<nettime> Steven Shaviro on A Hacker Manifesto

["McKenzie Wark" <mckenziewark@hotmail.com>]

By Steven Shaviro
The Pinoccio Theory
http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/


October 21, 2004


A Hacker Manifesto

McKenzie Wark's A Hacker Manifesto is a remarkable and beautiful book: 
cogent, radical, and exhilarating, a politico- aesthetic call to arms for 
the digital age.

The book really is, as its title says, a manifesto: a public declaration 
of principles for a radically new vision, and a call to action based on 
that vision. It's written as a series of short, numbered paragraphs or 
theses; the writing is tight, compressed, and aphoristic, or a Wark 
himself likes to say, "abstract." It's not "difficult" in the way that 
certain "post-structuralist" philosophical texts (Derrida, Lacan, etc) are 
difficult; rather, A Hacker Manifesto is characterized by an intense 
lucidity, as if the writing had been subjected to intense atmospheric 
pressure, so that it could say the most in the least possible space. 
Deleuze writes somewhere that an aphorism is a field of forces in tension; 
Wark's writing is aphoristic in precisely this sense. I read the book with 
both delight and excitement, even when I didn't altogether agree with 
everything that Wark said.

A Hacker Manifesto owes something -- both in form and content -- to Marx 
and Engels, and more to Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle (a book 
about which I feel deeply ambivalent). Wark's ambition (which he calls 
"crypto- marxist") is to apply Marx's ideas to our current age of 
digitization and "intellectual property." Unlike cultural marxists and 
"post-marxists" (who tend to refer to Marx's general spirit more than his 
actual ideas), Wark focuses squarely on "the property question," which is 
to say, on issues of economic production, of ownership of the means of 
production and the results of the production process, and therefore of 
exploitation and expropriation. Class is the central category of Wark's 
analysis, and Wark defines class as Marx defined it, as grounded in 
people's diverse relations to production and property, rather than using 
the vaguer sociological sense (a group of people with a common sense of 
identity and values) that is most often used today. It's always a question 
of conflicting interests between the producers of value, and the legal 
owners who gain profit from the producers' labor, and who control the 
surplus that the producers produce.

Modern capitalism begins in the 16th and 17th centuries, when -- in the 
wake of the decline of feudalism -- wealthy landowners expropriate 
formerly common lands, reducing farmers or peasants to the status of (at 
best) paid laborers (but more often, landless people who own nothing, and 
can't even find work). (This is the stage of what Marx calls "primitive 
accumulation," a useful term that Wark oddly fails to employ). Capitalism 
then intensifies in the 18th and especially the 19th century, when 
industrial workers, in order to survive, must sell their labor to 
capitalists, who control the means of production, and who reap the profits 
from the massive economic expansion of industrialization. Wark sees a 
third version of this process in our contemporary Information Age, where 
the producers of information (understood in the widest sense: artists, 
scientists, software developers, and all sorts of innovators, anyone in 
short who produces knowledge) find their labor expropriated from them by 
large corporations which own patents and copyrights on their inventions. 
Wark calls the information producers "hackers," and refers to the 
owners/expropriators of information as "the vectorialist class" (since 
"information" travels along "vectors" as it is reproduced and transmitted 
from place to place).

This formulation allows Wark to synthesize and combine a wide range of 
insights about the politics and economics of information. As many 
observers have noted, what used to be an information "commons" is 
increasingly being privatized (just as common land was privatized 500 
years ago). Corporations trademark well- known expressions, copyright 
texts and data that used to circulate in the public domain, and even 
patent entire genomes. The irony is, that even as new technologies make 
possible the proliferation and new creation of all sorts of knowledge and 
information (from mash-up recordings to database correlations to software 
improvements to genetic alterations), the rules of "intellectual property" 
have increasingly restricted this proliferation. It's paradoxical that 
downloading mp3s should be policed in the same way as physical property is 
protected from theft; since if I steal your car, you no longer have it, 
but when I copy your music file I don't deprive you of anything. Culture 
has always worked by mixing and matching and altering, taking what's 
already there and messing with it; but now for the first time such 
tinkering is becoming illegal, since the very contents of our common 
culture have been redefined as private property. As I'm always telling my 
students, under contemporary laws Shakespeare never could have written his 
plays. Though nothing is valued more highly in our world today than 
"innovation," the rules of intellectual property increasingly shackle 
innovation, because only large corporations can afford to practice it.

