Considered in the light of recent aesthetic arguments regarding the politics of spectatorship and economic arguments regarding peer production, participatory practices offer an ambiguous figure for exploring the ethics of contemporary IT production. Does evil offer a useful way for addressing this ambiguity? It is, I would like to suggest, by looking more carefully at the ways in which producers and users are mobilised and manipulated by technical practices that it becomes possible to answer this question. This presentation will explore some ideas about the material culture of computation and software production and propose some arguments for addressing technical practice from an ethico-aesthetic point of view.