The Three Pillars of Functional Autonomy of Hackers

In the following pages, we reflect on the pitfalls of attributing emancipatory potentialities to a broad class of DIY practices and bottom-up technology initiatives. We develop such a reflection by drawing on more than 15 years of experience studying hackers. Embedded in the word “hacking,” and key to the hacker identity, is the promise that freedom can be realised through the repurposing of tools and by routing around constraints and regulations. Variations on this idea recur across a wide range of bottom-up DIY practices and interventions in technology use. However, the industry has already anticipated the disruption stemming from unauthorised and non-prescribed uses of its products. Attempts by users to route around technical and legal constraints are routinely harnessed by firms and fed back into the development process.

The hacker subculture offers many examples of such a recuperative dynamic. Numerous scholars have shown that Silicon Valley owes its existence to a computer underground that emerged from the 1960s West Coast counterculture, and from which the computer industry derived many of its ideas and innovations [1‐3]. Likewise, the so-called “sharing economy” originates in experiments with commons-based, peer-to-peer production initiatives [4], and the dream of a personal, small-is-beautiful computer has grown into an ever-more fine-grained surveillance system [5]. Indeed, the list of such examples can become so long that it compels us to reflect upon the systematic importance of recuperation in the current iteration of “informational” capitalism [6‐8].

We offer a theoretical contribution to this area by developing a conceptual framework for studying processes of recuperation. Recuperation operates by replacing the goals and values that were initially professed by a community of hackers (users, citizen scientists, etc.) with new ones, which are better aligned with the needs of capital accumulation and state control. As a direct consequence, the collective endeavour of the hackers is pulled in the direction of market demand and the constraints of mass production. Recuperation processes are often resisted by hackers, although typically in the form of infighting between different factions within the community. While one faction asserts its attachment to the original values and design goals of the project, another faction strives to accommodate that design to the external pressures, and considers this to be a criterion for the project’s (technical and commercial) success. Later in this article, we will identify “three pillars of autonomy,” as crucial in determining the outcome of such struggles. In order for a hacker community to maintain its functional autonomy vis-à-vis the computer industry upon which it nevertheless depends for its material subsistence, hackers need technical skills, shared values, and a collective memory.

This brings us to the second theoretical contribution of the article: we will develop a second-order reflection on how the emancipatory claims surrounding bottom-up DIY practices are mirrored in the academic literature. The exact reproduction of the practitioners’ (limited) self-understanding has been codified in the follow-the-actors dictum of Science and Technology Studies (STS). With this methodological stricture, born out of a generalised mistrust of overarching, theoretical concepts, the STS scholar abdicates responsibility for guiding practice with theory. This outlook, together with the case-study approach, resonates with how scholarly inquiry is organised and financed under present-day “academic capitalism.” Reflection about technology is compartmentalised into one-off micro-studies, tailored to fit the average, 3-year timespan of an external research grant, and with an in-built, funding-driven selection bias of cases towards up-and-coming, emerging technologies (and markets). Long before the moment of betrayal arrives in the project, the scholarly community has lost interest, and moved on to do research on the next big thing. Our claim is that in this way the promise that freedom will come from a grassroots DIY intervention can be perpetually renewed in the academic literature, in spite of the many historical lessons suggesting otherwise.

In making this claim, we aspire to make a theoretical contribution to the STS field at large, with a bearing on empirical investigations that goes beyond the specific study of hackers to include, for instance, user studies, studies of citizen science, and design research.

We borrow the concept of “recuperation” from the French sociologists Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, whose magisterial work The New Spirit of Capitalism provides the theoretical backbone for our inquiry. They have compellingly argued that capitalism advances by incorporating its critiques. Critique, once recuperated, is made into a source of innovation and legitimacy for capitalism [9]. This basic idea can be productively applied to the kind of critique that is expressed in social-movement contestations of product design, standardisation, and alternative technology development. The hacker subculture makes up a subcategory of this phenomenon. The collaborative production of free software programs and open hardware devices showcases a kind of critique—the critique of intellectual property—that is embedded in development methodologies and technological design. Likewise, free software development and open hardware tinkering is emblematic of broader societal trends in that this “critique” is systematically recuperated and turned into a motor of corporate development. Computer firms are tailoring their business strategies around the opportunity to procure innovations from individual users and user communities. Methodologies of “open innovation” [10, 11], or even “outlaw innovation” [12], render the user-centric innovation model systematic. The more the industry grows dependent on open innovation processes, the more thoroughly it must manage the value-producing users and user communities. Step by step, user communities are being subsumed under capital’s valorisation process, just as waged labour was in earlier times.

