In this talk, I present various threads of analysis from two dissertation chapters on the central motifs of value that hackers hold through an examination of everyday practices. I will argue that to become a hacker is to embody a form of liberal individualism that shuns mediocrity; hackers favor a virtuous display of technical ability and intelligence whose inscription is marked in a repertoire of micropractices, including playful humor, agonistic taunting, and especially, the clever display of code. Hackers are bound together in an elite fraternal order of judgment, of constant self-cultivation, and the performance of a set of character traits that are often directed to confirm their mental and creative independence from each other. This leads to a series of tensions between individualism and collectivism, populism and elitism, hierarchy and equality that texture their social world but are bridged and attenuated through the expression of wit, especially clever code and humor. The execution of cleverness affirms an image of the free-thinking individual who learns the logic of systems so well that only he can innovate and create something truly original. However, given this commitment to technical self-cultivation, there is a felt need to constantly and recursively "equalize" the conditions by which other hackers can develop their skills and prove their worth to peers. One does not privatize the source of value one creates, even those exceptional pieces of code that are undeniably one's own, seen to emerge from raw, sheer technical ability. In the case of Free and Open Source software, this value is fed back, circulated among peers, contributing to an endowed and growing pool of resources through which other hackers can constantly engage in their asymptotic process of self-cultivation.

This talk will allow me to discuss how hacking is connected to the liberal tradition, to examine the workings (and shortcomings) of meritocracy and finally to discuss how some of these tensions appear in Debian and how they are mediated (successfully and unsuccessfully). I would then like to end with an open discussion and debate with developers over the material I presented.