Wark makes sense of these developments as nobody else has, by locating 
them, in his "crypto-marxist" terms, as phenomena of "the property 
question" and class struggle. "Information wants to be free but is 
everywhere in chains" (#126). This means also that the struggle over 
information is more crucial, more central, than traditional marxists 
(still too wedded to the industrial paradigm) have been willing to notice. 
While previous forms of economic exploitation have often been (dubiously) 
justified on grounds of scarcity, Wark points out that for information 
this justification becomes completely absurd. Information is cheap and 
abundant, and it takes all sorts of convolutions to bring it under the 
rule of scarcity. This alone reveals the idiocy of "intellectual 
property." Individual hackers (software engineers, say, or songwriters) 
might feel they have something to gain economically by controlling (and 
making sure they get paid for) the product of their particular 
informational labors; but in a larger sense, their "class interest" lies 
in free information, because only in that way do they have access to the 
body of information or culture that is the "raw material" for their own 
creations. And the fact is that, by dint of their ownership of this raw 
material, it is always the "vectorlist class" who will profit from new 
creations, rather than the creators/hackers themselves.

In making his arguments, Wark brings together a number of different 
currents. If his Manifesto has its deepest roots in the Western Marxist 
tradition, from Marx himself through Lukacs and Benjamin to the 
Situationists, it also draws heavily on Deleuze and Guattari's notions of 
the "virtual," as well as Mauss' theory of the gift. At the same time, it 
relates directly to the practices (and the ethos) of the free software 
movement, of DJs producing mash-ups, and of radical Net and software 
artists. (Indeed, much of the book originally appeared on the nettime 
listserv).

Much of the power of A Hacker Manifesto comes from the way that it 
"abstracts" and coordinates such a wide range of sources. Wark argues that 
the power of "information" lies largely in its capacity to make 
ever-larger "abstractions": "to abstract is to construct a plane upon 
which otherwise different and unrelated matters may be brought into many 
possible relations. To abstract is to express the virtuality of nature, to 
make known some instance of its possibilities, to actualize a relation out 
of infinite relationality, to manifest the manifold" (#008). Abstraction 
is the power behind our current servitude, but it is also the source of 
our potential expanded freedom. The regime of intellectual property 
abstracts away from our everyday experience, turning it into a controlled 
stream of 1s and 0s. But the answer to this expropriation is to push 
abstraction still further, to unleash the potentialities that the 
"vectorialist" regime still restricts. A Hacker Manifesto is already, in 
itself, such an act of further abstraction; it charts a path from 
already-existing forms of resistance and creation to a more generalized 
(more abstract) mode of action.

There are various points, I admit, at which I am not entirely convinced. 
Wark makes, for instance, too much of a separation between industrial 
workers and hackers, as between capitalists and vectorialists; this 
underestimates the continuity of the history of expropriation; I'd be 
happier with a term like Hardt and Negri's multitude, vague and undefined 
as it is, than I am with Wark's too-rigid separation between industrial 
production and knowledge production. Hardt and Negri have a more generous 
understanding than Wark does of the ways in which the information economy 
creates the common. I'm also, I fear, too cynical to accept the historical 
optimism that Wark in fact shares with Hardt and Negri; in the world 
today, I think, in both rich countries and poor, our affective investments 
in commodification and consumerism are far too strong for our desires to 
really become aligned with our actual class interests (however powerful a 
case these theorists make for what those interests are).

Nonetheless, I don't want to end this review on such a (mildly) negative 
note. If anything, I fear that my comments here have failed to give a 
sense of the full breadth of Wark's argument: of the full scope of his 
references, of how much ground he covers, of the intensity and 
uncompromising radicality of his vision. Whether or not A Hacker Manifesto 
succeeds in rousing people to action, it's a book that anyone who's 
serious about understanding the changes wrought by digital culture will 
have to take into consideration.


For more information on the book: 
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/WARHAC.html




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