For analytical purposes, we distinguish between three different temporalities or time horizons within which recuperation unfolds, and within which it is resisted. The shortest time horizon encompasses the lifecycle of an individual hacker project and its associated community of developers. The second time horizon spans a landscape of hacker projects and/or communities evolving in tandem with an associated branch of the industry. The third time horizon of recuperation processes, in keeping with Boltanski and Chiapello’s work, maps onto a periodisation of capitalism as the “spirit of the time.” This is the broader context for the struggles that play out across the two previous timescales. Needless to say, where the line should be drawn between one or the other can only be decided on a case-by-case basis. This heuristic serves to scale up the analysis from a single case study of a local contestation to the global situation that frames and gives meaning to the situated locality.

The first time horizon spans the lifecycle of an individual development project and the associated community of hackers and/or developers. This underscores a point made initially that an adequate study of a technical innovation must consider the whole biography of the development project, from start to finish, during the course of which project goals, individual motives, and the design of the technology itself are transformed [13]. The methodological principle of studying the full trajectory of social conflicts resonates with how the waxing and waning of popular mobilisations are studied in Social Movement Studies. A suggestive synthesis between Science and Technology Studies and Social Movement Studies has been devised by David Hess. He has come up with the concept “technology- and product-oriented movements” (TPMs) to describe civil-society mobilisations centred on grievances and making claims in relation to the creation and diffusion of alternative technologies. Hess highlights three phases in the co-evolution of a TPM and its conjoined product innovation. To start with, the goals of the TPM are co-articulated with those entrepreneurs and companies who are willing to create a market for the new product. Then, with the absorption of the innovation, the design and meaning of the technology are transformed under pressure from market and mass-production constraints. Finally, this transformation gives rise to “object conflicts” between the TPM and its for-profit allies, and between different fractions of the TPM. Conflicts revolve around the proper design and/or adoption of a transformed technology, as measured against the original grievances and values acclaimed by (a fraction of) the movement.

The second time horizon covers a longer timeframe, following the co-evolution of hacker culture taken as a whole in conjunction with the computer industry and other external actors (such as the state, military, etc.). A simple case study following the lifecycle of a single development project or community relates their internal dynamics to their immediate context. In contrast, a study following some development within hacker culture at large must relate this phenomenon to definitive historical moments. For instance, Steven Levy’s classic work on hackers identifies several phases in the history of hacking, spanning the period from the 1960s MIT hardware hackers to the emergence of free software in the 1980s. Thus, his iconic book covers scenes and communities with very different ethoses, cultural references, and political goals [14]. Most scholars have pinpointed the 1970s West Coast context as a key historical and geographical juncture for making sense of the early relationship between hackers and the computer industry [15]. For instance, by following the life trajectory of Stewart Brand and his associates, Fred Turner’s book From Counterculture to Cyberculture shows how the former culture branched off into the latter, giving impetus to the nascent computer industry in the process [1]. Indeed, the idea of building a small computer to foster free communication practices and new modes of community formation came out of the communalist longings of the Sixties counterculture [14, 16]. Cultural and organisational elements of the counterculture, which already resonated with tropes from computer science and cybernetics, were soon integrated into the computer industry, and came to fundamentally rewrite how business is conducted in this sector. This dispels the notion of a pristine hacker subculture that has been corrupted by the industry at some later point. There is compelling evidence that the two have evolved in tandem from day one. Nonetheless, the relationship between the community and the industry is itself an evolving one. The more dependent the industry becomes on open innovation processes, the more effort is being put into managing such external sources of value, but hackers also come to occupy a more strategic position in the production process.

The third time horizon situates hacker practices within the evolving whole of capitalism. We borrow this idea from Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello’s interpretative framework, according to which capitalism is constantly driven to evolve in response to critique. The incorporation and adaptation of critique give capitalism the means to overcome its own, recurring impasses and to re-found itself on new, legitimate grounds. The spirit of the current, post-Fordist incarnation of capitalism came about in response to the upheavals of 1968. Numerous other authors have suggested a similar storyline, in which the ideals of the student movement, individual freedom, self-expression, etc., have been appropriated and integrated as the motor of consumerist societies [17]. Whereas Boltanski and Chiapello’s argument dwells on the evolution of organisational forms, these authors have had little to say about the role of technology in the processes they describe. The link to hackers has been proposed by Anne Barron, who suggests that the values embodied in free software development qualify as “a particularly pure form” of the new spirit of capitalism. The other side of the coin of the artistic and social critique of proprietary software and other forms of “closed innovation” systems is an emotional investment in “open” forms of capital accumulation. Thus, the oppositional stance is turned into an “ethical foundation for contemporary capitalism” [18, 19]. This generally held argument can be substantiated with examples of technical products and infrastructures originating in the antagonistic, yet symbiotic, relationship between hackers and the computer industry. A case in point is the development of mesh computer networks, distributed and anonymous retrieval systems, and video conferencing, all of which are derived from the outlawed practice of file sharing [20, 21]. Taken together, hackers have made major contributions to the material infrastructure of what Boltanski and Chiapello call “connexionist” capitalism.

