[Air-L] Geek Researcher Spends Three Years Living With Hackers

[Richard Forno]

Biella does great work.....ergo I'm looking forward to adding this to my must-read pile.....which right now is more like a "scholastic endtable" which is one year away from becoming am "academic-style room divider."  ;) 

--rick


Geek Researcher Spends Three Years Living With Hackers
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/11/coleman/

When you’re starting off as an anthropologist, you aim is to explore a subculture your peers have yet to uncover, spending years living with the locals and learning their ways.

That’s what Gabriella Coleman did. She went to San Francisco and lived with the hackers.

Coleman, an anthropologist who teaches at McGill University, spent three years living in the Bay Area, studying the community that builds the Debian Linux open source operating system and other hackers — i.e., people who pride themselves on finding new ways to reinvent software. More recently, she’s been peeling away the onion that is the Anonymous movement, a group that hacks as a means of protest — and mischief.

When she moved to San Francisco, she volunteered with the Electronic Frontier Foundation — she believed, correctly, that having an eff.org address would make people more willing to talk to her — and started making the scene. She talked free software over Chinese food at the Bay Area Linux User Group’s monthly meetings upstairs at San Francisco’s Four Seas Restaurant. She marched with geeks demanding the release of Adobe eBooks hacker Dmitry Sklyarov. She learned the culture inside-out.

Now, she’s written a book on her experiences: Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking. It’s a scholarly work of anthropology that examines the question: What does it mean to be a hacker?

Earlier this month, she dropped by Wired’s offices to talk about the book. Here’s an edited transcript of the conversation:

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http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/11/coleman/

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Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it.