I am obsessed by the question of hacker ethics& politics. I have written a short piece for the Sarai Reader about what, from a socio-political perspective, shapes such strong and diverse forms of ethics for information freedom among hackers (pretty vague piece as it was published from a talk I gave). And my whole dissertation is about the peculiar nature of hacker ethics and politics and changing forms of political conscioussness amongst FOSS hackers. Here is a short and somewhat outdated overview. Now I am working with Mako on a paper that further explores the underlying legal and philisophical orientations and mechanims that give FOSS a form of extreme spreading power (internal and externall to FOSS and in the Latourian sense ) that works in part by denying its politics (more on that later).

BUT, the interesting thing is that tonight, Danny and Quinn who are full of good information on all things geekish, pointed meto a significant change made in the The Jargon File by ESRthat reflects the changing nature of hacker political affiliations at least according to some.

As reported in NTK:

“Finally (and not included in the changelogs),
Eric has tweaked the Hacker Politics page, from its previous
description as “vaguely liberal-moderate” to
“moderate-to-neoconservative (hackers too were affected by
the collapse of socialism)”. Go tell that to the
Kuro5hinners, Eric. Recalling Raymond’s familiar defence of
previous changes, “rather than complaining that I am
‘rewriting history’, help me write it!”, let it be noted
that if someone did want to fork the Jargon File, now would
be the time to do it. Raymond’s previous googlejuice at
tuxedo.org has been cast to the winds. A new, reformatted
and popularly linked-to upstart could quickly seize the top
Google slot. Ha, ha, as we apparently all say, only serious.”

Although I have concentrated mostly on only FOSS hackers (and I see differences among different types of hackers in terms of ethcs, another paper coming soon), I would say that the tendency has been the complete opposite than that which ESR reports. While there are hackers of every political orientation, affiliation, and fascination, the liberal and left leaning hacker which seemed to be pretty rare pre-2000, has risen to much greater prominence in the last couple of years. I think that Raymond’s need to redefine the hacker political orientation reflects more his own anxiety (as a professed libertarian) over the trends towards widerspread liberalization (made possible in part by the likes of Lessig, O’Reilly, EFF, and participation in sites like kuro5hin and also the cynicism and “reality bites” after the dotcom crash) and to a lesser extent leftizization (thanks again to the likes of kuro5hin and greater visibility of tech activism represented by orgs like Indymedia and yes, I know leftizization is not a word but anthropologists do make up words all the time).

So now he seems to be re-writing history or at least telling his version given a certain anxiety over the diversification of political affiliations amongst hackers. At least that is my theory tonight. And it will be very interesting to see if his version will stick or whether history forking will ensue…