All right I consider myself lucky sometimes. I have a really fun dissertation topic and right now I am in one of the funner parts of my diss, narrating a typical “life history” of a free software developer.

Ok, so I know there is no typical life history but there are consistent patterns that I gleaned from interviews (way too many interviews, I may add), and I am trying with detail and humor to portray hacking from the time that hackers are spring chickens to their ripe old age of 40 when they work on a free software project. I get to do this in about 30 pages but I open with a one page overview of what is to come that is somewhat silly which I like becomes it comes after this very serious discussion about phenomenology, and publics. If anyone has read the Hacker Crackdown, I am clearly indebted to Bruce Sterling.

“The spirit of exploration that forms the basis for hacking is retroactively understood by many hackers to predate their relationship to computers. It may start at the tender age of three, when they first took apart every electric appliances in the kitchen, much to a mother’s horror; lead into learning how to program at the age of five, the parental unit now overjoyed (