In the late Middle Ages, authors shared their texts freely.
By Dr. Kathleen E. Kennedy
Global Professor
British Academy
University of Bristol
Introduction
Hackers are the last thing most people would associate with the Middle Ages. I copyrighted that sentence as I typed it into my phone while waiting in a grocery line. Indeed, the sentence was copyrighted whether I intended it or not, as under current American law, text is copyrighted the moment it is fixed in media. Such a short description of a textual event hides a wealth of cultural norms, norms which I hope to explore here. I am an author. I am the author of that sentence I wrote in the grocery line. However, until I shared that sentence, I had an audience of one, myself. Copyright is fundamentally about who has the right to share a text, that is, who has the right to copy that text, and also who has the right to alter that text. Ultimately, copyright determines who can profit legally from the copying of a text. Historically, however, anyone could copy a text, and profit from that copy. Today if I wish to publish my sentence professionally, as the author I am unlikely to retain the copyright of it. Instead I exchange the copyright with a professional publisher, who then has control over making copies of the sentence I wrote, and over who else can use my sentence. The fact that some-thing else has occurred instead is a tribute to Punctum Books’s interest in openness, commonness, and freedom of information.
As with any cultural practice, copyright has a long history that extends back before there were laws devoted to copyright in the eighteenth century. In the late Middle Ages, authors shared their texts freely. Once completed, a text could be copied by anyone with the skills to do so, and the evidence is overwhelming that this copying included what we today would call “derivative works.” That is, copyists felt free to translate texts into other languages, add or subtract material to or from texts, and insert texts into other texts. In every way medieval copyists treated texts as common to all, some-thing we might call “public domain,” or, more generally, an “information commons.” Occasionally, a king or a clergyman attempted to control this free movement of texts, and then we see people, “medieval hackers,” mounting defenses of this information culture. This will trace intellectual property norms from late medieval England until the crown and a group of printers collaborated successfully to control printing in the 1550s. Despite such channeling, this considers how the medieval norms of commonness, openness, and freedom of information are still present in our textual culture in the culture of computer hackers. I will also explore how these norms challenge modern copyright law.
The people involved in translating both the Bible and the parliamentary statutes in late medieval England used the very terms of openness and access that hackers use today: they stress commonness, openness, and freedom. This traces the striking similarity of vocabulary used by contemporary legal theorists and hackers and that of early translators such as the anonymous translators of the Wycliffite Bible, the first complete translation of the Bible into English, later Bible translators such as William Tyndale and George Joye, and early legal translators such as John Rastell. As modern hackers would say, in late medieval England the desire for sacred and secular law in the vernacular was “an itch that had to be scratched,” not just for the good of the translators, but for the common good.1 The major distinction between medieval hackers and modern hackers is that these ideals and the information commons that enabled them were normative in manuscript culture, came to be restricted under the early Tudors, and are now marginal, as are hackers themselves.
It is the rhetoric shared by the medieval information commons and modern hackers that led me to that sentence typed at the grocery store: “hackers are the last thing most people would associate with the Middle Ages.” When we think of hackers we think of computers, of programming, maybe even of crime. We are not wrong to think so: today hackers are most frequently computer programmers, and some hackers commit crimes. However many hackers argue that this is a reductive way of thinking about hacking. These hackers counter that hacking is bigger than computer programming. They claim that it is a culture, an ideology. The hacker ideal is a community of equals who gain entrance to the community and position among its hierarchies through skill. This skill is often quite physical, skill at making things, but at a more fundamental and idealistic level it is about having the skill to make something do what the hacker wants it to do, whether or not that thing was designed originally to perform that action. Yet the existence of the notion of “hacker” suggests that this level of skill and control is not the norm today. That we have a word for “hacker” at all suggests that distance, institutional control, or some other physical or cultural barrier prevents manufacture and repurposing from being commonplace.
Such hacking might appear to be strictly limited in time, place, and culture, but I argue instead that hackers are truly medieval, thanks to their relationship with the information commons. Sadly, today many of us think very little about this commons, to which we all have access. The information commons is the “public domain” loosely understood. As we will see in detail later the information commons includes all “texts” which the public has the right to circulate and modify as they desire. The information commons does not end with large digital libraries such as Project Gutenberg (www.gutenberg.org), The Internet Archive (archive.org), or Google Books, but extends to a range of computer code, and in the past extended much, much further. We can be pardoned for being unfamiliar with the concept though, as in the early twenty-first century the information commons appears to be shrinking.
