Code Free or Die(): Why Hackers Are so Often Libertarians

by Daniel Franke

To anyone who has inhabited the internet long enough to know ICANN from 4chan or netcat from a LOLcat, it should not come as news that hackers are very frequently libertarians. The reason is commonly understood to be something like this: hackers, by definition, like do odd things, like take their DVD player apart or look up how a nuclear bomb works. Legislators, who chronically fail to understand why anyone would want to do these things or why they would be of value to anyone, pass laws that prohibit or interfere with them. Justifiably upset, hackers adopt political views that oppose such intrusions.

The clearest exposition of this model is perhaps Paul Graham's 2004 essay The Word 'Hacker' . The general idea, however, has been tacitly understood for much longer. It underlies the plaintive tone of most Slashdot stories. Simple observance of the hacker-libertarian correlation is older still; one could not spend ten minutes reading early USENET without getting hit over the head with it. Gordon's Restatement of Newman's Corollary to Godwin's Law observes, Libertarianism (pro, con, and internal faction fights) is the primordial net.news discussion topic. Any time the debate shifts somewhere else, it must eventually return to this fuel source. (I am uncertain precisely when this was written. It was no earlier than 1990 when Godwin's Law was coined, and no later than 1994 when Mike Godwin cited it).

Hackers do indeed have a long and perilous history of falling under the heel of big government. An incomplete timeline follows:

1986: The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act passes, for the first time making cracking a separate crime. While it mostly targets uncontroversially criminal acts, legal harassment by ignorant authorities for perfectly legitimate behavior such as port-scanning becomes routine throughout the '90s.

1993: Philip Zimmerman is targeted by a criminal investigation after PGP makes its way outside of the United States, in violation of US export restrictions on cryptography (which was then classified as munitions).

1996: The Communications Decency Act severely restricts "obscene or indecent" material on the internet. It is overturned by the Supreme Court the following year.

1998: The Digital Millennium Copyright Act passes, making it a crime to circumvent any security measure intended to protect copyrighted material, regardless of intent to violate copyright.

1999: Jon Johansen et. al. release DeCSS, decoding the laughable 'encryption' used on virtually all DVDs and making it possible to watch DVDs using open-source software. The following year, Johansen's house is raided by Norwegian police.

1999: Amazon receives its notorious `1-click' patent.

2000: 72 people in California are served with an injunction forbidding them from wearing a T-shirt containing a portion of the DeCSS source code.

2001: Dimitry Sklyrov, a Russian programmer, while visiting the US, is arrested under the DMCA and detained for several months for having written an e-book reader capable of viewing DRMed e-book formats.

2002: Sarbanes-Oxley renders it nearly impossible for small web startups to go public.

2003: The SCO legal saga begins. SCO demands that all Linux users pay them a $700 license fee.

2003: The FBI abusively invoke USA PATRIOT in order to recover notes from reporters who interviewed Adrian Lamo.

2004: In what Brad Templeton dubs 'spamigation', the RIAA begins suing its customers en masse, filing more than 20,000 lawsuits to date and including children, grandmothers, and the estates of the deceased among its defendants.

2005: FEC Commissioner Bradley Smith asserts that the 'press exemption' of the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform Act does not protect bloggers.

However, these grievances are insufficient to explain hacker attitudes. Hacker culture has existed for practically as long as university students have had access to computers — well into the early '60s — and even before that it was recognizable in its prior incarnation among amateur radio operators. It has been libertarian for as long as anyone can remember. Yet my timeline begins at 1986. Prior to the CFAA, it is difficult to point to any government intrusion that should trouble hackers in particular. Civilian uses of computers simply weren't on congress's or law enforcement's radar before then.

Lest I misrepresent Graham's thesis, it is broader than any list of grievances. Graham correctly observes that hackers are skeptical of all authority, even where libertarian theory says that such authority is legitimate. Hackers will get just as riled when the PHB that runs their IT department tells them, I just read an article in a trade journal about something called virtualization. We should use it. as they will by any government bureaucratic drone. So hackers had plenty to annoy them before 1986. Government came late to that party.

But the observation that hackers are a parcel of prickly smart-asses does nothing to explain why. If our quirks aren't limited to the intersection of government and technology, then what does any of this attitude have to do with writing code?

Graham's answer to this is as follows:

Let me put the case in terms a government official would appreciate. Civil liberties are not just an ornament, or a quaint American tradition. Civil liberties make countries rich. If you made a graph of GNP per capita vs. civil liberties, you'd notice a definite trend. Could civil liberties really be a cause, rather than just an effect? I think so. I think a society in which people can do and say what they want will also tend to be one in which the most efficient solutions win, rather than those sponsored by the most influential people. Authoritarian countries become corrupt; corrupt countries become poor; and poor countries are weak. It seems to me there is a Laffer curve for government power, just as for tax revenues. At least, it seems likely enough that it would be stupid to try the experiment and find out. Unlike high tax rates, you can't repeal totalitarianism if it turns out to be a mistake. This is why hackers worry. The government spying on people doesn't literally make programmers write worse code. It just leads eventually to a world in which bad ideas win. And because this is so important to hackers, they're especially sensitive to it. They can sense totalitarianism approaching from a distance, as animals can sense an approaching thunderstorm.

