217) explains:
During the second period of the labour-process, that in which his labour is no longer necessary labour, the workman, it is true, labours, expends labour-power; but his labour, being no longer necessary labour, he creates no value for himself. He creates surplus-value which, for the capitalist, has all the charms of a creation out of nothing. This portion of the working-day, I name surplus labour-time, and to the labour expended during that time, I give the name of surplus-labour. It is every bit as important, for a correct understanding of surplus-value, as nothing but materialised surplus-labour, as it is, for a proper comprehension of value, to conceive it as a mere congelation of so many hours of labour, as nothing but materialised labour.
In this process, while the worker can commit more of their time to the capitalist for increased wages, they must give more of themselves as well. As Marx ([1844] 1959, 4) explains in The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844: “The raising of wages gives rise to overwork among workers. The more they wish to earn, the more must they sacrifice their time and carry out slave-labor, completely losing all their freedom, in the service of greed. Thereby they shorten their lives.” Part of the sacrifice for the worker is time in which they are in control of themselves; time given over to the capitalist. Additionally, if the worker does not give their time over and, instead “consumes his disposable time for himself,” then through the denial of surplus value, “he robs the capitalist” (Marx [1867] 1967, 233).6 While machinery and other forms of technology work together to alienate the worker, as previously discussed, it also then amplifies the exploitation of labor: “Thus we see, that machinery, while augmenting the human material that forms the principal object of capital’s exploiting power, at the same time raises the degree of exploitation” (395).7
It is easy to see how the blurring of labor and leisure can be framed positively; the worker no longer must toil for the bourgeoisie. The “toil” is somehow mitigated because labor takes on an enjoyable quality. Productive time, to some extent, becomes recreational time. Recreational time, however, also becomes productive time. Hours previously spent doing tasks unrelated to one’s occupation are now spent developing skills and potential intellectual commodities which will make them more valuable workers: “There are no clear boundaries any longer between work time and leisure time, between the inside and outside of the factory, and between wage and volunteer labor” (Söderberg 2008, 4). For example, a programmer working on a personal project at home is not just enjoying their occupation; they are also becoming more skillful workers for their day job. This may be one of the greatest tricks of capitalism in the late twentieth century and into the twenty-first century: if the laborer is allowed to enjoy their work, they will surrender more of their productive time to the capitalist.
For many, this may not be an issue—after all, should not the worker enjoy their labor? Certainly the notion that labor should be something satisfying and meaningful to the worker is agreeable to most. Hackers and programmers, however, are not undergoing satisfying and meaningful labor in a void.8 According to Marx ([1844] 1959, 29), when labor is sold under capitalism, they pour their life into the object and that life becomes something external to the laborer:
The worker puts his life into the object; but now his life no longer belongs to him but to the object. Hence, the greater this activity, the more the worker lacks objects. Whatever the product of his labor is, he is not. Therefore, the greater this product, the less is he himself. The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labor becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him, and that it becomes a power on its own confronting him. It means that the life, which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien.9
In the blurring of labor and leisure, the life poured into the object is equally “hostile and alien” as it acts to immiserate. Labor is still separated from the worker and given to the capitalist (the financial fruits of the labor are reaped almost entirely by the techno-capitalist). The difference between this relationship of life and its objectification under the Protestant ethic and the so-called hacker ethic is the manner in which work is given emotional and moral value. For the Protestant ethic, work was intimately tied to the idea of religion, conferring value onto work through its implications of delayed gratification. For the hacker ethic, however, the work is given emotional and moral value through the association of pleasure and fulfillment in the act of labor itself. In both instances, life is still surrendered for the sake of the capitalist. While the relationship (or the perceived relationship) between the laborer and work has changed, the process of capital accumulation is left relatively intact and the worker is still immiserated.