Recently institutions and corporations have found it both useful and possible to impose the strictest control in history over the use of information, and this control extends to limiting the information commons. Such wide-ranging control of information is possible thanks to the digital revolution of the late twentieth century. I argue that our modern notion of “the hacker” has developed as this digital control over information has developed. A hacker is an active person, but also a person in opposition, and these inflections are inherent in our uses of the term. The title, Medieval Hackers, highlights that opposition with its anachronistic title. The title implies several other aspects of my argument, too. It suggests that the information commons was the norm in medieval England until government and trade institutions and guilds found it both useful and possible to impose controls over the use of information, to limit the information commons. The title implies that these early attempts at information control resulted in the first articulations of hacker culture. This argues that the historical bedrock on which our own Anglo-American culture is founded is that of an information commons, and that like all bedrock this information commons influences and emerges into culture in various ways today, including in the figure of the hacker.
Media Archaeology
This exploration repurposes a new media theory which itself borrows from the field of geology. Erkki Huhtamo describes “archaeology of the media” as “a way of studying the typical and commonplace in media history—the phenomena that (re)appear and disappear and reappear over and over again and somehow transcend specific historical contexts.”2 Media archaeology offers a more flexible model for considering the past’s relationship to the present than Foucauldian genealogy: “media archaeology is first and foremost a methodology, a hermeneutic reading of the ‘new’ against the grain of the past, rather than a telling of the histories of technologies from past to present.”3 Nevertheless, Lisa Gitelman cautions that in this methodology, the past is too often “represented discretely, formally, in isolation,” while the “present retains a highly nuanced or lived periodicity.”4 In short, media archaeology can recover which technologies were new at which periods, but must also fight against seeing this technology in isolation. Clearly media archaeology offers an invigorating way of examining the past, but as with any technique, it must be used cautiously.
develop the idea of media archaeology further and extend its use of the geologic analogy. In so doing, my method reads the new against the grain of the past more thoroughly than some others because I employ this method as a medievalist, a twenty-first century scholar at the bottom of the trench, looking up and out at the strata, rather than down and in as do modernists practicing media archaeology. Medievalists develop nuanced pictures of the premodern world and desire to reveal connections between that world and the modern, practices that fight the romanticizing tendency in media archaeology. Medievalists grapple expertly with the difficulties (even impossibilities) inherent in attempting a warts-and-all recreation of ancient culture.
One might think of medievalists as rigorously schooled in cultural calculus. Before the seventeenth-century scientist, Isaac Newton discovered how to calculate the area under a curve, astronomers strove mightily using the best mathematical tool at their disposal: trigonometry, which finds the areas of triangles. So the pre-Newtonian astronomers labored to estimate as closely as possible the area under a curve by dividing that curve into thinner and thinner triangles. Eventually they reached a number past which they could no longer figure: we can call this number .9 (that is, “.9 repeating,” or “nines all the way down.”) Because .9 is not a whole number, impossibly tiny portions of the area under the arc remained unmeasured. The magic of calculus was, and remains, truly radical: the scientific community agrees to call that .9, ONE, to use it as though it isone, because calculations using the fiction of the whole number work. Calculus, the very foundation of modern science and technology, rests on this fiction. Today scientists call this fiction “tolerance,” and a particular project’s tolerance is based on assessments of that project’s margin for error. Historians of all sorts are used to working with “cultural tolerance,” and any project which “read[s] the new against the grain of the past” must be especially aware of that margin for error.
When discussing archaeology, the vocabulary of paleontology and geology becomes useful. To practice media archaeology, media theorist Siegfried Zielinski speaks directly of using “certain conceptual premises from paleontology.”5 He expresses clearly the usefulness of the stratigraphic model: “if the interface of my method and the following story are positioned correctly, then the exposed surfaces of my cuts should reveal great diversity, which either has been lost because of the genealogical way of looking at things or was ignored by this view.”6 For Zielinski, culture accumulates over time as do layers of the earth’s crust. Whether for paleontological or archeological purposes, or for oil exploration, modern earth science rests (literally) on the premise of geological stratification. The surface layer, including dirt, plants, dwellings, and mobile phones, is eventually covered, and slowly the surface layer becomes stone due to compression and the chemical exchanges caused by pressure and time. Moreover these stone layers are not static. Strata can be ‘lost,’ drawn down into the mantle and reheated, and there are other more visible options as well. As the Grand Canyon demonstrates vividly, wind and water can cause erosion, and this can reveal ancient strata. In the form of earthquakes and volcanoes the shifting of the plates making up the earth’s crust can uncover hidden strata (and create new strata) quickly and violently.
