4.1 Liberalism
The desire for a meritocratic form of hierarchy, in which individual talent and dedication is rewarded accordingly, is linked to a broader commitment to the political philosophy of liberalism. As Coleman (who uses the term “hackers” to refer to the collective identity of open source software makers) explains, hackers working on open source projects display a commitment to liberalism in the sense of:
historical as well as present‐day moral and political commitments and sensibilities that should be familiar to most readers: protecting property and civil liberties, promoting individual autonomy and tolerance, securing a free press, ruling through limited government and universal law, and preserving a commitment to equal opportunity and meritocracy.
(Coleman, 2013, p. 2)
This commitment to liberalism is not straightforward, but rather hackers enact a “liberal critique from within liberalism” (Coleman, 2013, p. 3). They critique a liberal belief in the value of intellectual property by promoting another liberal value, that of free speech. Hackers, in other words, critique proprietary software on the basis that it limits their “productive freedom,” or freedom to “autonomously improve on their peers’ work, refine their technical skills, and extend craftlike engineering traditions” (Coleman, 2013, p. 3).
How is meritocracy enacted? As Coleman argues, hackers’ commitment to meritocracy gives open source software production a contradictory character. On the one hand, hackers emphasize that individuals must “pull themselves up by their own bootstraps,” meaning they should apply themselves to learning their craft and earning any respect or rewards through long hours of dedication to programming and engineering. On the other hand, to create the conditions for this, hackers must provide not only the software they build and its source code, but also the documentation and explanation necessary for others to assess, evaluate, and learn from their work (Coleman, 2013). Beyond that, since the work of programming is often far more complex than implementing a well‐defined plan and involves a host of social and cultural competencies in addition to technical ones, hackers rely on each other for all kinds of knowledge that help them to do their jobs or contribute to open source projects. In other words, where meritocracy suggests self‐reliant, individual feats of technical skill, here it also implies providing the necessary resources that create the equal opportunity in which a meritocracy works.
Hacker culture, in particular in the online discussion spaces for discussing programming problems, reflects this contradictory emphasis on self‐reliance and helping others: on the one hand, the experienced programmers in these spaces can be notoriously hostile to beginners asking questions that have been answered numerous times before, leading to the response “RTFM” (“read the fucking manual”) and similar (Coleman, 2013, p. 107). On the other hand, the fact that these spaces exist and that so many programmers volunteer time to maintain them suggests programmers are fully aware of their reliance on the help of others and the need for this circle of support to remain (Coleman, 2013). Meanwhile, technically challenging questions invite a great number of responses, not just because they represent an intellectual challenge but also because it gives hackers an opportunity to demonstrate their skills and intelligence to an audience of peers.
4.2 Humor and Merit
To outsiders it may seem strange, but anyone who has spent time in open source communities or editing Wikipedia will know that humor plays an important role in peer production. Although such humor is significant for many reasons (including smoothing over conflicts or acting as a kind of “communal gift”), it has a specific relationship to the value of meritocracy (Coleman, 2013, p. 105). As Coleman points out, humor and craftiness in general allows hackers to draw attention to their technical competence in a socially acceptable way (Coleman, 2013). To write a script or piece of documentation that is funny to another expert coder, one has to play with form (conventions and corresponding expectations), and thus one must demonstrate a deep familiarity with the programming language, programming styles, algorithmic techniques, and general approaches to solving problems. Similarly, to make jokes that draw on or highlight Wikipedia’s complex set of policies and guidelines or key events from its history one must be steeped within them. In Bourdieu’s terminology, we could say that such clever software developers or Wikipedians are signaling their cultural capital, or command of the various skills, knowledge, and competences that will allow them to succeed within a particular field or project.
4.3 Critiques of Meritocracy in Geek Cultures
In theory, a meritocracy works when individuals have access to the same material and intellectual resources, and thus an equal opportunity from which to develop themselves and display their individual talent. In practice, access to these resources will always be unequal, since it is impossible for everyone to have the same time, financial resources, prior knowledge, and so on.
In particular, Alice Marwick (2013) and Marie Hicks (2016) have each criticized the belief in meritocracy in computer cultures in ways that can be extended to analyzing peer production. Although Marwick’s analysis is focused on startup culture (which in Bourdieu’s terms is a relatively “heteronomous” form of software production opposite the “autonomous” mode of FOSS production), her criticism of the “myth of meritocracy” is likely to be highly relevant to many peer production projects. As she argues, this belief is not only generally false but has disproportionate negative effects on women and people of different races, nationalities, ethnic and economic backgrounds. Beyond more obvious cases of sexism and racism, there will always be issues of unconscious bias that impact judgments of others and their contributions – Marwick notes in her interviews with both male and female Silicon Valley workers, for example, that female entrepreneurs and tech workers are often judged by their appearance rather than technical or business competence (Marwick, 2013, p. 264). The fact that Silicon Valley and workers in the US and European tech industries generally are perceived as favoring progressive politics hardly means that ethnocentrism and erroneous assumptions about others disappear (and rather that this ethnocentrism takes on new forms, see English‐Lueck, 2002). By upholding an ideology of meritocracy, open source communities and Wikipedia are less likely to see how participation and achievement are dependent on being able to fit in with a group that is overwhelmingly male and white. As Ford and Wajcman (2017) note, for example, participation in Wikipedia is often adversarial, unwelcoming to newcomers and suited to people with high degrees of technical skill, all of which favors its existing (mostly male) community and discourages women from taking part. Likewise, Nafus (2012) demonstrates the strong link between the meritocratic ideal in open source communities (present in claims that technical contributions “don’t have gender”) and the hostile attacks women often face in these communities when raising issues of sexism.
Marie Hicks’s work deals with the history of computing, but is equally relevant to the present topic. Hicks (2016) notes how highlighting the contributions of “genius” women in the history of computing – while noble in its intentions – strengthens the belief that success is a function of individual talent, obscuring inequalities of access and the fact that any individual contribution is dependent on a great deal of “hidden work” by countless others. This kind of critique raises the question of whether we should aim to improve ostensibly meritocratic systems favored in peer production and geek culture, or replace them with something else entirely.
In sum, this section has taken a closer look at meritocracy as a core value of FOSS and Wikipedia communities and the wider technological and media fields they operate within. Meritocracy is steeped in a liberal worldview that prizes individual achievement and equal opportunity, and as such we can see in peer production cultures an emphasis on both individual merit as well as the need to assist others. The meritocracies enacted by these communities can be found in crystallized form in various reputation systems and governance structures. However, meritocracy will always remain an ideal, or myth, given that power always ensures inequalities
