The Ideology of Hacking
[..]
The hacker movement is a political project. Like the activity of many 'alternative' subcultures that are not directly defined by their political engagement, "the struggles are at once economic, political, and cultural - and hence they are biopolitical struggles, struggles over the form of life. They are constituent struggles, creating new public spaces and new forms of community" [46]. The chief uniting and mobilising force for the hacker underground is the common enemy of Microsoft (Bezroukov, 1999a). Opposition to Microsoft draws both from socialist anarchistic principles, and from high-tech libertarianism. The rightwing drift, dubbed as the Californian Ideology, is a recent transition, and not surprising given the hegemonic dominance of the corporate sector in the United States and the greater stakes in free software for business. However, it runs counter to the roots of hacking, which essentially is a reaction against Taylorism (Hannemyr, 1999). Basic motivations to engage in free programming are the rush of technological empowerment (Sterling, 1994), the joy of un-alienated creativity (Moglen, 1999), and the sense of belonging to a community (commonly recognised by hackers themselves as 'ego', but reputation only viable within a group of peers, i.e. a community). Those values may not seem political at first sight, but they are on collision course with the commercial agenda of turning the Internet into a marketplace. The rising tension within the hacker community are illuminated by the words of Manuel Castells: "The struggle between diverse capitalists and miscellaneous working class is subsumed into the more fundamental opposition between the bare logic of capital flows and the cultural values of human experience"
[..]