Of note is how conscious earth scientists are of using “stratigraphy” as a fiction, such as .9 = 1. Strata are made of different types of sediment or volcanic rock, accumulated over time, and strata are identified by the type of rock characteristic of individual strata. Yet strata do not always separate from one another with a thin line, but express relative positions and physical (chemical) compositions. Generally, deeper strata are older than shallower strata (the law of superposition). Individual strata meet at transitional zones, and these can be of great interest to scientists. Like the fiction of 1, stratigraphy allows for a tolerant, two-dimensional representation of four dimensions—the three dimensions of space, and time.
“Cultural stratigraphy” recognizes that our technological landscape of mobile phones rests on top of computers and land-line telephones and telegraphs and letters and messengers going back deep into time. Zielinski’s model of media archaeology is quite static, however, as it makes just one cut in motionless strata, and it may not correct for the processes over time that have fossilized deep strata: the medieval messenger we dig up is a pale reflection of the living courier. In a further complication, letters and messengers may be medieval, but they are also modern phenomenon. Even more than geologic strata, cultural strata are shifting and complex. Unlike most modernists, as a medievalist, I am accustomed to working in lower strata and looking up and out to see how younger layers are influenced by older layers in complicated, rather than simple ways. I am practiced at explaining how time has altered a layer from what it once was.7 That stratigraph of the mobile phone cannot be considered in isolation, but is related also to developments in technology, manufacturing, and globalization of industry and culture.
In this way I am borrowing consciously from the Annales school of social history, at the same time as I am informed by the methods of a new generation of scholars. The annalistes developed the practice of social history and promoted the use of methods borrowed from the social sciences. One of the fathers of the annalistes, Fernand Braudel spends much of the first volume of his magisterial La Méditerranée connecting the geology of the Mediterranean basin with its peoples, and I draw from this tradition.8 Just as the sources I shall rely on show topography characteristic of their times and places, they betray also the shifting of strata beneath them. A similar methodology is used to excellent effect by critic Martin Foys in his recent study of the Nunburnholme Cross.9 In my investigation, translation of texts, additions to them, and methods of copying them reveal strata, or layers of accretion, over time. In media archaeological terms, the interaction of hackers with the information commons is today exceptional, but I argue that this same interaction appears to be cultural bedrock underlying, and therefore influencing, all of Anglo-American media culture, at times indirectly, and at times with immediacy.
What Is a Hacker?
The Oxford English Dictionary implicitly admits to an un-traced origin of the word “hacker.” The OED defines “hacker” as “a person with an enthusiasm for programming or using computers as an end in itself,” and it lists the first recorded usage in a passage from 1976: “the compulsive programmer, or hacker as he calls himself, is usually a superb technician.”10 Such a description attests to a well-established folk tradition already in place in 1976. (The first recorded instance of “hacker” to refer to illegal programming occurred in the same year.)11 Yet the word itself is quite old. In fact, the earliest record of the noun “hacker” is medieval: a type of chopping implement was known as a “hacker” from the 1480s.12 Evidently, over time the term moved from the implement to the person wielding the implement.13 Today the grammatical slippage remains, as “the hacker hacked the hack” is grammatically sound, if stylistically unfortunate. Notably, even its earliest uses, “hacker” and “hacking” referred to necessary disruption. Arboriculture required careful pruning (with a hacker) to remove unwanted branches and cultivation necessitated the regular breaking up of soil and weeds in between rows of a crop (with a hacker). Such practices broke limbs and turf in order to create beneficial new growth. Such physical hacking resembles the actions of computer hackers who claim to identify security exploits (breaking into software) in order to improve computer security, not to weaken it.
As the OED asserts, hackers explore and develop: they make things functional the way they wish them to be. Hacker Eric Raymond distills the definition of “hacker” thusly:
- A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary.
