McKenzie Wark, Hacker Manifesto
To understand what McKenzie Wark is trying to say in his book we must first observe the relationships between two main factors; the hacker class and the abstractions they produce, as well as the vectoralist class and the way they commodify information. The term “hacker” is used in popular media to describe someone with malicious intent who attempts to break into systems using programming. For McKenzie Wark, hackers are those individuals who produce novel conceptions and perceptions hacked out of raw data. “Everything and anything is a code for the hacker to hack, be it "programming, language, poetic language, math, or music, curves or colourings”. What is created as a result of this hacking is known as an abstraction which McKenzie Wark defines as “the construction of different and unrelated matters into previously unrealized relations.” These abstractions are not always great or even good but they create the possibility for new information to enter the world in areas of science, philosophy, culture, art or “in any production of knowledge where data can be extracted from it.” Hackers can be people like you and me, students, teachers, artists, engineers, basically anyone who creates new ideas and new ways for people to do things or see the world.
Hackers need to use vectors, which are any mediums or channels for the creation and flow of knowledge and information, in order to produce these abstractions and share them with the world. However, things aren’t as easy as they sound. For McKenzie Wark, the key battle of our time is who controls those vectors. There are those who stand in the way of the hackers and prevent them from creating a world where information is freely available and widely abundant. Named for their control over vectors, the “vectoralist class” are the “modern day dotcom corporate giants, the transnational turbo-capitalist regime” who own the means of production and thus monopolize abstractions. They exercise this control by waging “an intensive struggle to dispossess hackers of their intellectual property”, enforced by a series of patent and copyright laws that are used to separate the hacker class from the fruits of their labor.
People like Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, and Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, are all members of the vectoralist class. These are not people who are out to change and transform the world in a way that there will be justice and fairness and equality among human beings and they are not here to genuinely empower people in general. They may try to project a very benevolent image by donating millions of dollars but that doesn’t change the fact that they hold massive amounts of wealth as well. However, the wealth is actually secondary. What is primary is control over vectors. Now McKenzie Wark is trying to unite people against the vectoralist class by forming the hacker class Just like Karl Marx in the 19th Century was trying to organize people to form the class known as the proletariat. Class is preceded by class awareness and class consciousness. If we are not aware of our class then how can we recognize other people like us and organize ourselves into a revolutionary movement? The purpose of this book is a call for creation of class consciousness where McKenzie Wark is essentially saying “Hackers of the world unite.”
We’ve already transitioned into a world where the most contentious debates of our time are around property and intellectual property, i.e., patenting, copyrights, etc. Wark wants to change the terms of the debate, i.e., how we think about and evaluate intellectual property. We need to look at the big picture where we’ve got this massive class conflict that has emerged between the hacker and vectoralist classes. Intellectual property is not about money, it’s about power, about a class of people wanting to have absolute control over knowledge. This is known as the commodification of information; free information being appropriated by the vectoralist class. It is what Peter Sunde, the founder of The Pirate Bay, meant when he said “The internet is broken.” To say that the internet is broken is to say that the internet was supposed to be a space where people all over the world could work collectively to produce knowledge. The problem is that there is too much control over the internet as to who has access to what information. According to Wark, free information should not be viewed as a product to be sold, rather, it is “a condition of the affective allocation of resources.” When the vectoralist class turn information into a commodity, it means we will only be able to see information as being produced by the vectoralist class because they are the ones whose profits are dependent on the “scarcity” of information. “When information becomes intellectual property we are bound to repeat the same commodity form, because this is what the market decrees.” Information wants to be free, but it is everywhere in chains. The Hacker challenges this whole intellectual property regime by speaking about creating something new in a collective.
