Re: [-empyre-] Matrixial Encounters

["Aliette Guibert" <guibertc@criticalsecret.com>]

Whouah ! Hello Ken.
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ken Wark" <warkk@newschool.edu>
To: <guibertc@criticalsecret.com>; <empyre@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
Cc: <eduardo@navasse.net>
Sent: Friday, April 15, 2005 10:40 PM
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Matrixial Encounters


> 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.

thanks:)
>
> 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.

absolutely

>
> 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.

oh chit! But you cannot imagine what we loose front of the European
oligarchy:)
>
> 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.

But you could come before I would have to fight alone and so with my proper
ideas.

Ken, you could quote us in your site (the symposium anyway)?
>
> thanks
>
> k
>
> http://www.ludiccrew.org/wark
>
>