- One who programs enthusiastically (even obsessively) or who enjoys programming rather than just theorizing about programming . . .
- An expert or enthusiast of any kind.
- One who enjoys the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming or circumventing limitations.
- [deprecated] A malicious meddler who tries to discover sensitive information by poking around. . . . The correct term for this sense is “cracker.”14
The definition moves from the strictly computer-related to more general ways of experiencing and expressing expertise. It ends with a defense of the legality of hacking: for Raymond criminal hacking is something else, is “cracking,” and we will consider this distinction further below. One of the earliest explorers of hacker culture, journalist Steven Levy adds to Raymond’s definition and describes what he found in hacker communities in the early 1980s thusly: “it was a philosophy of sharing, openness, decentralization, and getting your hands on machines at any cost to improve the machines and to improve the world.”15 Hackers such as Richard Stallman and Larry Wall go so far as to describe the decision to be a hacker as a “moral choice” and their rhetoric has been de-scribed as evangelical.16
Most of the time hackers act within legal bounds, but they can also infringe on proprietary interests (including copyright), sometimes doing so in the name of functionality, and sometimes with larger political goals.17 Levy explains the thought process behind the actions which hackers sometimes take that run counter to social norms:
just as information should be clearly and elegantly transported within a computer, and just as software should be freely disseminated, hackers believed people should be allowed access to files or tools which might promote the hacker quest to find out and improve the way the world works.18
The recent actions against censorship legislation, in support of file-sharing websites and improved cyber-security by hacker groups such as LulzSec and Anonymous, and of the website WikiLeaks, and even of the leaks by whistleblower Edward Snowden demonstrate such motivation clearly. Displaying classic hacker culture, the first two of these groups blend a folkloric playfulness with technical expertise and a sense of social justice. Hacking “for the lulz” captures in modern leetspeak (internet chat idiom) the exuberant, frequently dangerous playfulness of trickster figures Coyote or Loki. Though unconfirmed, the recent, reported hacking of computer systems belonging to Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization provides a fine example of this enthusiasm and sense of play. Whether hacked by an opposing government, opposition group, or hacktivist organization, the computer systems were deactivated, but also began playing a song by metal band AC/DC at top volume.19 Recent hacker ethnographer Gabriella Coleman finds humor to be central to hacker culture, as it is deployed to negotiate a culture both egalitarian and at times hierarchical.20
Anonymous’s use of the Guy Fawkes mask as a symbol of their organization expresses keen awareness of this ancient tradition of hazardous play. The historical Guy Fawkes was what we would today call a religious extremist and a domestic terrorist. Famously, his plot to blow up the Parliament building and kill most of the members of parliament and the royal family was foiled and he was executed. A national holiday, this event is memorialized even today with bonfires, effigies, and masks on 5 November. Anonymous’ use of the Fawkes mask hurdles its association with seventeenth-century Catholic domestic terrorism, however, and accepts as its origin Alan Moore’s 1980s graphic novel, V for Vendetta, and the Wachowskis’ translation of that comic to film in 2006.21 In Moore’s comic, the Fawkes-mask-wearing main character, V, is a radicalized, violent anarchist, while the Wachowskis’ V is a more box office friendly social activist. Anonymous members’ use of the mask exploits the space between the two versions of V. While hackers may hack purely in their own interests, larger groups have gained notoriety for their actions on behalf of citizens. Nevertheless, the methods Anonymous and other hacker groups use even in social activism reflect this culture of dangerous play: citizens who find their hacked account information online in plaintext may not feel the “lulz” or the justice. Those aided by Coyote do not always, either.
