[ISN] Geek Researcher Spends Three Years Living With Hackers

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

By Robert McMillan
Enterprise
Wired.com
11.28.12

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. [1] It’s a scholarly work of anthropology 
that examines the question: What does it mean to be a hacker?

[1] http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0691144613/infosecnews-20

[...]


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