In this way, the transition from the Protestant ethic to the hacker ethic further facilitates the exploitation of the hacker class. Direct work with computers through the hacker ethic thus fulfills one of the key problems surrounding machinery for Marx ([1867] 1967, 403): “If machinery be the most powerful means for increasing the productiveness of labour—i.e., for shortening the working-time required in the production of a commodity, it becomes in the hands of capital the most powerful means, in those industries first invaded by it, for lengthening the working-day beyond all bounds set by human nature. It creates, on the one hand, new conditions by which capital is enabled to give free scope to this its constant tendency, and on the other hand, new motives with which to whet capital’s appetite for the labour of others.” Under the hacker ethic, the technologist surrenders more of their time over to the capitalist willingly. In this way, the hacker ethic embodies what Julian Kücklich (2005) refers to as playbour, a portmanteau of play and labour. Christian Fuchs (2014, 124) explains the exploitative measures of playbour in a manner similar to the dynamics underpinning the hacker ethic: “The exploitation of digital playbour is based on the collapse of the distinction between work time and play time . . . workers are expected to have fun during work time and play time becomes productive and work-like. Play time and work time intersect and all human time of existence tends to be exploited for the sake of capital accumulation.” Thus, the blurring of labor and leisure under the hacker ethic—the collapse of the divide between work and play—seems to make hackers and other technologically skilled workers vulnerable to exploitation on a major scale, with capitalists able to further colonialize workers’ time. Indeed, this is part of a broader trend within business, particularly among white-collar and technological occupations that seek to capitalize on the voluntary efforts of workers (Fleming 2013). The problem with playbour and the hacker ethic, however, is that the worker is often gleeful at such immiseration and exploitation since labor becomes almost indistinguishable from play. As Fuchs (2014, 133) states, “Exploitation tends to feel like fun and becomes part of free time.”
Under trades, the worker could engage in deep and fulfilling labor in a way which gave them monopoly control over the product and the process (though the craft/tradesmen system was by no means free of flaws itself). Under industrial capital, both of these characteristics—the fulfillment and the control—were removed from the laborer. The capitalist then extracted surplus value from the worker and constantly searched for ways to intensify the percent of surplus value to be had. Under playbour and the hacker ethic (and a resurgence in the craft of technological work), some sense of fulfillment is returned to the labor process as well as some degree of autonomy/control. The ability to extract value through surplus labor, however, still seems to be in the hands of capital. The dynamics underpinning the relationship between the worker and the process of labor thus seem to be shifting in late modernity while the relation between workers and capital appear to have remained relatively constant. Whether in the form of profession, hobby, rebellion, or even criminality, hacker labor appears vulnerable to immediate commodification.
Not only does the rise of the hacker ethic, which is endorsed in various tech industries (Fuchs, 2014), perpetuate a gleeful immiseration of the worker, there are specific ways in which hackers—as technological laborers—are exploited, particularly related to their creative tendencies because “it is more or less axiomatic, at least in a capitalist economic system, that growth depends on innovation” (Huws 2014, 104). The ways in which hacker labor is exploited are numerous and, as such, a comprehensive explication is avoided in favor of a representative discussion. Key contradictions and points of exploitation will be detailed beginning with the relationship between free and open-source software (F/OSS), proprietary software, and commercial interests. Remember that the F/OSS movement is directed towards collaborative programming experiences designed to generate software free for the public and open for others to contribute. Tension exists in the programming community about the appropriate philosophy to guide F/OSS. One side holds F/OSS should contribute to the market place and has no problem with the appropriation of F/OSS for capitalist interests. The other opposes this relationship, though typically not on radical grounds but on liberal terms. As F/OSS guru Richard Stallman (2002) has stated, free in this sense means “free speech” rather than “free beer.” For such views some have labeled Stallman a communist or socialist. Stallman himself has denied these claims, asserting that capitalism itself is not the problem but proprietary ownership of software is, namely that it restricts access to source code which is considered a form of speech—potential radical resistance is neutralized through the language of liberalism.
Regardless of which philosophy is held in the F/OSS community, free and open-source software has become intimately connected with vectoralist production. For example, one of the largest enterprises in F/OSS programming is Linux, an open-source operating system based on the UNIX architecture, which comes in numerous varieties tailored for different user experiences and demands. Such efforts are said to resist proprietary operating systems like Microsoft’s Windows and Apple’s Mac OS because of their free and open nature.
