A Hacker Manifesto

McKenzie Wark

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9780674257436
• Topic: Informatique
• Subtopic: Sciences générales de l'informatique

A double is haunting the world--the double of abstraction, the virtual reality of information, programming or poetry, math or music, curves or colorings upon which the fortunes of states and armies, companies and communities now depend. The bold aim of this book is to make manifest the origins, purpose, and interests of the emerging class responsible for making this new world--for producing the new concepts, new perceptions, and new sensations out of the stuff of raw data. A Hacker Manifesto deftly defines the fraught territory between the ever more strident demands by drug and media companies for protection of their patents and copyrights and the pervasive popular culture of file sharing and pirating. This vexed ground, the realm of so-called "intellectual property, " gives rise to a whole new kind of class conflict, one that pits the creators of information--the hacker class of researchers and authors, artists and biologists, chemists and musicians, philosophers and programmers--against a possessing class who would monopolize what the hacker produces.Drawing in equal measure on Guy Debord and Gilles Deleuze, A Hacker Manifesto offers a systematic restatement of Marxist thought for the age of cyberspace and globalization. In the widespread revolt against commodified information, McKenzie Wark sees a utopian promise, beyond the property form, and a new progressive class, the hacker class, who voice a shared interest in a new information commons.

WRITINGS

ABSTRACTION

[007]

Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 145. Throughout A Hacker Manifesto, certain protocols of reading are applied to the various textual archives on which it draws, and which call for some explanation. It is not so much a “symptomatic” reading as a homeopathic one, turning texts against their own limitations, imposed on them by their conditions of production. For instance, there is an industry in the making, within the education business, around the name of Deleuze, from which he may have to be rescued. His is a philosophy not restricted to what is, but open to what could be. In Negotiations, he can be found producing concepts to open up the political and cultural terrain, and providing lines along which to escape from state, market, party and other traps of identity and representation. His tastes were aristocratic—limited to the educational culture of his place and time—and his work lends itself to the trap of purely formal elaboration of the kind desired by the Anglo-American educational market particularly. One does better to take Deleuze from behind and give him mutant offspring by immaculate conception. Which was, after all, Deleuze’s own procedure. He can be turned away from his own sedentary habits.

[011]

Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red, 1983), 164. This classic work in the crypto-Marxist tradition sets the standard for a critical thought in action. Debord’s text is so designed that attempts to modify its theses inevitably moderate them, and thus reveal the modifier’s complicity with the “spectacular society” that Debord so (anti)spectacularly condemns. It is a work that can only be honored by a complete reimagining of its theses on a more abstract basis, a procedure Debord himself applied to Marx, and which forms the basis of the crypto-Marxist procedure.

[021]

Arthur Kroker and Michael A. Weinstein, Data Trash: The Theory of the Virtual Class (New York: St Martin’s, 1994), p. 6. The great merit of this book is to have grasped the class dimension to the rise of intellectual property. It remains only to examine intellectual property as property to arrive at what K+W leave uncharted—the class composition of the new radical forces that might oppose it. Data Trash identifies the new ruling class formation as the “virtual class,” whereas A Hacker Manifesto prefers not to offer the virtual up as semantic hostage to the enemy.

CLASS

[024]

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in The Revolutions of 1848: Political Writings, vol. 1, ed. David Fernbach (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), pp. 98, 86. Karatani would see the property question coming from Marx, but the state ownership answer as belonging to Engels, and a distortion of Marx’s whole trajectory. See Kolin Karatani, Transcritique: On Kant and Marx (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2003). A Hacker Manifesto is clearly neither an orthodox Marxist tract nor a post-Marxist repudiation, but rather a crypto-Marxist reimagining of the materialist method for practicing theory within history. From Marx one might take the attempt to discover abstraction at work in the world, as an historical process, rather than as merely a convenient category in thought with which to create a new intellectual product. Crypto-Marxist thought might hew close to the multiplicity of the time of everyday life, which calls for a reinvention of theory in every moment, in fidelity to the moment, rather than a repetition of a representation of a past orthodoxy, or a self-serving “critique” of that representation in the interests of making Marx safe for the educational process and its measured, repetitive time.

