A Hacker Manifesto McKenzie Wark

abstraction,   hacker,    vectoralist class


18)  Just as the development of land as a productive resource creates the historical advances for its abstraction in the form of capital, so too does the development of capital provide the historical advances for the further abstraction of information, in the form of "intellectual property."... What abstraction hacks out of the old feudal carcass is a liberation of these resources based on a more abstract form of property, a universal right to private property.

13) While we recognize our distinctive existence as a group, as programmers or artists or writers or scientists or musicians, we rarely see these ways of representing ourselves as mere fragments of a class experience.

20) As the abstraction of private property is extended to information, it produces the hacker class as a class, as a class able to make of its innovations in abstraction a form of property. Unlike farmers and workers, hackers have not-- yet--been dispossessed of their property rights entirely, but still must sell their capacity for abstraction to a class that owns the means of production, the vectoralist class--- the emergent ruling class of our time.

about abstraction
10)  Out of the abstraction of nature comes its productivity, and the production of a surplus over and above the necessities of survival. Out of this expanding surplus over necessity comes an expanding capacity to hack, again and again, producing further abstractions, further productivity, further release from necessity--- at least in potential. But the hacking of nature, the production of surplus, does not make us free. Again and again, a ruling class arises that controls the surplus over bare necessity and enforces new necessities on those people who produce this very means of escaping necessity.

16) Abstraction is always an abstraction of nature, a process that creates nature's double, a second nature, a space of human existence in which collective life dwells among its own products and comes to take the environment it produces to be natural.

15) All abstractions are abstractions of nature. Abstraction release the potential of the material world. And yet abstraction relies on the material world's most curious quality-- information. Information can exist independently of a given material form, but cannot exist without any material form. It is at once material and immaterial. The hack depends on the material qualities of nature, and yet discovers something independent of a given material form. It is at once material and immaterial. It discovers the immaterial virtuality of the material, its qualities of information.

28) Commodified life dispossess the worker of the information traditionally passed on outside the realm of private property as culture, as the gift of one generation to the next, and replaces it  with information in commodified form.

29) Information, like land or capital, becomes a form of property monopolized by a class, a class of vectoralists, so named because they control the vectors along with information is abstracted, just as capitalists control the material means with with goods are produced, and pastoralists the land with which food is produced. This information, once the collective property of the productive classes--- the working and farming classes considered together--- becomes the property of yet another appropriating class.

43) The hacker class, being numerically small and not owning the means of production, finds itself caught between a politics of the masses from below and a politics of the rulers from above. It must bargain as best it can, or do what it does best--- hack out a new politics, beyond this opposition. In the long run, the interests of the hacker class are in accord with those who would benefit most from the advance of abstraction, namely those productive classes dispossessed of the means of production-- farmers and workers. In the effort to realize this possibility the hacker class hacks politics itself, creating a new polity, turning mass politics into a politics of multiplicity, in which all the productive classes can express their virtuality.

44)  The hacker interest cannot easily form alliances with forms of mass politics that subordinate minority differences to unity in action.

58) The hack expresses knowledge in its virtuality, by producing new abstractions that do not necessarily fit the disciplinary regime that is managing and commodifying education. Knowledge at its most abstract and productive may be rare, but this rarity has nothing to do with the scarcity imposed upon it by the commodification and hierarchy of education. The rarity of knowledge expresses the elusive multiplicity of nature itself, which refuses to be disciplined, Nature unfolds in its own time.

60) The cultures of the working class, even in their commodified form, still contain a class sensibility useful as the basis for a collective self-knowledge. The hacker working within education has the potential to gather and propagate this experience by abstracting it as knowledge. The virtuality of everyday life is the joy of the producing classes. The virtuality of the experience of knowledge is the job that the hacker expresses through the hack. The hacker class is only enriched by the discovery of the knowledge latent in the experience of everyday working life, which can be abstracted from its commodified form and expressed in its virtuality.

73) Everywhere the desire to open the virtuality of information, to share data as a gift, to appropriate the vector for expression is represented as the object of a moral panic, an excuse for surveillance, and the restriction of technical knowledge to the "proper authorities."

75) Any domain of nature may yield the virtual. By attracting from nature, hacking produces the possibility of another nature, a second nature, a third nature, natures to infinity, doubling and redoubling. Hacking discovers the nature of nature, its productive-- and destructive-- powers.

128) Information expresses the potential of potential. When unfitted, it releases the latent capacities of all things and people, objects and subjects. Information is the place upon which objects and subjects come into existence as such. It is the plane upon which the potential for the existence of new objects and subjects may be posited. It is where virtuality comes to the surface.

139) Information, when it is truly free, is free not for the purpose of representing the world perfectly, but for expressing its difference from what is, and for expressing the cooperative force that transforms what is into what may be. The sign of a free world is not the liberty to consume information, or to produce it, nor even to implement its potential in private worlds of one's choosing. The sign of a free world is the liberty for the collective transformation of the world through abstractions freely chosen and freely actualized.