Currently, however, Linux is being absorbed into capital production. For instance, it is used as the primary operating system in many business servers, thus providing a low-cost platform for companies. Industry giant IBM boasts of using Linux in many of its servers (Vaidhyanathan 2012). Google has also appropriated Linux in its Android operating system, which is currently the most widely used smartphone platform (Calia 2013). While Google does not profit directly from the operating system itself because of the copyright requirements dictated by the Linux community, it does profit from sales from the Google Play store—a marketplace where users can purchase applications and other media for their Android electronics. In this sense, Google profits from Android, which was chiefly built from decades of development from the Linux community—a legacy of labor that it got for free. Similarly, the video-game distribution platform, Steam (owned by the Valve Corporation) has appropriated Linux to create its own “distro” (distribution) for computer gaming called SteamOS. Steam thus gets to release video games through its service (of which it gets a cut of the sales) on an F/OSS platform. While Valve must pour capital into altering Linux to meet their needs (similar to Google with Android), much of the foundational labor did not cost the company a red cent.
The lines between the F/OSS movement and capitalist production are permeable. In the early days when the F/OSS movement was simply the free software movement, key figures in the hacker community gathered to determine how to encourage corporate involvement in free software (Söderberg 2008). The term “open source” was adopted to appeal to businesses worried that free software would undermine profits. In addition, they also developed an alternative to the GPL software license, which makes all works accessible and modifiable and subsumes any subsequent works automatically under the same license, thus making proprietary ownership of code difficult. The summit decided to create an “open source license” that performs the same functions as the GPL but allows for derivative works to be copyrighted, allowing corporations to make their own proprietary versions to make open-source software (and its associated labor) profitable (Söderberg 2008). It would seem, then, that the hacker class assists in its own exploitation. To put the situation bluntly: “Open-source licenses can be described as an organisational principle for systematising ‘primitive accumulation,’ by which is meant theft, of the social labour taking place in developing communities and in the commons” (Söderberg 2008, 38).
Such forms of exploitation echo Barbrook and Cameron (2001) in their description of the “Californian Ideology”: “The existence of a ‘gift economy’ among hobbyists was a necessary precondition for the subsequent success of products made by Apple and Microsoft. Even now, shareware programs still play a vital role in advancing software design” (370–371). They continue by stating, “The history of the Internet also contradicts the tenets of the free-market ideologues . . . many of the key Net programs and applications were invented either by hobbyists or by professionals working in their spare time. For instance, the MUD [multi-user dungeon] program, which allows real-time Net conferencing, was invented by a group of students who wanted to play fantasy games over a computer network” (371). The infrastructures and various technologies these companies use are not created through capital alone. Rather, such advancements often involve using products developed through the free labor of “hobbyists” or “professionals working in their spare time.” Thus, while F/OSS can be said to resist commercialization through collaboration and openness (meant to stand in opposition to proprietary ownership and direct control of labor), capital re-calibrates itself and absorbs F/OSS as an area of extractable resources, particularly intellectual labor—winning “the ultimate prize for companies involved in the hacker movement is to engage a pool of gratis labour in one end of the balance sheet and to sell the output in the other end with no discount” (Söderberg 2008, 40).
In this fashion, F/OSS serves as a kind of digital commons—a collective pool of labor intended for the benefit of society at large. Capital, however, “consumes the commons for free . . . The essence of the commons is its social character, but in capitalism the commons are individually appropriated as proprietary goods by capital” (Fuchs 2010, 189). An additional consequence is that obtaining free labor from open source drives down the wages of employed programmers: “Not only do corporations thereby cut labour costs in individual programming projects. They also impose an overall downward pressure on the wages and working conditions of in-house computer programmers” (Söderberg 2008, 40; see also Dafermos and Söderberg 2009; Fuchs 2014).
