A Hacker Manifesto
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Wark's ideas about open-source culture, environmentalism, and the politics of information exchange are fresh enough to merit real attention. "A Hacker Manifesto"...might incite a genuinely important conversation about the shape of the future.--Peter Ritter"Rain Taxi" (06/01/2005)
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A double is haunting the world--the double of abstraction, the virtual reality of information, programming or poetry, math or music, curves or colorings upon which the fortunes of states and armies, companies and communities now depend. The bold aim of this book is to make manifest the origins, purpose, and interests of the emerging class responsible for making this new world--for producing the new concepts, new perceptions, and new sensations out of the stuff of raw data.
"A Hacker Manifesto" deftly defines the fraught territory between the ever more strident demands by drug and media companies for protection of their patents and copyrights and the pervasive popular culture of file sharing and pirating. This vexed ground, the realm of so-called "intellectual property," gives rise to a whole new kind of class conflict, one that pits the creators of information--the hacker class of researchers and authors, artists and biologists, chemists and musicians, philosophers and programmers--against a possessing class who would monopolize what the hacker produces.
Drawing in equal measure on Guy Debord and Gilles Deleuze, "A Hacker Manifesto" offers a systematic restatement of Marxist thought for the age of cyberspace and globalization. In the widespread revolt against commodified information, McKenzie Wark sees a utopian promise, beyond the property form, and a new progressive class, the hacker class, who voice a shared interest in a new information commons.
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11 of 15 people found the following review helpful
Hackers of All Countries, Unite! You Have Nothing to Lose...
17 Nov 2004
Format:Hardcover
McKenzie Wark's *A Hacker Manifesto* is a bold and daring effort to rethink the composition of society in the age of digital media and to constitute a politics appropriate to the tenor of the times. Like Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels' *The Communist Manifesto,* to which *Hacker* represents a clear homage, Wark deftly walks a fine rhetorical line. On the one hand, he attempts to describe the character and tendencies of contemporary society, a society in which capitalism's reach extends ever deeper by producing new and increasingly abstract forms of private property. On the other hand, like all manifestos worth their salt, Wark's book also is constitutive, helping to call a new creative subject - the hacker class - into being. Their interests and practices, Wark shows, are set against those of the vectoralist class, a group intent on capturing and expropriating the products of those who hack or creatively rework existing cultural raw material. *A Hacker Manifesto* thus serves as a junction point of sorts - both a call and an answer - for an emerging class consciousness and set of creative practices.
*Hacker* also owes a debt to Guy DeBord's *Society of the Spectacle,* given its methodically aphoristic style. And like *Spectacle,* Wark deftly moves between philosophy and social theory, history and economics, politics and media, creation and criticism. The result is a powerfully interdisciplinary - and astonishingly insightful - book whose recombinant style at once embodies and emboldens the politics of hacking that he so admires.
If you choose to read this book (and I hope that you do), bear in mind that what you'll find is eminently quotable. The task at hand is not to quote Wark's book, however, for to do so would be tantamount to transforming his insights into deadened theoretical abstractions. Quotation is the hobgoblin of the vectoralist class. *Hacker* asks not to be quoted, but to be, well, hacked - to be plundered for insights whose only end is their radical reworking and recombination.
*Hacker* also owes a debt to Guy DeBord's *Society of the Spectacle,* given its methodically aphoristic style. And like *Spectacle,* Wark deftly moves between philosophy and social theory, history and economics, politics and media, creation and criticism. The result is a powerfully interdisciplinary - and astonishingly insightful - book whose recombinant style at once embodies and emboldens the politics of hacking that he so admires.
If you choose to read this book (and I hope that you do), bear in mind that what you'll find is eminently quotable. The task at hand is not to quote Wark's book, however, for to do so would be tantamount to transforming his insights into deadened theoretical abstractions. Quotation is the hobgoblin of the vectoralist class. *Hacker* asks not to be quoted, but to be, well, hacked - to be plundered for insights whose only end is their radical reworking and recombination.
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful
McKenzie Wark's 'A Hacker Manifesto'
17 Feb 2005
Format:Hardcover
Intellectual property may become the defining question of our times for those who work in and between the media and the academy. McKenzie Wark's 'A Hacker Manifesto' is a major intervention in this arena, one that suggests new ways of asking (and answering) 'the property question.' Wark's manifesto is beautifully written in spare, elegant prose of rare economy. The book is structured in short numbered theses, borrowing from Guy Debord's 'Society of the Spectacle', and these are often built around irresistible aphorisms - 'education is slavery', 'invention is the mother of necessity', 'information wants to be free but is everywhere in chains.' Other versions of this text exist online, but this is the one to get: the notes alone (exclusive to this version) are stimulating reading, and the book is handsomely designed. It is a work which deserves to be widely read, used, discussed, taught, argued with - and hacked.
5 of 7 people found the following review helpful
amazing!
27 April 2005
Format:Hardcover
Warks book is one of the most refreshing books I have read from this year. His argument about the change in capitalism and the role of intellectual "property" will become increasingly important. His use of Debord, Marx and Deleuze to deal with the rise of the vectorial class is great! Anyone interested in internet theory, postmodern theory or anarchist theory should really read this book.
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