[031]

Critical Art Ensemble, The Electronic Disturbance (New York: Autonomedia, 1994), pp. 16–17. See also Critical Art Ensemble, The Molecular Invasion (New York: Autonomedia, 2002). This group discover, through their always-inventive practice, just what needs to be thought at the nexus of information and property, and provide useful tools for beginning just such a project. Their work is particularly illuminating in regard to the commodification of genetic information—a frontline activity for the development of the vectoral class. All that is required is a deepening of the practice of thinking abstractly. Together with groups, networks and collaborations such as Adilkno, Ctheory, EDT, Institute for Applied Autonomy, I/O/D, Luther Blissett Project, Mongrel, Nettime, Oekonux, Old Boys’ Network, Openflows, Public Netbase, subRosa, Rhizome,

TMark, Sarai, The Thing, VNS Matrix and The Yes Men, Critical Art Ensemble form a movement of sorts, where art, politics and theory converge in a mutual critique of each other. These groups have only a “family resemblance” to each other. Each shares a characteristic with at least one other, but not necessarily the same characteristic. A Hacker Manifesto is among other things an attempt to abstract from the practices and concepts they produce. See also Josephine Bosma et al., Readme! Filtered by Nettime (New York: Autonomedia, 1999).

[032]

Naomi Klein, No Logo (London: Harper Collins, 2000), p. 35. See also Naomi Klein, Fences and Windows (New York: Picador, 2002). This exemplary work of journalism discovers the nexus between the brand and logo as emblems of the hollowing out of the capitalist economy in the overdeveloped world, and the relegation of the great bulk of capitalist production to the sweatshops of the underdeveloped world. We see clearly here that capital has been superseded as an historical formation in all but name. Klein stops short at the description of the symptoms, however. She does not offer quite the right diagnosis. But then that isn’t the task she sets herself. There can be no one book, no master thinker for these times. What is called for is a practice of combining heterogeneous modes of perception, thought and feeling, different styles of researching and writing, different kinds of connection to different readers, proliferation of information across different media, all practiced within a gift economy, expressing and elaborating differences, rather than broadcasting a dogma, a slogan, a critique or line. The division of genres and types of writing, like all aspects of the intellectual division of labor, are antithetical to the autonomous development of the hacker class as class, and work only to reinforce the subordination of knowledge to property by the vectoral class.

[035]

Gregory Bateson, Steps Towards an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine, 1972). Bateson grasped the link between information and nature on an abstract level, even as he shrank from examining the historical forces that forged just this link. And yet he is a pioneer in hacker thought and action in his disregard for the property rules of academic fields. He skips gaily from biology to anthropology to epistemology, seeing in the divisions between fields, even between statements, an ideological construction of the world as fit only for zoning and development in the interests of property. At the moment when the foundations of the ideology of the vectoral class were in formation, in information science, computer science, cybernetics, and when information was being discovered as the new essence of social and even natural phenomena, Bateson alone grasped the critical use of these nascent concepts.

[046]

Antonio Negri, The Politics of Subversion: A Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Polity, 1989), p. 203. Negri’s is a living Marxism, but one that seeks to graft the new onto the old corpus at the wrong junctures. It is less useful to repurpose Marx’s writings on immaterial labor and real subsumption than to revisit the central question of property, and reimagine the class relation in terms of the historical development of the property form. Negri, who had so much to say about the recomposition of the working class in the overdeveloped world, and how the energies of the productive classes drive the commodity economy from below, does not quite find a new language adequate to the historical moment, when labor is pushed to the periphery and an entirely new class formation arises in the overdeveloped world.

EDUCATION

[051]

Stanley Aronowitz, The Knowledge Factory (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), p. 10. Critical theory that does not turn upon its own implication within the commodification of knowledge is merely hypocritical theory. In Aronowitz we find the essential data for establishing that this institutional context is not a neutral one. He might also be an exemplary figure for imagining ways of configuring a practice within education that advances the cause of knowledge.

[057]

Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 191. The limit to this intriguing critique is that it discovers symptoms within education of processes going on without that it does not trace beyond the walls of the academy, into the rise of the vectoralist class. Readings imagines a free and open process of inquiry, but it is limited to the humanities and to quite specific kinds of humanities scholarship at that, thereby only reinforcing prejudices between “fields.” His version of a free and open practice of knowledge is only imaginable within the homogenous, segmented and continuous time of the educational apparatus. Readings proposes a narrative in which the utopian promise of education is the best of all possible worlds for knowledge. Knowledge is betrayed only in the era of “globalization,” which is when the vectoral class commodifies it under the cover of the rhetoric of “excellence.” This ignores the long history of education as a regime of scarcity. Readings naturalizes education as the home of knowledge, thus obscuring it from critique. This is ultimately a work not of critical but of hypocritical theory, unable to examine its own conditions of production.