The appropriation of such fruits of hacker intellectual labor constitutes expropriation bordering on what Marx ([1867] 1967) termed primary or primitive accumulation and Harvey (2010) describes as accumulation by dispossession. Under this method of accumulation, capitalists actively seek to take resources away from laborers. Early capitalist land grabs is one example of this phenomenon. The bourgeoisie devised methods, often deploying the state, to claim rights to landed resources, thus dispossessing laborers of their access to these resources. Once capitalists had control of these resources, it became much easier to force workers to sell their labor, as a vital means of subsistence was now converted into property and restricted from public use.
Of course, under traditional forms of primitive accumulation, the worker is entirely deprived of access without submitting to the will of the now legally sanctioned owner or becoming an outlaw (Hobsbawm 1965). Under this contemporary form of informational primitive accumulation, the worker is not wholly cut off. Such is the nature of computational technologies—information is only copied rather than stolen outright. In this sense, then, it is not so much the intellectual resources themselves that are subjected to primitive accumulation but the labor used to develop these software programs as resources. Indeed, under the ethos of the “gift economy,” members of the hacker class—while working towards noble ambitions of creating software for the common good—have their labor appropriated by vectoralists. Perelman (1998, 78) thus distinguishes this form of accumulation as “advanced accumulation.”
This accumulation occurs because of the capitalists class’ “collective monopoly over the means of production (or, in its updated version, the means of financing)” (Harvey 2014, 135; emphasis in original). In the case of intellectual property, such as F/OSS programs, however, means of production and means of financing also includes a near monopoly on the means of distribution—that is, control over the vectors (Wark 2004). Of course, the Internet has been said to provide a level playing field for distribution—everyone can contribute and share their content. Numerous success stories exist for individuals getting their messages out to the public for relatively little investment. These cases, however, do not represent the general predilection of Internet consumers. Most people want an easy-to-use product from a known vendor or brand, similar to how many users prefer familiar news sources on the Internet over independent media sources (Hess 2009).
In this way, capital possesses an advantage due to its tremendous resources. It can erect its own distribution channels and advertise its services in a way that most F/OSS software networks cannot. Fuchs (2014, 302) similarly addresses the how this disparity in finance capital perpetuates this disjuncture:
Within capitalism, free software development requires time and time is a scarce resource. So many free software developers have a day job for earning a living and contribute to software development voluntarily and unpaid during their spare time. Facebook and other commercial platforms in contrast have a revenue stream that stems from Internet prosumer commodification, which allows them to employ software engineers and other operational personnel, to buy servers and other goods that are necessary for operating and to engage in public relations by running ads and campaigns that promote Facebook usage. Platforms like Facebook and Google also have reputational power and political influence because they are huge organizations that control access to a large global user community.
In this manner, F/OSS programmers provide a large pool of free labor while capital can invest additional resources to retool F/OSS software to its needs and then use its resources, power, and influence to penetrate the market and garner attention. To provide an example, recall that for many Linux was not a popular computer operating system despite it being free and open for many years. Google, however, streamlined the user interface and then engaged in mass marketing through packaging the OS in smartphones. Android now dominates the smartphone market—Linux is widespread. Most users of Android, however, do not use Linux as a traditional operating system and may not even be familiar with free and open-source software.10 That is the power of finance capital in the vectors: “This means that alternative online platforms in capitalism are facing power inequalities that stem from the asymmetric distributions of money and other resources that are inherent in capitalism” (Fuchs 2014, 302).
Additionally, capitalists not only appropriate free and open-source software projects but also use the ideological values like “openness” and “freedom” as marketing tools.11 For instance, IBM invested in F/OSS development and marketed the enterprise through the slogan, “Peace, Love, and Linux” (Söderberg 2008, 5). Such strategies are essentially ventures of cultural capitalism, as Slavoj Žižek (2009, 52) describes: “At the level of consumption, this new spirit is that of so-called cultural capitalism; we primarily buy commodities neither on account of their utility nor as status symbols; we buy them to get the experience provided by them, we consume them in order to render our lives meaningful.” Similar to Žižek’s (2009) description of Starbucks and the “coffee ethic,” which packages abstract values into the consumptive experience, companies like Google benefit from some users who consume Android (and its other open source-based software like its web browser Chrome) because of its associations with free and open-source software.12 Thus, the hacker class’ labor is abstracted into liberal values, which, in turn, contribute to the consumer experience. The only party that comes out ahead in this scenario are corporate owners, while the hacker class continues to be immiserated and exploited.
