Am I a hacker?

My latest post on the Geek Feminism blog is up! Excerpt:

When Coleman says hackers support “a liberal politics of free speech” (p. 15), I was hoping for more analysis of just whose free speech hackers support, but I didn’t find one. In fact, in my experience, the kind of free speech hackers support is quite narrow. Racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, and ableist speech must be protected; any criticism of such speech must be suppressed in order to protect the free speech of those who would make remarks that marginalize and exclude (I guess you have to kill free speech in order to save it). Later on the same page, she writes “From an ethnographic vantage point, it is important to recognize many hackers are citizens of liberal democracies, and have drawn on the types of accessible liberal tropes–notably free speech–as a means to conceptualize their technical practice and secure novel political claims” — which I thought was closer to the truth. Consistently with the selective nature of the application of the “free speech” trope, hackers don’t believe in free speech for its own sake; they use it because it’s a powerful tool for getting support.