A hacker himself, Stallman clarifies the distinction between “hacker” and “pirate”: “the use of ‘hacker’ to mean ‘security breaker’ is a confusion on the part of the mass media. We hackers . . . continue using the word to mean, ‘Someone who loves to program and enjoys being clever about it’,” or as I myself have heard it generalized: “hackers make things. Bored kids break things.”22 While in modern French, “pirate” is the sole term to express both “pirate” and “hacker,” conflating the two obscures the workings of power and property: a pirate steals by definition, while a hacker may not.23 The annual hacker conventions DEF CON and Black Hat put point on the need for such clarifications. The conventions developed to explore the limitations of computer and network security, and these limitations are demonstrated at presentations during the conventions: attendees must decide on their own how to act on such knowledge. Legal at-tempts have been made to suppress these demonstrations in the past, but the current trend in DEF CON and Black Hat attendance finds an increasing number of federal and corporate agents attending in an attempt to stay abreast of the information security field.24
As early displeasure with DEF CON and Black Hat at-tests, corporations and government may associate such customary community behavior as sharing with crime and de-monize these practices with the criminal term “pirate.” Discussing proprietary software development in the early 1980s, Stallman gives this ominous description: “the rule made by the owners of proprietary software was, ‘If you share with your neighbor, you are a pirate.’”25 Yet as Snowden’s revelations of pervasive hacking by the NSA and DCHQ remind us even more than the attendance changes at DEF CON, the line between hacking and piracy is both a legal one and highly contested: “the trope of piracy has always been highly mobile, a marker of the very instabilities of those lines that define social and ethical standards.”26 Lawrence Lessig is quick to point out that “neither our tradition nor any tradition has ever banned all ‘piracy.’”27
As Raymond’s definition makes clear, hackers are characterized both by expertise and enthusiasm. The affiliation of the translators we will study with higher education, their enthusiasm for their work, and the importance of communities of translators to them place these translators squarely within a medieval information culture which we today call hacker ideology. Modern or medieval hackers are associated frequently with institutions of higher learning. Levy traces early computer hackers to MIT. John Wyclif and his early followers were all affiliated with the University of Oxford. John Rastell and other early law hackers were trained at the Inns of Court, the legal college of its era. Hacker ethnographer Pekka Himanen recognizes the similarity of hacker culture to academic culture and to medieval work ethics: “openness may be seen as the legacy that hackers have received from the [medieval] university.”28 More than money, hackers are motivated by peer recognition: “for these hackers, recognition within a community that shares their passion is more important and more deeply satisfying than money, just as it is for scholars in academe.”29 A PhD himself, Himanen has worked in and near academia most of his life, and one must recognize the knowing wink in this statement. In the end, neither Anonymous members nor most medieval translators are or were paid for their hacking directly, and so both are motivated by nonmonetary reward.
Some medieval translators were marked with an enthusiasm so zealous that they risked martyrdom for their efforts, and while this may not be identically true of modern hackers, the past few years have seen a string of high-profile arrests. William Tyndale argued that the Bible was common to all Christians, and that its text should be openly available in English, and free to pass from believer to believer: Tyndale was a hacker. He was tried for his hacking, however, and executed for his activities. Even today the hazardous play characteristic of hacker culture can harm the hackers themselves, and not just their targets. New members of the 4chan community can experience all manner of hazing, but the whistle-blowing and attempts to find asylum of Edward Snowden (2013), defection of Sabu from LulzSec (2011), Wikileaks founder Julian Assange’s flight from prosecution (2010), and a steady series of arrests of people involved in Anonymous actions (2010-2012) serve as reminders that very real-world consequences remain for hackers who act against the law today.
No less than their medieval counterparts, computer hackers are translators. Analog or digital, translators exercise control over media. Computer code is perpetually translated. Coders translate human languages into computer languages, and then computer language is translated into machine language, the language of zeros and ones in which computers work: one incorrect character and a computer cannot read a program. Levy recounts in detail the great leap forward that occurred as hackers developed more and more robust assemblers (and later compilers) to accomplish these feats of translation, allowing people to program in languages (FORTRAN, BASIC) that were more similar to English than machine language.30 Like computer hackers, medieval translators were insiders: they had the language skills to open texts, scriptural or legal, into other languages, and thereby make them more accessible.
Computer or human, language is fraught today, and was in medieval England:
if the languages an individual used—Latin, French, English . . . —were in part functions of birth and upbringing, their use in particular domains helped sustain the dynamics of society. Like individual speech acts, moreover, languages had meaning in relation to one another.31
The various computer languages used today by programmers develop and shift in popularity as well, leaving programmers to catch up or miss opportunities. I know a programmer who works as a translator in a quite literal fashion. Effectively he is a computer language translator. He works with databases written in old computer languages and writes patches (and more elaborate programs) that allow these old databases to be read by databases written in newer languages. Hidden from many of us, our contemporary digital culture is saturated with translation, and I go so far as to claim that late medieval England had a culture of translation also. What is surprising is that medieval translators express ideals similar to those of modern-day computer hackers. This startling fact demands that we consider more carefully the medieval antecedents to digital hacking.
