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of the opinion that with the technical means of reproduction, now distributed among millions of households, “the bottle is opened, the ghost is out and nothing will be able to put it back in there.” Free software is an example of non-rivalry goods.40 However, there is an even more fundamental reason why Merten thinks the free production of information, and in the end of all material goods, will overcome exchange-based societies: they are supposed to be of better quality. There is a sense of superiority in the air here. Merten uses open-source science, fairy tales and recipes as examples that show how useful global cooperation and sharing of information can be in terms of realizing the GPL society. According to Merten, free software is an anomaly, a contradiction to capitalism.41 It is not a commodity, operates outside the realm of accumulation and thus, by its very nature, does not fit into the capitalist mode of production. To follow Merten’s thinking, free software eliminates abstract, fetish-type exchange value and establishes an economy dominated by the practical (use) value of goods and services. Capitalism cannot develop a production method based on self-expression. Others have countered this claim by saying that capitalism is capable of appropriating virtually anything. Instead of presenting free software as an inherent contradiction, critics insist that its production is taken up as a creative provocation which, in the end, will be neutralized and integrated in the next wave of modernization.42 Along these lines, Christian Fuchs accused Oekonux of being an elitist tech circle that does not recognize its “objective” role in the process of reforming capitalism.43 Hackers clearly do not operate outside the capitalist economy. Their “leisure-time” work on free software is made possible by other entities. But this doesn’t bring the debate much further. Cynical appropriation theories are valid, but boring because they are always right. They close rather than open strategy debates and rarely develop new practices. Merten responded to Fuchs that the “new” cannot develop itself in a vacuum and is impossible to separate from “old” structures. Coding is fertile, not futile. In my view, it is the task of the critical techno-intelligentsia to search within existing complex systems for “germs of the new” and stop complaining about the almighty power of the capitalist beast that eventually will absorb all dissent. There is an earnest search under way by the post-1989 generation to leave the 20th century behind and circumvent the “tired” choice between reform and revolution. There are numerous “non-capitalist” tendencies within the history of hacking – they just need to be dug out. The growing importance of knowledge produces cracks in capitalist logic.44 In his biography, GPL inventor Richard Stallman tells of a shift during the Reagan years towards selling software instead of treating it as a zero-cost commodity. “Selling software became more than a way to recoup costs, it became a political statement. More than a few programmers saw the hacker ethic as anti-competitive, and, by extension, un-American. At best it was a throwback to the anti-corporate attitudes of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Like a Wall Street banker discovering an old tie-dyed shirt hiding between French-cuffed shirts and double-breasted suits, many programmers treated the hacker ethic as an embarrassing reminder of an idealistic age.”45 The same could be said of Oekonux’s discourse and rituals, which remind Germanophiles of the rigid “Stamokap” years in the 1970s,46 dominated by “scientific Marxists,” when thousands of “young socialists” (including Chancellor Gerhard Schröder) sat together in local study groups reading Marx. One must overcome fears of such antagonism and ignore the zeitgeist and the opinions of journalists and friends in order to extract from the Oekonux sandbox that which is useful for one’s own context and needs.