Past literature tends towards dichotomous representations of computer hackers as either unhealthy young men engaged in bold tournaments of sinister hacking or visionaries whose utopian technological lifestyle has the potential to disrupt the pathologies of capitalism and modernity more generally. In contrast, this article examines the heterogeneous nature of hacker sociality in order to more adequately portray the complex topography of hacker morality and liberalism. We distinguish between and compare three different, though overlapping, moral expressions of hacking in order to theorize liberalism not as it is traditionally framed — as a coherent body of philosophical, economic, and legal thought or a set of normative precepts and doctrines — but as a cultural sensibility that, in practice, is under constant negotiation and reformulation and replete with points of contention. In doing so, we seek to contribute not only to the ethnographic literature on hacking, but to wider theoretical issues regarding the relationship of culture, morality, liberalism and technology in the contemporary world.

In a conversation format, seven anthropologists with extensive expertise in new digital technologies, intellectual property, and journal publishing discuss issues related to open access, the anthropology of information circulation, and the future of scholarly societies. Among the topics discussed are current anthropological research on open source and open access; the effects of open access on traditional anthropological topics; the creation of community archives and new networking tools; potentially transformative uses of field notes and materials in new digital ecologies; the American Anthropological Association's recent history with these issues, from the development of AnthroSource to its new publishing arrangement with Wiley‐Blackwell; and the political economies of knowledge circulation more generally.

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This paper discusses two main claims made about virtual worlds: first, that people become "immersed" in virtual worlds because of their sensorial realism, and second, because virtual worlds appear to be "places" they can be studied without reference to the lives that their inhabitants live in the actual world. This paper argues against both of these claims by using data from an ethnographic study of knowledge production in World of Warcraft. First, this data demonstrates that highly-committed ("immersed") players of World of Warcraft make their interfaces less sensorially realistic (rather than more so) in order to obtain useable knowledge about the game world. In this case, immersion and sensorial realism may be inversely correlated. Second, their commitment to the game leads them to engage in knowledge-making activities outside of it. Drawing loosely on phenomenology and contemporary theorizations of Oceania, I argue that what makes games truly "real" for players is the extent to which they create collective projects of action that people care about, not their imitation of sensorial qualia. Additionally, I argue that while purely in-game research is methodologically legitimate, a full account of member's lives must study the articulation of in-game and out-of-game worlds and trace people's engagement with virtual worlds across multiple domains, some virtual and some actual. [Keywords: knowledge production, phenomenology, virtual worlds, World of Warcraft, Second Life, video games, raiding] Personally I really enjoy pushing the pace, challenging myself: how hard, how efficient I could be, how much I could push damage, how I could survive. That sort of thing was the first reason why I chose to raid, and that continues to be a motivating factor. Eventually it really became about when you achieve common goals, as a group you really build strong camaraderie and strong connections. When you're raiding in Molten Core and you're killing bosses for the first time and doing server firsts or close to server firsts, it was [sic] an incredible high. And the amount of people yelling on vent when we killed Ragnaros was amazing. It was like nothing has even been louder. There will always be those first kills that I remember. -HolyHealz, raid leader of Power AeternusWe affirm the specificity of the human act, which cuts across the social milieu while still holding on to its determinations, and which transforms the world on the basis of given conditions. For us, man is characterized above all by his going beyond a situation, and by what he succeeds in making of what he has been made.-Jean-Paul Sartre, Search for a MethodIn retrospect, Julian Dibbell's 1993 Village Voice piece "A Rape in Cyberspace" was the beginning of a high-water mark in the first generation of studies of virtual worlds. The worlds Dibbell wrote about were alphanumeric contraptions in which people's sociality consisted of great walls of texts flowing across their screens. His achievement was to demonstrate that something as abstract as a database of t...

The idea of the "ecologically noble savage" once linked environmental activists and indigenous people. Today the concept is increasingly seen as problematic. In the Porgera district of Enga Province, Papua New Guinea, Ipili people confront massive social change brought about by the presence of a large gold mine. This paper explores how Ipili people find some aspects of global consumer culture to offer utopian possibilities for change, while others present dystopic inversions of their own culture. In doing so, it compares Western attempts to understand Ipili as noble or ignoble savages with Ipili attempts to make sense of the material culture and mores of outsiders. It concludes that both Ipili and westerners have unsettling insights into each other's culture.