The point of adopting an overarching, theoretical perspective like the one proposed here is that it draws attention to the historically developed framing conditions of the local case under study. It is indispensable to adopt a global perspective on local struggles in order for the emancipatory potential of the latter to be adequately assessed. There is no shortage of examples where struggles that appear to be emancipatory, when taken in their immediate context, turn out to have oppressive and exploitative consequences when exported to other locations and contexts. A case in point is the demand for flexible working conditions. Generally embraced by computer engineers as an improvement over nine-to-five office work, flexible working conditions translate into intensified exploitation when introduced into the lower tier of the “gig” economy. We contend that no DIY practice identified as emancipatory in the technology sector will remain so for very long, unless there is an analytical effort to expand the socio-political outlook of practitioners beyond their immediately given situation.

In what follows, we develop a reflection on the necessary conditions for hackers to successfully resist recuperation attempts, based on a summary of three case studies. The empirical material has been collected and presented separately in different contexts before. We draw on them here in order to illustrate what we elect to call the “three pillars of functional autonomy.”

The three pillars represent some indispensable prerequisites for a critical discourse on technology that can inform the resistance to recuperation. In other words, they refer to the necessary—but not necessarily sufficient—conditions for developing functional autonomy in the face of recuperative tendencies. These pillars are the following. First, expertise: hackers’ ability to understand and engage with a technology. Second, shared values and cultural references. Third, a historical horizon encompassing familiarity with older generations of the same technology. Having secured all three pillars, practitioners may acquire an independent vantage point that diverges from the hegemonic common sense permeating the industry, and the engineering profession at large. Upon them depend their ability to collectively pursue alternative trajectories of technological development and, hence, to make good on the promise that their technology is an emancipatory one.

The technical expertise of hackers is key. They need to preserve open, transparent software and hardware architectures, while at the same time passing on and continuously updating the required skills from one generation of hackers to the next. Only if those conditions are fulfilled can hackers bend systems, protocols, and standards to their will. This contributes to the functional autonomy of hackers in several ways. Understanding how something works is a prerequisite for judging its significance and ramifications. The technical expertise of hackers has allowed them to intervene in politics in more consequential ways than is the case with the “prefigurative politics” of many social movements. The paths taken by hackers in terms of technology choice have not only demonstrated the possibility of an alternative, but have on many occasions forced the computer industry to follow suit. To illustrate that technical expertise is a necessary, but insufficient condition for having autonomy, it is enough to consider career engineers. Typically, such a career spans three stages. They begin as hobbyists in their teens, attend university to study informatics (physics, etc.), and then end up with a job in a tech company or start their own firm. Tertiary education and professional training give them enough expertise to be able to understand and produce technology, which is the first pillar. However, since professional engineers are only familiar with the hegemonic interpretation of what technology is, they are unlikely to develop a critical stance towards the dominant infrastructure.

This highlights the importance of hackers sharing values and cultural references. It goes without saying that the phenomenon called “hacking” is heterogeneous. The cultural expressions of hackers have been transformed many times over, as the practice has spread to new geographical regions and engaged with new technological developments. We concur with Christopher Kelty that a commonality holds this variety together, which helps practitioners to recognise themselves as “hackers.” Ultimately, this common identity is verified in the capacity of hackers to come together from time to time and act in concert [27]. Independent technical expertise and cultural values may thrive, and be passed on under the hacker moniker. Their values are ethical and aesthetic at once, in the same gesture. For instance, free software code is judged to be both morally superior and more beautiful than proprietary “spaghetti” code. Shared values are cultivated in regular mass interactions online, such as mailing lists and chat rooms. However, these would not suffice on their own. Hacker culture requires physical meetings and conventions in order to reproduce itself, aptly described by Gabriella Coleman as “a ritual condensation and celebration of a lifeworld” [28]. Likewise, hackerspaces, together with other physical locations, such as shared machine shops, provide a material and symbolic milieu that reinforces identity formation. The iconic soldering iron, and fridges stocked with Club Mate, is two relevant examples [29, 30]. The critical importance of subcultural identity for sustaining the functional autonomy of hackers is underlined by the observation that this is chiefly what distinguishes them from the great variety of other kinds of actors who engage with technology under labels such as “citizen science” or “Do-It-Yourself.”

