Re: [-empyre-] Matrixial Encounters

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

Aliette, Eduardo,
    It's always interesting to me to read what others make of A Hacker 
Manifesto. There are some things i would like to clear up, however.

1. I do not propose hackers as a new "universal class". Quite the contrary. 
They are if anything a liminal class, always 'in between', a small class 
with ambivalent interests. There is a reading of Lukacs in the book, but it 
is not of the 'end of history' type. I think Aliette puts it well when she 
says that hackers are "high slaves" or samurai. Which reminds me of what 
friends say is happening in the anime industry in Japan, where the working 
week just keeps getting longer and longer. This might be an example of what 
happens when hackers -- producers of the new -- do not control their own 
labor process.

2. It really doesn't matter whether hackers are "diverse individuals" as 
Eduardo puts it. All classes are made up of diverse individuals. All classes 
are culturally diverse, and also increasingly diverse from the point of view 
of the division of labor. Bourgeois thought makes a fetish of this 
'diversity'. What matters from a critical point of view is that private 
property and the wage relation are forms of abstraction that makes these 
differences irrelevant. It doesn't matter if you are a programmer or a 
musician or a writer or a chemist. X amount of patents are worth Y amount of 
copyrights. The market makes all kinds of hacking equivalent.

3. It may well be that smart hackers (broadly defined) are figuring out how 
to contribute to the gift economies of creative commons, free software, 
listservers (etc) with an eye to reaping bankable value in the long run. 
Nowhere do I ask of anyone that they do anything but consider their own self 
interest. Mine is not a moral work. It's a political-economic one. If the 
private vices of vanity and narcissism lead people to seek recognition in 
gift economies which both reward that person while contributing to the 
greater good, that's fine. The point is that gift economies now how powerful 
abstract tools. Self interest can now work through the gift and produce the 
commons as easily as through the commodity and the reproduction of private 
property.

4. However, what confronts us is a new class which seeks to control the 
production process through turning once negotiable rights (patent, 
copyright) into absolute private property rights (more along the lines of 
trademark and trade secret). I was never happy with calling them 'resocrats' 
in the French translation, precisely because it downplays the element of 
ownership. What this new class owns is vectors -- the lines along which 
information moves and is stored.

5. "Resistance is not enough". Here I agree entirely with Eduardo. My book 
is not a theory that anticipates a practice. The practices are already 
there, all around us. All I did was analyse what they have in common, as a 
contribution to seeing beyond the fragmented world that appears before us as 
'spectacle' (if one still wants to speak in that language). BY all means 
read Benjamin. The whol e of A Hacker Manifesto can be seen as flwoing out 
of his 'theses on the philosophy of history' and 'the author as producer'. 
But let's not fall into the tarpit of mysticism that has become Benjamin 
studies...

6. Of course, the whole book can be read as a fiction. Perhaps its a fiction 
of action, or perhaps its about the action of fiction. It is not meant to be 
sectarian or dogmatic. There one would hope to have learned something from 
what Guattari calls the ''sad militants' of 68.



____________________________________
McKenzie Wark     http://www.ludiccrew.org
English edition:
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/WARHAC.html
German edition:
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