Even underground, black market or otherwise illicit forms of hacking do not escape at least some form of exploitation under the auspices of capital accumulation. While gains may be had for hackers engaged in data theft, virus writing, and other forms of technocrime, capital has reoriented itself to these threats. Indeed, these threats have sparked a massive multi-billion dollar computer crime control industry (Yar 2008a). Technocriminals, including some hackers, thus provide a pool of labor that generates real and perceived levels of risk for individuals, businesses, and government agencies, among others. This risk is then transformed into a market gap that security and insurance companies can remedy. Even threats posed by technocriminals are thus exploitable. In addition, hackers may also form the ranks of the technosecurity industry, thus providing a pool of skilled labor for these companies. Hackers are therefore on both sides of the threat-security divide—providing, in many ways, both the illness and the cure for techno-woes. Capital, however, seems to be the primary beneficiary. Thus, according to Yar (2008a, 190), security has become “inextricably entwined with the circuits of accumulation in contemporary capitalism.”
Recall that in chapter 3, hacker perspectives on government, law, and law enforcement were examined. The analysis pointed towards a particular philosophical perspective on the state—and potentially in other domains—permeating hacker culture, described here as a technological liberalism. Involved is the ethical underpinnings of liberalism, a technological ontology, and a sense of technological utopianism. Two examples of technological liberalism were then given, crypto anarchy and technolibertarianism. Much like the other analyses presented in this work, this examination has direct implications for hackers’ relationships to capitalism from a Marxist perspective, particularly through its liberal philosophical roots. In particular, the history of liberalism and capitalism—economic liberalism, as Karl Polanyi (1944) refers to it—operates in a dialectical contradiction, capable of both oppression and liberation (Harvey 2014; Polanyi 1944).
Liberalism, with roots dating back to the Enlightenment, has arisen as a philosophical perspective intricately intertwined with the development of capitalism (Losurdo 2014). Polanyi (1944, 135) states: “Economic liberalism was the organizing principle of a society engaged in creating a market system.” The creation of private property and the ability to produce, buy, and sell goods on the market garnered strong legitimacy from liberal notions of autonomy, meritocracy, freedom, and liberty among others. With its emphasis on personal freedom, this philosophy abhorred state power and control. This liberalism, in all of its forms, usually maintains a wary and cynical perspective towards the state.
With economic liberalism came the idea of laissez-faire economics. Under this notion, the state would ideally refrain from meddling in the affairs of the market and only intervene when life, liberty, and property were at stake. Thus, as capitalism took off in various countries like England, “laissez-faire was interpreted narrowly; it meant freedom from regulations in production; trade was not comprised” (Polanyi 1944, 136). In other words, the state’s role became to protect political economic relations, but not to interfere with trade and the market. It was not until the 1830s, however, that “economic liberalism burst forth as a crusading passion, and laissez-faire become a militant creed” (136).
Economic liberalism and laissez-faire economics presented a kind of utopian ideal. Persons would be free to engage in market relations. As each person exercised freedom across the market—both in selling and purchasing—the market would maintain itself. The state would only be necessary to curb the impulse of others who would use their freedom to infringe on the liberty of others, either through violence, coercion, fraud, or theft. In this way, “laissez-faire or freedom of contract implied the freedom of workers to withhold their labor either individually or jointly, if they so decided; it implied also the freedom of businessmen to concert on selling prices irrespective of the wishes of the consumers” (Polanyi 1944, 148). While such practices could be engaged in, the ideal was that it would be irrational for persons to do this as the shifting forces of the market would punish that behavior. Polanyi (1944, 148) elaborates: “But in practice such freedom conflicted with the institution of a self-regulating market, and in such a conflict the self-regulating market was invariably accorded precedence.”13
Despite cooperative efforts between liberal and radical criminologists, radical criminology has long recognized the problems of liberalism, particularly with how such perspectives can easily become the handmaidens of power. Indeed, such wariness of liberalism is built into the core of radical criminology, as even Marx’s critiques of capitalism were reactions to the stark realities of economic liberalism and other historical circumstances. The idea of the utopian free market regulating itself with little intervention from the state for the betterment of all became a problematic affair for Marx. While capitalism did serve to advance humankind in terms of technological development and mass production, Marx was struck by the barbarity of the system towards its workers. How could such a supposedly utopian system of freedom and equality ravage entire portions of the population while other albeit smaller segments were afforded vast riches? From an extreme laissez-faire position, since all parties are capable of exercising their freedom, some chose more wisely and were awarded in the market place for it. Under this explanation, the causation for social stratification is internalized—often manifesting in rhetoric casting such diparities as results of moral or biological defects of the individual (Losurdo 2014). Resisting liberalism’s tendency to transform social issues into personal problems, Marx (and other radicals of the time) chose to view the problem as an illness of capital rather than an illness of character.