Common, Open, and Free: A Hacker’s Life for Me?
“Commonness, openness, and freedom” is a set of terms that will appear over and over, as together those terms form a popular distillation of hacker values.32 Modern hackers use these terms to describe their goals for the world. Medieval information culture embodied these values. When medieval hackers express their desire for similar values to persist in the face of early attempts to control information, they use the same rhetoric as computer hackers. Each term of the three can be loaded with meaning located in a specific moment in time. For example, John Wyclif’ s helpers would not have thought of “open” as relating to open source software as we might today. Yet the base definition remains the same.33 This section will introduce each of these terms.
I am struck by the emphasis computer hackers place on an information commons as necessary to cultural development, since in the Middle Ages manuscript culture was a profound information commons. Medievalists are accustomed to thinking about “commonness.” The English law is the “common law.” The house of Parliament filled with those below the rank of peer is the House of Commons, and historians and critics have done much work studying the importance of the concept of the common profit to the medieval English.34 From critic Russell Peck’s classic study of the common profit in the medieval poet John Gower’s works, to critic Matthew Giancarlo’s recent cultural study of the medieval parliament, medievalists have examined the notion of commonness from primarily cultural perspectives, rather than legal ones. Intellectual commons, or “information commons” as I will usually call them, have not been examined. Yet commonness is once again a matter of some debate outside of the field of Medieval Studies, and the terms used are similar to those used by the medieval English when discussing information commons.
The most recognizable and popular voice touting the necessity of a “new commons” is that of cyber-rights activist and Harvard law professor, Lawrence Lessig, and I will use his formulation of the issues as a means of outlining the discussion. In The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World, Lessig lays out important elements that create a commons. Accordingly a commons is a resource that anyone within the relevant community can use without seeking the permission of anyone else. Such permission may not be required because the resource is not subject to any legal control (it is, in other words, in the public domain). Or it may not be required because permission to use the resource has already been granted.35 Lessig gives the traditional examples of streets, parks, and texts in the public domain. He also claims that language is a commons, though he does not explore that claim.36 Lessig’s main interest lies in assessing the future of the internet, given that its original design was to be a commons: “open code creates a commons” as Lessig says frequently.37 Traditionally, commons are maintained in the face of potential for monopolization, and with the understanding that the commons is more valuable if the public has access to it.38 While custom may not regulate the commons of the internet (or not well), medievalists and Early Modernists can immediately identify the importance of customary practice in the regulation of many sorts of early commons such as pasturing animals.39 I argue that in a manuscript culture, texts were part of an information commons. The concept of “the hacker” did not exist, in effect, because everyone was one.
The customary nature of the commons together with the idealism of hacker ideology demonstrate why there is room for a cultural consideration of hackers beyond historian Adrian Johns’ masterful Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates.40 Johns views the hacker culture I describe here as theoretical, rather than actual. Our differences of approach and opinion make good sense, however. In many respects, Johns writes a social history of intellectual property in Piracy. Yet there are facets to legal culture which are difficult to see through the lenses of classic legal or social history, as Coleman’s ethnography aptly illustrates. Custom is one example. Further, ideals can be powerful without always extending to practice, and the idealistic expressions of hackers about their culture, whether in the twenty-first century or sixteenth century, can influence culture whether or not they are practiced as preached. This study explores the same history of hacking Johns traces, but does so for long before his research begins and employs a more cultural method.
This recent consideration of commonness, the “work not of economists but of lawyers and legal theorists” fits into discussion of intellectual property by political philosophers Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in their philosophical opus on the commons, Commonwealth.41 Hardt and Negri develop a political philosophy based on the commons as neither pub-lic nor private. While we can easily see how the commons and private property can be in tension, they remind us also that “it is important to keep conceptually separate the common—such as common knowledge and culture—and the public, institutional arrangements that attempt to regulate access to it.”42 These scholars emphasize the social character of the commons, that it is not only air and water, but also language and social networks.43 Those social networks are fundamental to hacker culture and medieval information culture alike.