But I think this begs the question. It's a libertarian view of why hackers ought to be libertarian. If one agrees with the premise that civil liberties make people rich, then everything else follows neatly. But if authoritarian government doesn't literally make programmers write worse code , then why should hackers be especially likely to make the connection?

One seductively flattering answer to this question comes from a 1992 USENET post by Stuart Reges. In short, Reges holds that there is a certain mental skill — libertarian IQ — that makes us good at forming mental models of how programs operate as well as forming mental models of how society operates. The former ability makes us good hackers. The latter ability gives us an intuitive understanding of why libertarianism works.

Complimentary as this hypothesis may be, I think it misses the point. All the economic theory that goes along with libertarianism is a side show. Libertarianism isn't about what makes us rich; it's about what's right. We hold these truths to be self-evident and all that. Libertarians don't oppose big government because it's clumsy or wasteful. They oppose it because it's evil.

Besides, I think Reges gives us too much credit. The median hacker's understanding of Austrian or Chicago-school economics is hand-wavier than he'd tolerate from himself on any technical matter. Bring up externalities and the free-rider problem and he'll change the subject. Sure, the most sophisticated among us will cite Coase's Theorem, but most hackers have never heard of it, and even my own background only allows me an informal understanding of it.

I propose that we've been looking at the problem from the wrong angle. It isn't that hackers tend to adopt libertarian politics, nor is there any third factor that influences both. Rather, people with a naturally anti-authoritarian attitude tend to become attracted to programming.

The phrase knowledge is power is hopelessly clichéd, but it's true in a very literal sense. That which one does not understand has power over him. People who have no interest in understanding computers are entirely accustomed to getting bossed around by them; it just seems like a fact of life. If you don't know that you can clear the read-only bit on a file by right-clicking it and unchecking the attribute in the properties dialog, then not being allowed to edit the file doesn't seem fundamentally different from not being allowed to play an encrypted .wma file because Microsoft shut down its licensing server. Trying to get non-technical people upset about DRM is hopeless. They're subjected to the tyrannical whims of their computer all the time. What's so particularly bad about this one?

But to those of libertarian temperament, this is an unacceptable state of affairs. Getting bossed around by government is bad enough. But getting bossed around by an inanimate object? Simply intolerable. How do I control this thing?

This model of the hacker psyche explains a lot of our personality quirks. When unwilling to cope with not understanding a technology, learning about it is the not the only option. The other option is to become a luddite. Hackers lapse into ludditism with some frequency.

To wit, I have the cheapest piece-of-junk cell phone still on the market. It can't even download ringtones. But it's really good for making phone calls. Because that's what cell phones are for. They aren't for sending email. They aren't for taking pictures. They aren't for playing Tetris. They're for making phone calls. It's really annoying accidentally hitting the wrong button and then trying to figure out how to get my phone out of camera mode. I don't want to figure out how to get my phone out of camera mode, because phones aren't for taking pictures. They're for making phone calls.

Some people laugh at me for this attitude, but it's the same sentiment that hackers adopt whenever they rail against software bloat. We've all overheard, if not participated in, conversations that go like this:

I don't want my text editor to read mail! I just want a text editor! So just use it as a text editor. But then I still have to have all this other junk sitting around. Why can't you just ignore it? It's not even exposed in the UI. You have to know the right M-x command in order to get to it. It's less than 80MB of stuff, you have a 1TB hard drive, and most of it doesn't get loaded into RAM until you invoke it. But it's gross!

It may seem like a stretch to call the emacs-hater's attitude ludditism, and a further stretch to call it libertarian. But the psychology is there nonetheless. Nobody wants to take the time to understand something they consider superfluous. Rationally or not, hackers will meet any technology they don't understand with suspicion — not just of its merits, but of its safety. I don't want it screwing up my system , we'll tell you, even if we know perfectly well that it will just sit inert on the hard drive. Ever recompile your kernel just to disable a module that you don't need? Most of us have, and yet this completely defies any rational basis.

But this irrationality is commonplace. Libertarian attitudes routinely overshoot libertarian principles. Essentially all libertarians support the right to bear arms, but consider property rights more fundamental. Thus, we acknowledge the right of property-owners to forbid firearms on their property. But that won't stop libertarians from getting annoyed whenever a property-owner exercises that right.

We get annoyed with the hoplophobe for the same reason that we yank that useless module out of our kernel: we hate and fear being controlled.

Thanks to Spencer Bagley, Alex Krupp, Mike Geiger, Eric S. Raymond, Jason Murad, and Cain Norris for their input on drafts of this article.

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