An example of one such issue presented by economic liberalism—particularly its vision of freedom—is articulated through Marx’s ([1867] 1967) descriptions of freedom and labor. He notes that workers under capitalism are simultaneously freed of ownership over the means of production—thus losing their capacity to make a living outside of wage labor—and also free to sell their labour-power to anyone they wish. Thus, through disparate ownership over the means of production (remember that current notions of private property were products of economic liberalism), the worker was subordinated in the market place, forced to subsist through wage labor. What this example demonstrates is the dual character of freedom—it is a source of liberty and a source of domination, one of the key contradictions of capitalism noted in Marx’s work. There is, as Harvey (2014, 203) states, “a whale of a contradiction here. Freedom and domination go hand in hand. There is no such thing as freedom that does not in some way have to deal in the dark arts of domination.”
Polanyi (1994, 257–258) points to the source of this contradiction between freedom and domination in the meaning of freedom itself: “Clearly, at the root of the dilemma there is the meaning of freedom itself. Liberal economy gave a false direction to our ideals. It seemed to approximate the fulfillment of intrinsically utopian expectations. No society is possible in which power and compulsion are absent, nor a world in which force has no function. It was an illusion to assume a society shaped by man’s will and wish alone. Yet this was the result of a market-view of society which equated economics with contractual relationships, and contractual relations with freedom.” Under this perspective, economic liberalism pretends as if “power and compulsion” as well as “force” are not problems for the liberal market.14 In forgetting these notions, power and coercion are then allowed to run roughshod over the populace through liberalism’s blind eye toward such forces. Only force or coercion of the state seems to be of concern. This dynamic can easily be seen in the neo-liberal economic policies of contemporary Western nations, most notably the United States, which have led to massive social inequality and also contributed to the expansion of institutions of social control, such as the U.S.’s corrections commercial complex and its military industrial apparatus (Lilly and Knepper 1993; Harvey 2014).
Even in the early days of liberalism, the contradiction between freedom and oppression was evident. Marxist philosopher Domenico Losurdo (2014) investigates such contradictions throughout the infancy and adolescence of liberalism, particularly in America and Britain. He describes how the rhetoric of liberalism was often paradoxically used to justify racial domination. The same Americans who were ardently trying to protect themselves from the perceived tyranny of British rule were also the ones deeply invested in maintaining chattel slavery and the relocation and extermination of the indigenous peoples (Losurdo 2014). To sustain this paradox, narratives were fashioned to exclude non-whites as full persons who would normally be protected under liberalism.15 For instance, British philosopher John Locke is quoted as denigrating the resistance of Native Americans against the expansion and domination of the colonists: “When he [the Native American] sought to challenge the march of civilization, violently opposing exploitation through labour of the uncultivated land occupied by him, the Indian, along with any other criminal could be equated with ‘one of those wild savage beasts with whom men can have no society nor security,’ and who ‘therefore may be destroyed as a lion or a tiger’” (cited in Losurdo 2014, 24). Under this strategy, non-Whites are reduced to the level of animal—as sub-human—and therefore categorically excluded from liberal protections. Animals were thought incapable of acting with the rational and moral mind of humans and, as such, were not considered able to appreciate their liberties nor act to protect them sufficiently in a civilized society.
