A Hacker Manifesto

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.

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.

A Hacker Manifesto is essential and engrossing reading. Graciously avoiding the definite article, Wark's book successfully breathes new life into a debate which has been stumbling around directionless for some time now, last spotted muttering to itself about the "crisis of the humanities" and the "death of theory." Taking the premise that Marx's legacy is more crucial than ever - especially after 1989 and the rise of the information economy - this carefully-structured collection of aphorisms functions as a positive alternative to the toothless Cultural Studies' mantra celebrating "RTS" (Resistance-Transgression-Subversion). Instead, Hacker Manifesto offers a sophisticated framework for understanding the historical potential latent within an emerging class: the hacker class - needed by the "vectorialist class" (informational entrepreneurs) to do their sterile dirty work, but not completely controlled by them either. Erudite, poetic, and richly condensed, Wark's little red book is as beautifully designed as it is argued. Indeed, no-one grappling with "the network society" - or the political and ethical stakes of our increasingly digital world - can afford to ignore the challenges and insights offered here. Like Hardt & Negri's Empire, this book is a strategic experiment in optimism, and a vigorous rejection of the passive-nihilism of much diluted French-inspired theory in the 1980s and 90s. There is something of the Pascalian wager here; but in relation to the potential for radical change, rather than divine life after death. Indeed, Wark's expansion of the term "hack" outside computer subcultures and into the wider world of political economy (laws, discourses, institutions, modes of production, etc.), may be his most lasting gift to the continuing hacking and retrofitting of established ideas and virtual options. After noting that "information wants to be free but is everywhere in chains," the author calls for a "third politics" for the third era of abstraction of labor (beyond the pastoralists and the capitalists). "New circumstances call for new theories, and new practices, but also for the cultivation of variants, alternatives, mutant strains." It's true that Wark assumes a certain familiarity with the Big Ideas of the last few hundred years, and this book will therefore seem somewhat elusive to those who are not versed in Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Benjamin, Debord, Deleuze, etc. But like all manifestos worth their salt, it allows - even encourages - re-reading and prolonged reflection. In other words, this is not for people looking for 5-second brain-abs, but a commitment to thinking through the issues associated with living in a time of "weapons of mass seduction." Poetic without being florid, inspiring without being overly inflated, Hacker's Manifesto satisfies the criteria of all important books; reminding us that things could - and *should* - be otherwise. But for Wark's sake, please don't make a bumper sticker out of his pith

"There can be no one book, no one thinker for these times. What is called for is a practice of combining heterogeneous modes of perception, thought and feeling, different styles of researching and writing, different kinds of connection to different readers, proliferation of information across different media, all practiced within a gift economy, expressing and elaborating differences, rather than broadcasting a dogma, a slogan, a critique or a line." -- McKenzie Wark A Hacker Manifesto is the Big Picture of not only where we are in the "information age," but where we're going as well. Adopting the epigrammic style of Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle, as well as updating its ideas, Ken Wark establishes so-called "knowledge workers" as an unrecognized social class: "the hacker class." Wark also updates Marx and Engels, Deleuze and Guattari, Nietzsche, and a host of others. Wark also eloborates on what he has called "the vectoral class." That is, the owners of the vectors that control the flow of information. They need and use the hacker class to turn information into commodity through ownership and scarcity. Derrida argued against the "informatization of language, which transforms language and culture from a safe preserve into a resource that can be exploited for extrinsic purposes." Control of this resource is where the tension between the hacker class and the vectoral class plays out. Far from just being the story of "us versus them" class struggles, Ken Wark's book is far more complex: It tackles many issues, historical, emergent, and emerging. Opening up new discursive spaces where none existed before, A Hacker Manifesto might well turn out to be one of the most important books of the new century.

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.