Steven Levy is a technology journalist and author whose book hackers-levy (1984) is the definitive account of hacker-ethic-mit culture at the mit-ai-lab and other early computing centers. stallman is one of the central figures of the book, particularly in its sections on MIT during the mit-ai-lab-hacker-culture-1971-1984 era.
Levy's book documented the ethos of information freedom, collaborative development, and open access to machines that prevailed at the MIT AI Lab before proprietary software displaced it. This ethos — and its erosion — is the background against which Stallman's turn toward activism must be understood.
"Hackers" appeared two years before the founding-gnu-and-fsf-1983-1991 era was well underway, making it a contemporaneous rather than retrospective account of the culture Stallman was trying to preserve and codify in the free-software-definition and gnu-manifesto.
Levy's account is cited in free-as-in-freedom-williams by sam-williams and is considered essential context for understanding why Stallman framed software freedom as an ethical imperative rather than merely a technical preference. The hacker ethic documented by Levy is the cultural precursor to the four-freedoms.