Liberalism also holds that private property is necessary for the sustainment of liberty—people need to be able to own things and do with them as they please without interference from others. Once non-Whites were reduced to the level of animals, which could be owned as property, their ownership through means like chattel slavery became seen not as a form of domination but as an exercise of liberty (Losurdo 2014). Post-abolition, the narratives that sustained the contradiction between freedom and oppression shifted. Workers were brutally subjugated by capitalists. One justification for such exploitation was a belief that the workers did not deploy their liberty to the fullest extent possible (Losurdo 2014). If they had, then they would be owners rather than workers. Instead, they chose such conditions. Blame was internalized as social issues were transmogrified into personal problems. Such methods are reminiscent of contemporary political rhetoric surrounding wealth inequality and other social welfare issues. Thus, through liberalism, the denigration of the laboring classes under capitalism finds a legitimating mechanism that sustains the contradiction between freedom and oppression—the oppressed either are not deserving of liberty categorically or they fail to exercise their liberty adequately.16
It is in such a context of economic liberalism and the contradiction between freedom and domination that we find hackers and technological liberalism. In particular, there are aspects of technological liberalism that reflect broader beliefs in economic liberalism. Involved first is a rejection of state regulatory power. Recall two examples of technological liberalism provided in chapter 3, crypto anarchy and technolibertarianism. In both of these areas of thought, state scrutiny and control is thoroughly rejected (Frissell 2001; Hughes 2001; May 2001b). As John Perry Barlow (2001, 28) stated in his “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.” In this work, he goes as far as to reference the Boston Tea Party, a favored historical moment for the contemporary hyper-libertarian American political group, the Tea Party: “I decided it was a good a time as any to dump some tea in the virtual harbor.”
The primary problem with technological liberalism—particularly as expressed through the “Californian Ideology” (Barbrook and Cameron 2001)—is that, while they both reject state power, the emphasis on economic deregulation roughly parallels Polanyi’s (1944) description of economic liberalism and laissez-faire and Harvey’s (2005) descriptions of neo-liberalism. Technological liberalism thus “stresses individualism, personal responsibility, competition, private property, and consumerism, lacks consciousness of inequality and exploitation, and is in line with the basic ideas of neo-liberalism” (Fuchs 2014, 122; citation omitted).17 As my friend Gary Potter described it, “You are as free as our profit-margins allow.”
For instance, according to crypto anarchists, one of the perceived virtues of cryptography is that encryption can protect privacy in the market place, thus preventing state control from obstructing the flow of money and commodities (Hughes 2001). Timothy May (2001a, 67) declares that cryptography will allow corporations, along with other “virtual communities,” to effectively be “on a par with nation states”—an outcome he finds agreeable. Likewise, in attempting to cast-off the perceived oppression of the state, Barlow (2001, 28) defends online capitalist marketplaces by stating, “You [governments] have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces.” Barbrook and Cameron (2001, 373) summarize this state-centric political perspective in the following terms: “The California ideologues preach an antistatist gospel of high-tech libertarianism—a bizarre mish-mash of hippie anarchism and economic liberalism beefed up with lots of technological determinism. Rather than comprehend really existing capitalism, gurus from both New Left and New Right much prefer to advocate rival versions of a digital ‘Jeffersonian democracy.’” In other words, the digital philosophies that have emerged from the hacker class are, by and large, unreflexive of issues surrounding capitalism. For them, the problem is state authority alone. As a result, any political action on the part of the hacker class only addresses part of the problem and, in total, protects the interests of capitalism.
The hacker class does have a history of resisting corporations but these entities are not largely seen as the problem in and of themselves—only their attempts to exert control on technology and hacker activities are viewed in such a manner.18 In this sense, members of the hacker class are fans of laissez-faire economics as long as the market stays in sort of a utopian ideal—markets that maximize the liberal notion of free trade and ownership without resulting in control and domination. Hackers by and large remain fairly uncritical of capitalism as a power structure, however, thus rendering this ideal fantastical. To essentialize these hacker philosophies, then, we can assert state and corporate efforts to exert control are resisted but the idea of the capitalist marketplace is left intact—and it is here we find the critical oversight. A liberalist bent saturates the hacker class, which views capitalism as an ideal so long as its undesirable outcomes are suppressed. From a Marxist perspective, the system cannot be regulated in such a manner, as the problem is the system itself. Thus the hacker liberal philosophy finds itself being absorbed into the contradictions of capital accumulation through a predominantly state-centered critical perspective.