The historical possibilities latent in the notion of an information commons are sketched out strikingly by political scientist Steven Weber: “people take the religious ‘code,’ modify it, recombine it with pieces of code from elsewhere, and use the resulting product to scratch their spiritual itch.”44 The Bible already existed when the fourteenth-century Wycliffite translators and the sixteenth-century Lutheran translators approached it. In translating it, they modified the Bible by “recombining” it with other languages, or “pieces of code from elsewhere,” and they used the resulting vernacular Bible to “scratch their spiritual itch” for scripture in English. A similar equation applies to the translation of the law. Neither the Wycliffites nor the Tudor translators could have accomplished their task (or conceived of it in the same way) had the Bible not been part of a traditional information commons.
Nevertheless, a central thread is that institutions attempted at various times in late medieval England to control or gate the information commons, to render at least parts of it proprietary. I discuss Archbishop Thomas Arundel’s laws outlawing the spread of the new English Bible (1407-1409). I recount the struggle of hackers against the laws of Henry VIII’s administration (1509-1547) that tried to curtail the hackers’ new Bible translations. In a sense, Arundel and Henry VIII at-tempted to exert proprietary control over the Bible’s text and claimed a legal right to identify who would be allowed to copy the Bible or translate it into English. Today, translation is considered to produce a derivative work, and derivatives are protected under current copyright law. We will see how a group of law printers convinced Mary I (1553-1558) to agree to incorporate and grant them the right to regulate all printing, institutionalizing a level of proprietary interest never before accomplished.
Closing a commons restricts other aspects of society in ways that could not have been completely apparent to the sixteenth-century printers, but are readily evident today. Without linking their use of these terms to hacker culture, Hardt and Negri make it clear that a society based on the commons requires openness.45 Indeed, in the worldview pro-posed by the pair, capital itself is “understood not simply as social relation but as an open social relation” (emphasis original).46 Furthermore, Hardt and Negri’s formulation implies free circulation. Both openness and freedom are recognized by modern hackers as integral parts of their ideology.
Built on the hacker tradition of an information commons, the open source software model advocated by Stallman, Himanen, and other hackers highlights the second ideal of hacker culture: openness. From operating systems (Linux) to web browsers (Firefox), these programs are “open” to all. Any user can see the code and work to improve it if she or he so desires. Access to open source code is assured through a range of licenses (like the copyright on this text) designed to perpetuate the openness of these programs, and most of these programs are available to users gratis. In this way open source culture can be free in multiple senses.47
Openness can be seen in other arenas of information cul-ture as well. Today we own many electronics that exist in boxes, but we cannot open those boxes ourselves because something has broken and we want to fix it, or even just be-cause we want to see inside. These boxes are closed on many levels. In contrast, building a piece of electronics out of parts (something that is still possible) may be far more labor intensive than cutting open a packing box, or removing the cover from a desktop computer, but once assembled, any part can be replaced, and parts can be added over time to keep the system up to date. That is an open box. The analogy works also in fields far from electronics. Although your Great Aunt Biddy may never divulge her recipe for barbecue, you can walk into a grocery store and buy each ingredient and make your own and sell it at a block party: cooking from scratch is an open process. Openness can be found in parts of the modern publishing field, too. Rather than a standard copyright, the present text is protected by a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.48 This frees a reader to share this text as long as it is attributed to me and the reader does not make any money in so sharing it. However, this license does not render this text entirely open, as the “No Derivatives” clause prohibits building on this text, or even translating it without permission. A related prohibition, “do not fork code” (do not create a separate project using someone else’s code without permission) is a modern hacker custom that we will also see at work in early sixteenth-century England.
There is a growing understanding that openness has been prioritized at previous points in history. Raymond characterizes the distinctions between industry software development and open source development as “the cathedral and the bazaar,” explicitly linking industry hierarchies with the medieval Church (and hackers with a globalized, exoticized marketplace).49 Programmer Tim O’Reilly sees open source as having a history, too: “instead of thinking of open source only as a set of . . . software development practices, we do better to think of it as a field of scientific and economic inquiry, one with many historical precedents, and part of a broader social and economic story.”50 Consultant Eugene Kim sees “culture[s] of openness” occurring repeatedly through time and emphasizes the necessity of effective communication in creating these cultures, effective communication which “begins with shared language.”51
The third hacker ideal is freedom, and this can have multiple resonances. Of course, free can refer to gratis, costing nothing. More often, however, freedom is associated with access and circulation: code circulates freely, easily, among users. According to hackers copyright is the opposite of freedom. Copyright, even the prehistory of copyright, is a product of the narrowed cultural options that critic James Simpson and I argue emerge in the 1540s. The scholarship concerning early copyright and the prehistory of copyright, the Stationers’ Company, Tudor printing monopolies, and Elizabethan plagiarism is deep and probing, but it is entirely forward-looking.52 None of these scholarly works gives more than a cursory backward glance into the Middle Ages to find cultural precedent. I gesture toward this closure of options characteristic of the 1540s, but the meat of this text lies in describing the culture that precedes this closed notion of intellectual property, and against which, in the end, institutional control successfully thrust.
