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 [1,2,3]. 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 [6,7,8].

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.

Our key argument is that the conditions under which hackers sometimes resist recuperation attempts are typically not present in the many other settings that are being studied as cases of bottom-up DIY tinkering. The dizzying variety of names given to such actors in the academic literature—“users,” “hobbyists,” “makers,” etc.—bears witness to the absence of a shared frame of reference within which skills, values, and memory can be passed on from one cycle of struggle to the next. Since the three pillars of autonomy tend to be absent in the latter settings, we should expect the actors to be recuperated in a short time. Confirmation of this expectation is readily found in the vast backlog of interventions and practices that have had their original, emancipatory promises betrayed. Even so, the notion of recuperation remains under-theorised in the scholarly literature about unruly users and bottom-up technology development.

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.

Functional Autonomy of Hacker Communities

Considered broadly, the proposal that alternative, bottom-up technologies for social change can emerge from a setting that is concurrently said to be under the hegemonic control of state and capital is seemingly self-contradictory. By and large, hacker culture, norms, and practices, together with the underlying technological infrastructure, are all saturated through and through with hegemonic relations to the state and capital. Still, we cannot contend from this that resistance is futile. Here, we take a cue from factory workers’ resistance to the domination of capital at the point of production, as analysed in the tradition of labour process theory. The starting point of labour process theory is Karl Marx’s fragment on the “Results of the Direct Production Process,” where he distinguished between the formal and the real subsumption of labour under capital. The one thing that checks the total domination of capital over the production process, i.e., the real subsumption of labour under capital, is the de facto, if not de jure, functional autonomy that workers exercise through direct control of their tools, as well as through the knowledge they have about how to deploy those tools productively [22]. Factory workers are considered to enjoy some functional autonomy vis-à-vis their management, despite being enveloped by the contractual wage relation [23]—and the same reasoning applies to hackers. The historical parallel with struggles over tools and skills in the workplace is justified, since hackers, having been put to work by an open innovation model, are subsequently formally subsumed under capital’s valorisation process.

Functional autonomy is our answer to how critical engineering practices may arise from within hacker culture, in spite of this setting being predicated on a symbiotic relationship with the computer industry. A relatively high degree of autonomy means that hackers enjoy discretion in defining their common goals and choosing the proper means for solving tasks, i.e., functional control over the labour process. This claim is congruent with an established usage of the word “autonomy” in political philosophy, harking back to Rousseau and Kant [24]. A collective can be said to be “autonomous” if it has not submitted to any external authority other than the laws it has given to itself. The capacity of such a collective to set goals for its own shared undertaking and to direct its future-oriented process of becoming follows from this autonomy. Feminist scholars have objected to the bias towards a decontextualised, free-roaming rational mind that underlies the notion of “autonomy” in the political philosophy tradition [25]. We hope to sidestep this line of critique by drawing on the concept as it has been developed in the specific context of workplace studies. It goes without saying that the limited autonomy that workers may secure for themselves within the contractual employment relation will always be shaped by an economic and material substratum. Applied to our context of inquiry, hackers are conditioned by the technical infrastructure upon which they draw, as well as the labour demand for their services (i.e., the necessity to work for subsistence and the position of the programmer within the social division of labour).

Recuperation encroaches upon the functional autonomy of hackers. Thus, the balance of forces is tilted so that their capacity to collectively determine the conditions under which they enter into a symbiotic relationship with the industry is weakened. This relationship is constantly being negotiated, without any prospect of it ever being settled in a final victory for either side. Companies strive to secure this external source of value production in order to minimise risks and optimise output. This harks back to Marx’s notes on the historical logic of capitalism. According to Marx, capital first engages external, non-capitalist forms of production, such as subsistence agriculture and artisan industries. Then, it gradually transforms the interior of the production process according to its own needs. The transformation of the production process into a properly capitalist one is called the passage from the formal to the real subsumption of labour under capital. Translated into our conceptual framework, hackers resist recuperation when they push back against capital’s drive to subsume their creative and cooperative activities under its valorisation process. The paradox is that capital depends on hackers resisting its relentless drive. If the functional autonomy of hackers were neutralised, so that they could not self-organise task allocation and choose their own methodologies for problem solving, they would cease to furnish capital with good ideas and development work. It is precisely the failings of the firm to organise production in-house in the most productive way that has sparked the outsourcing of innovation processes to commons-based, peer-production communities in the first place [26].

A recurring point of contestation in the symbiotic, yet antagonistic relationship between hackers and industry is the core value of hacker culture that information should be freely disclosed. As advocates of free software licences never fail to point out, this dictum is compatible with selling software and making a profit from the transaction. A case in point, it is argued, is Red Hat, and other companies that provide commercial support services for free software. We agree that a principal commitment to the free disclosure of information does not rule out profit-making. Nevertheless, it tends to be at odds with the goal of profit maximisation. All else being equal, the highest profit can be reaped by a firm if it is free to choose when to disclose knowledge and when to monopolise it. This goes a long way towards explaining the constant feud over what kind of licence should be considered “free” (or “open”), and heated debates on whether or not the terms of the licence have been breached in any particular instance, etc. Battles over licence agreements are the most visible and obvious manifestation of social conflicts around information disclosure, but recuperation works on many different levels at once. Project leadership is challenged, competing associations are created, new names are invented to replace old ones, etc. Often, it is only in hindsight that it becomes evident how a hacker community has been recuperated. Conversely, in order to diagnose recuperation in time for strategic interventions, it is necessary to study recuperation processes simultaneously at different scales and across different time horizons—as sketched out in the paragraphs above.

A more in-depth investigation of social conflicts surrounding innovation and the recuperation of hackers’ functional autonomy requires analytical concepts such as the three pillars introduced below.