Beyond blurring labor and leisure, the hacker class muddies the division between production and consumption. As high-capitalism has progressed from a production-based society to one based on consumption, the hacker class engages in a contradictory relationship with the consumption of intellectual property in addition to its role as content producers (Baudrillard 1970). As previously discussed, hackers often produce and endorse the use of free and open-source software. This practice, however, does not mean that proprietary software and other content are not used at all. The particular way that many (but not all) members of the hacker class consume software and other proprietary intellectual property presents a contradiction worth noting.
The piracy (or “warez”) scene has been intimately connected with hacking since early hackers shared Bill Gates’s proprietary Altair BASIC software (Décary-Hétu, Morselli, and Leman-Langlois 2012; Holt 2010a; Levy 1984). Interestingly, pirating content is an act that is simultaneously subversive towards capitalism and intellectual property ownership while also upholding the institution. In a study of an online piracy group that I co-authored with Ken Tunnell, we found that pirates often engage in copyright infringement as a way to undermine copyright ownership (Steinmetz and Tunnell 2013). For some, in true technological liberalist fashion, the perception is that intellectual property is intangible and inherently “wants to be free” (59). Bruce Schneier (2006) summarizes this perspective when he states that “trying to make digital files uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet.” In other words, the very ease with which intellectual property is replicated presents problems for proprietary intellectual property (Söderberg 2002). Pirates are also said to resist the current capitalist mode of intellectual property distribution and control because they believe this approach is outdated in the era of the Internet (Steinmetz and Tunnell 2013). In this vein, hackers and pirates can be seen as subversive in their consumption of content.
This type of consumption, however, also supports capitalism. In the previous study, “many participants treated piracy as an alternate mode of content distribution apart from traditional for-profit methods. After all, the ‘Sharing is Caring’ ethos is communal and has some semblance to a socialist worldview. The practice, though, is offset by members’ hyper-consumption. It involves both sharing and downloading volumes of content. Others have alluded to pirates’ contradictory positions situated between a culture of consumption and a culture of communalism. It evidently is possible to both care-and-share and satiate oneself through consumption” (Steinmetz and Tunnell 2013, 63–64). The primary problem springing from consumption of proprietary content, even if it subverts the direct payment process, is that “this contradiction is widespread among pirates—loathing the industry but loving the high-budget content that can only be generated by it” (64). While certainly more independent and low-budget projects have spread through piracy channels, the act typically involves the consumption of content that has been created by capitalist productive mechanisms. In essence, even while subverting capitalism, hackers uphold capitalism by desiring the intellectual property that it generates. Even with pushes to support and use F/OSS software, consumption in other domains (including many other areas of software) seems to be relatively unabated. The very cultural practices of hacking and piracy, then, can be said to provide some measure of resistance against the market-ends of capitalist production but not necessarily the consumptive.
In many accounts, hacking is portrayed as an utterly transgressive, resistant phenomenon to structures of social and technological development. Certainly there is tremendous truth to these accounts. Hackers have a long history of bucking trends, bending and breaking rules, and challenging authority. In the same paradoxical fashion that freedom can be oppressive, hackers operate within a dialectic that co-opts their various forms of labor—even when it is resistant and transgressive—into capital accumulation. Other mechanisms, however, exist which manage hackers as an exploitable class. In the tradition of radical criminology, the following chapter examines the role of the state and ideology in the maintenance of late-modern capitalism and its relationship with hackers.19 In particular, this analysis now turns to understanding how ideological apparatuses are erected, which ultimately legitimate forms of social control on the less-than-desirable aspects of hacker culture while bolstering the power of capital in the increasingly abstracted technological domains of accumulation.