[062]

Karl Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Program,” in The First International and After: Political Writings, vol. 3, ed. David Fernbach (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974), p. 347. With the canonization—and commodification—of Marx’s major works as fit matter for the educational process, a crypto-Marxist project of renewal might best look to the texts that the educational apparatus considers marginal. Texts, for instance, that are bound to the events of their time, rather than which could be taken to unfold in something like the universal and homogenous time of the education industry. This particular text has the added joy of being a place where Marx most clearly distances himself from the “Marxists” who were already turning critique into dogma. It is the place where Marx himself is already a crypto-Marxist, differentiating his thought from any callow representation.

[069]

Alexander Bard and Jan Söderqvist, Netocracy: The New Power Elite and Life after Capitalism (London: Reuters, 2002), p. 107. See also Slavoj Zizek, Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences (New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 192–195. In what B+S propose as an emerging “informationalist” order, the reigning ideology, or “assumed constant,” is no longer God or Man but the Network. As this is a transitional time, there is turbulence, as the Humanist constant collapses and a new constant struggles to emerge. There is the deconstruction of the Humanist constant, its mere displacement as Language or the Subject, and there are desperate attempts to shore it up—what B+S call hyper-egoism, hyper-capitalism, hyper-nationalism. The decline of capitalist era social institutions is the sign for B+S of a rise of informationalism and what they term a “netocratic” ruling class. The media, released from their dependence on the state, devalue politics. Media become a separate sphere, no longer standing in a relation of representation to a bourgeois public sphere. Information has become a new kind of religious cult. The fields of economics, infonomics, and biology are merging around the concept of information as pure quantity. Quality has been all but extinguished as a value. But information is not the same as knowledge. Information becomes a cheap and plentiful commodity, whereas what has value is exclusive knowledge, the effective overview, the timely synthesis. B+Sargue that an endless proliferation of information, viewpoints, and interests might work just as well as censorship and repression in maintaining the new ruling class prerogatives. The aesthetic and political task is not to proliferate or to aggregate but to qualify—and this is the essence of netocratic power. B+S see a renegade faction of the netocratic class breaking ranks and going over to the side of the subordinate classes. Their netocratic class is an amalgam of the vectoralist and hacker interest, as they do not clearly distinguish these by asking the “property question.” Like Himanen, they confuse the genuinely innovative with the merely entrepreneurial.

[070]

Richard Stallman, quoted in Sam Williams, Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman’s Crusade for Free Software (Sebastapol, Calif.: O’Reilly, 2002), p. 76. See also Richard Stallman, Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays (Boston: GNU Press, 2002). After an exemplary career hacking software, Stallman turned to hacking the politics of information. His Free Software movement challenges the notion that copyright is a natural right. And yet he does not attack the vectoralist class head on. He uses copyright law against itself, as the instrument for creating an enforceable freedom, rather than use intellectual property law as enforceable unfreedom. Stallman’s General Public License insists not only that what is released under the license may be shared, but that modified versions that incorporate material issued under this license must also be free. While Stallman repeatedly states that he is not against business, he stakes out a quite different understanding of an economy of information. For Stallman, the artificial scarcity created by hoarding information in unethical. If he likes something, he wants to share it. Free software is based in the social advantage of cooperation and the ethical advantage of respecting the user’s freedom. It is explicitly a step toward a post-scarcity world. He sees free software as a practical idealism that spreads freedom and cooperation—the “hacker ethic.” He distinguishes Free Software from Open Source. Open Source is a development methodology; Free Software is a social movement. Stallman complements his practical efforts to spread free software under the General Public License with a critique of what has become of the copyright system. Stallman insists that in the United States copyright began not as a natural right but an artificial monopoly—originally for a limited time. Copyright provides benefits to publishers and authors not for their own sake but for the common good. It was supposed to be an incentive to writing and publishing more. However, writers must cede rights to publishers in order to get published. Writers do not own the means of production and distribution to realize the value of their works, and so they lose control over the product of their labor. As publishers accumulate wealth in the form of exploitable copyrights, the legitimation of copyright shifts from the common interest of a community of readers to a “balance” of interests between writers and readers. Or rather, between readers and publishers. Where copyright licensed temporary monopolies in the interests of the common good, the emerging regime of “intellectual property” rights protects the interests of publishers—of the vectoralist class—as an interest in and of itself. What had to be justified un...