Читать книгу The Handbook of Peer Production - Группа авторов - Страница 94

The desire for a meritocratic form of hierarchy, in which individual talent and dedication is rewarded accordingly, is linked to a broader commitment to the political philosophy of liberalism. As Coleman (who uses the term “hackers” to refer to the collective identity of open source software makers) explains, hackers working on open source projects display a commitment to liberalism in the sense of:

historical as well as present‐day moral and political commitments and sensibilities that should be familiar to most readers: protecting property and civil liberties, promoting individual autonomy and tolerance, securing a free press, ruling through limited government and universal law, and preserving a commitment to equal opportunity and meritocracy.

(Coleman, 2013, p. 2)

This commitment to liberalism is not straightforward, but rather hackers enact a “liberal critique from within liberalism” (Coleman, 2013, p. 3). They critique a liberal belief in the value of intellectual property by promoting another liberal value, that of free speech. Hackers, in other words, critique proprietary software on the basis that it limits their “productive freedom,” or freedom to “autonomously improve on their peers’ work, refine their technical skills, and extend craftlike engineering traditions” (Coleman, 2013, p. 3).

How is meritocracy enacted? As Coleman argues, hackers’ commitment to meritocracy gives open source software production a contradictory character. On the one hand, hackers emphasize that individuals must “pull themselves up by their own bootstraps,” meaning they should apply themselves to learning their craft and earning any respect or rewards through long hours of dedication to programming and engineering. On the other hand, to create the conditions for this, hackers must provide not only the software they build and its source code, but also the documentation and explanation necessary for others to assess, evaluate, and learn from their work (Coleman, 2013). Beyond that, since the work of programming is often far more complex than implementing a well‐defined plan and involves a host of social and cultural competencies in addition to technical ones, hackers rely on each other for all kinds of knowledge that help them to do their jobs or contribute to open source projects. In other words, where meritocracy suggests self‐reliant, individual feats of technical skill, here it also implies providing the necessary resources that create the equal opportunity in which a meritocracy works.

Hacker culture, in particular in the online discussion spaces for discussing programming problems, reflects this contradictory emphasis on self‐reliance and helping others: on the one hand, the experienced programmers in these spaces can be notoriously hostile to beginners asking questions that have been answered numerous times before, leading to the response “RTFM” (“read the fucking manual”) and similar (Coleman, 2013, p. 107). On the other hand, the fact that these spaces exist and that so many programmers volunteer time to maintain them suggests programmers are fully aware of their reliance on the help of others and the need for this circle of support to remain (Coleman, 2013). Meanwhile, technically challenging questions invite a great number of responses, not just because they represent an intellectual challenge but also because it gives hackers an opportunity to demonstrate their skills and intelligence to an audience of peers.