In combination, technical expertise and shared values enable the hacker community to preserve a historical memory of past events bearing on their collective existence. Such historical distance then allows hackers to adopt a reflexive distance towards positive instantiations of technological products and infrastructure. Political mobilisation depends on the backward projection of a lost golden age, or what Chris Kelty has called a mythologised “usable past” [27]. Hackers celebrate the efficiency, simplicity, and transparency of older machines, which they profess were in many respects easier to use, understand, and modify. Recycling is the backbone of the political economy of hacklabs. Nostalgic appreciation of old machines sensitises practitioners to alternative paths that technology could have taken and provides a benchmark for making comparisons with the new [31]. The preservation of a shared, historical memory from one generation to the next, or one location to another, is always frail. A case in point is the spread of hacker subculture to China, where reports have it that many hacker tropes and symbols are being successfully reproduced—but without their equally characteristic, oppositional, anti-authoritarian implications [32, 33].

Below, we illustrate our general argument with three cases that exemplify the three pillars of autonomy. The first case, Internet Relay Chat, exemplifies the importance of technical expertise for successfully resisting recuperation attempts. The second case, open-source 3D printers, foregrounds the internal strife within the community over its shared values and goals as a central field of struggle against recuperation. The third case illustrates a breakdown in the transmission of shared memory during a displacement of hackers’ physical meeting spaces from hacklabs to hackerspaces.

On the basis of three case studies of hacker initiatives, we have proposed a conceptual framework for how alternative visions and practices of technology are systematically captured and fed back into the industry’s development process. The backbone of this framework is Boltanski and Chiapello’s theory of how capitalism transforms itself and overcomes limits with the help of recuperated critique. We have proposed an analytical distinction between three different time intervals within which processes of recuperation unfold in the hacker subculture, so that the resistance of hackers to recuperation attempts may be studied with more precision, and set in relation to capitalism as an evolving whole: “the spirit of the times.” The concept of recuperation has a great deal of explanatory power to offer for studies of the symbiotic, yet antagonistic, relation between the hacker subculture and the computer industry.

Recuperation aims to limit the functional autonomy of a community so that it can be subsumed into capital’s valorisation process. The autonomy of the collective is the defining limit between the formal and the real subsumption of labour under capital. When a hacker community has a large degree of autonomy, it may determine the ultimate goals of its collective efforts, and thus the general direction of its own future becoming. We have identified three pillars that support the functional autonomy of a hacker community: technical expertise, shared values, and historical memory. Taken together, these three pillars of autonomy enable hackers to cultivate critical opinions about predominant, technological designs, and engineering practices, as well as to pursue alternative pathways in technology development. With the term “functional autonomy,” we want to capture the fact that the political economy of hacking is intimately intertwined with those of state and capital, and yet, paradoxically, allow for a circumscribed room for manoeuvre wherein critical engineering practices may flourish.

Even when all three pillars of autonomy are firmly in place, the odds are stacked against the hackers, so that they often succumb to recuperation anyway. However, and this is a pivotal point in our argument, the same favourable conditions for putting up resistance to capital are seldom present in those looser constellations that are variously labelled “users,” “makers,” “citizen scientists,” etc. Unlike hackers, the latter do not draw from a common pool of technical skills, shared cultural values, and historical memory. Granted, the contingency unleashed by a novel design or an unanticipated application of a pre-existing product might open up a window of opportunity for non-incumbents to act. In due course, however, such challenges to the status quo will in all probability be settled on the terms of state and capital. The disturbance from unruly misusers has always already been anticipated by the open innovation model. Likewise, the David-versus-Goliath narrative in which DIY and maker practices are awash has been fully integrated into the marketing strategies of entrepreneurs and firms.

In spite of a vast backlog of bottom-up interventions in science and technology that at various points in time have had their emancipatory claims voided, this historical lesson remains under-theorised in the scholarly literature on the subject. This invites a second-order reflection on how the configuration of the user [47], lay expertise [48], or critical making [49] has been discussed in Science and Technology Studies and neighbouring fields over the years. In our reading, this lacuna is due in part to the influential notion that STS scholars must take the statements of practitioners at face value. With his famous slogan, “Follow the actors!” Latour sought to dethrone the critic by banning the use of “overarching theoretical concepts.” As a consequence of this methodological stricture, the limited outlook of the actors under study is exactly reproduced by the analyst. The task for emancipatory technology studies must be a different one: to contribute with a theoretical and historical understanding of the structural constraints under which capitalism can be effectively contested, with the aim of strengthening practitioners’ ability to resist recuperation attempts. The conceptual framework that we are proposing here does not balk at pointing out the compromised subject position of the practitioner, but on the condition that this analytical procedure is coupled with an inquiry into the critic’s own, compromised subject position. After all, both are operating under the same structural constraints of capitalism.