Making Medieval Hackers
To unpack the idea of an information commons as the bedrock of modern information culture this text explores the similarities between medieval English manuscript culture and modern computer hacker culture. First, the way medieval translators worked with text is very similar to what computer hackers do with code: they assess, modify and disseminate it. For modern hackers, modification can be structural, changing how code does its job, or linguistic, translating the language in which the code is written. For medieval translators, modification can also be structural, paraphrasing the psalms, for example, or linguistic, translating a statute into English. Hackers produce code, and in order to explore the medieval stratum of this practice one must examine texts and their production. While the information commons held across medieval Europe, I concentrate on medieval England as the foundation of modern Anglo-American law. Within medieval English culture, I draw my examples from the two most frequently copied texts, the Bible and the parliamentary statutes.
Approached from a practical standpoint, both the Bible and the statutes are similar to computer code today. As technologies, computers, the Bible, and the statutes require similar apparatus: all are sites of massive information storage and require refined techniques for information retrieval. Translation issues among computers, the Bible, and the statutes are similar as well. In a computer program, a single punctum out of place renders the code unreadable, and the program unusable. The discussion of whether to translate word-for-word or for sense is as old as Bible translation itself, but rarely do scholars consider translating the statutes in the same light. As in programming, the very wording of the Bible and the statutes was powerful, whether that power emanated from God or from the king and parliament, and therefore translation gave rise to similar methodological problems in each.
Yet medieval hackers were never called “hackers” at all because they were normative in a way computer hackers have never been. Only at times when the information commons is under threat do both groups employ the same rhetoric when explaining the importance of text and their roles in manipulating it. As manuscript culture gave way to print culture, ways of thinking about the possibility of text, of dissemination, of authorship, of ownership over information changed. At times these shifts were perceived as threatening the information commons, and then medieval hackers spoke out self-consciously. A similar paradigm-shift occurred in the late twentieth century, with the rise of digital technologies and the internet. Attempts to shut down file-sharing service The Pirate Bay led to the development of political “Pirate Parties” in several countries. Anonymous has also been involved in actions against corporations or governments that they view as threats to the free movement of information. We are today familiar with the reactions of at least parts of the hacker community to these perceived threats.
Simpson calls the type of information culture we shall see throughout this text, that I call an information commons, a “plausible alternative modernity.”53 Indeed it is plausible: computer hackers support this very culture today. We will discuss “differing definitions of self and communities,” of a“communitarian tradition,” but it will be one of translation, of manipulation of texts, not of reading alone, as Simpson explores.54 Once these medieval traditions had been firmly overcome, Simpson paints a bleak image of the 1540s, and we might well wonder how bright our own future is in a world increasingly cordoned from Hardt and Negri’s common and its flourishing, nourishing social networks.55
This text does not tell a triumphalist narrative of “the hacker.” Hacker culture used to be normative, but in the early age of print, in the 1540s, various cultural forces worked together to gate this vigorous textual culture and change it radically. To control access to texts and textual manipulation was revolutionary then. Today it is normative, and instead, arguing for open access to texts and the right to manipulate them is considered revolutionary (or simply criminal). Moreover, the technologies we have today allow for unprecedented control over texts and their manipulation. The medieval hackers “lost”: their culture was overwhelmed by a new way of life. Today, we must look back carefully at this moment that gave birth to our own information culture and use that examination to inform our decision to be spectators or agents in the current battles over access to information.
See endnotes and bibliography at source.
Chapter 1 (1-27) from Medieval Hackers by Kathleen E. Kennedy (Punctum Books, 01.16.2015), published by OAPEN under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported license.