Coleman’s Coding Freedom provides a detailed inlook into the lives of turn of the millennium white upper-middle class male hackers, and the not-so-vibrant social landscapes they comprise. It might be said that the vast majority of hackers fall into this rather predictable demographic, as Coleman does herself, and while this may be true, this narrow focus and generalization misses a lot of what the inter/transnational ‘hacking scene’ looks like, not to mention the Silicon Valley itself. Surprisingly, for example, there was no mention that much of the software being produced in the Silicon Valley (and to some degree, hacked), is created by Iranian engineers; where do they fit in this landscape?

I can appreciate Coleman’s work for its somewhat critical study of hacker identity, pleasure, & liberalism—particularly her assertion that the hackers of study evade a kind of base-level self-awareness, perhaps due to their at times problematic interpretations of liberal ideals—but it honestly seemed to me that Coleman lacked a pretty critical self-awareness as well. She writes of baby hackers ‘colonizing’ a family computer, the ‘whitewashing’ of differentiation among hackers (used to mean the difference between hackers and “crackers”—a pretty offensive appropriation of a term originally used to describe white men who cracked the whip on slaves and now used as a form of discursive resistance by people of color in the US), and even in her introduction acknowledges it’s “difficult” to announce oneself in a strange community with intentions to stay and study at length (but not that it’s problematic or entitled in any way?). This kind of language is totally avoidable and, albeit not central to her arguments, was disappointing to say the least.

I wonder what an ethnography of global networks of hackers would look like now, 10 years after Coleman’s work? It seemed to me that Coleman’s text quite literally privileged upper-middle class, predominately white and male, hackers—what would the landscape of study look like if we were to recenter this narrative on postcolonial cyberspaces? Or even to bring a more critical gaze to the (predominately wealthy white male) anarchist-hacker groups who are increasingly speaking for marginalized communities through their communiqués and hacking activities (Anonymous’ recent #OpThunderbird project, for example)?

I am also interested in alternative discourses on hacking, particularly those presented by someone other than a white academic. I am reminded of Sri Lankan rapper MIA’s relatively recent mixtape, Vicki Leekx—obviously named after Wiki Leaks (which in itself can be seen as a kind of appropriation of a white male movement to expose US imperial violence). 
The video released accompanying an excerpt of the mixtape (released on MIA’s secondary YouTube account, worldtown) indeed utilized video footage of surveillance in Iraq recorded by the US military, leaked by Wiki Leaks. MIA also bought the domain 4thepeopleontheboat.com, where she uploaded a track off the mixtape and a self-designed .GIF as album artwork—the track itself is dedicated to the refugees who attempt to immigrate to Australia via boat, many of whom are imprisoned at Christmas Island’s detention center. 
Finally, the mixtape itself begins includes the lyrics, “We choose the right format/We leak the information to the public/and we defend ourselves against inevitable legal and political attacks…Who says all them rules are made by rulers? We break ‘em and break all their computers/I ain’t buying no more from them looters, who try to out-school us/so we jump on our scooters/I hope you understood us when we say/We don’t make that money on the violence/That’s why we don’t do the silence.” MIA is well-known for both her critiques of the US government (particularly the War on Terror), and has advocated a kind of Third World anticolonial cyberspace feminist activism (XXXO is yet another track in this vein, meant to interrogate Orientalism, gender roles, and subversive power in social networking sites, harkening to Mona Awana's Palestinian liberation activism). Obviously all of this happened after Coleman published her book, but MIA is building on a landscape that was already in place for years--how could Coleman's conclusions on hacking reflect the multitude of experiences and political mobilizations in a much more diverse scope of study (could they at all?)?

Questions (I kind of wrote a few in my response but I'll re-enter them here):
  • I wonder what an ethnography of global networks of hackers would look like now, 10 years after Coleman’s work? It seemed to me that Coleman’s text quite literally privileged upper-middle class, predominately white and male, hackers—what would the landscape of study look like if we were to recenter this narrative on postcolonial cyberspaces? 
  • Can Coleman's work on hackers bring a more critical gaze to the (predominately wealthy white male) anarchist-hacker groups who are increasingly speaking for marginalized communities through their communiqués and hacking activities (Anonymous’ recent #OpThunderbird project, for example)? 
  • How do artists like MIA, well outside the realm of Coleman's study, complicate the narrative presented by the text? Both aesthetically and politically, MIA's work (as presented above) draws on countercultural experiences (none the least of which is her own father's experiences utilizing the internet as a Tamil freedom fighter) that present alternative cartographies of hacking which Coleman's text does not address; what would a re-drawn map look like? 




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