Free Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking by E. Gabriella Coleman

calls didn’t incur intrastate long-distance charges). The location of many BBSs was clear, as much of the online information was about local politics, news, and so forth. Many hackers recall BBSs as places of audacious social interactions that readily spilled into the real world during “BBS meet ups,” when participants would get together at someone’s home or “the local Denny’s at 3 in the morning” to continue doing what they did online: talk and trade software. Many BBS members became close friends. It is not farfetched to describe some areas has having a dynamic, complex BBS scene in which hackers, as one of them told me, would “haunt the multiliners and knew most everyone in the scene in the LA area.”
    At some meetings, hackers would erect a small-scale informal market to barter software and games, with such marketplace transactions cementing hackers together. As portrayed by one hacker in an email message, “My friends and I had shoebox after shoebox of games and utilities. [ … ] We’d trade over BBSs, at BBS meets (since they were all regional, it wasn’t uncommon to have meets once every couple months).”
    Despite its locally rooted nature and limited network capacity, a BBS, much like the Internet now, was technologically multifaceted, allowing for private and public interactions. Some BBSs were home to more subversive, harder-to-access underground hacker groups, which gained media notoriety in the late 1980s and early 1990s after a string of raids and arrests due to their actions, including some computer break-ins. Largely operating from within private BBS bunkers, these groups operated on an invite-only basis (Sterling 1992). Other BBSs and groups existed more publicly with phone access numbers listed in local computer magazines or posted on other BBSs, thereby attracting many nontechnical users who shared information on this platform.
    The mid- to late 1990s heralded the end of the BBS era—a passing that hackers would not let slip away without due commemoration and celebration. In 1993, to bid adieu to this artifact, hackers organized the first Defcon in Las Vegas. Meant as a onetime event, its popularity overrode its original intent, and Defcon remains one of the largest celebrations of hacking. The fact that the BBS period is now over indicates that much of the hacker lifeworld is constituted through technological infrastructures with their own features and histories, and as subject to birth, growth, and decay as any other social formation.
    While many younger hackers have never used a BBS, older geeks (which can mean a still-young thirty years of age, though there are certainly mucholder ones) in the presence of their younger counterparts will, at times, fondly reminisce about life and hacking on BBSs. For example, once when I asked about BBSing on an IRC channel, all the geeks started to share memories of this vanished era. One programmer humorously and with some retroactive embellishment explained his passion for BBSing with this short account:
     you call
     it is busy
     you set your modem on redial
     you wait
     your mom yells at you to get off the phone
     you stop redial
     haha
     she talks with whoever while you impatiently wait
     you finally learn *70, and life changes forever [*70 stops call waiting, which if activated, would boot you off the modem when someone else calls]
     you hide behind her door listening to her talk so you know exactly when she has hung up
     or 1170 on rotary :) [the code for disabling call waiting on rotary]
     while sighing really loud so she can hear
     then you can call!
     sweeeeet!
     you run upstairs
     anyways, you manage to call, you get the REALLY SATISFYING modem noise
     you login
     and then you go the message boards
     you crawl them
     and you see what the last person posted on each subject board
     sometimes it was the