A Hacker Manifesto

Rating:
Summary: The Big Picture
Review: "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.

Rating:
Summary: Rhetoric Claptrap
Review: I've been involved in "alternative-use" programming for longer than I care to remember and was ravingly excited about this book. Once I physically held it in my hands, I devoted an entire weekend to thoroughly delve into Wark's work.

Unfortunately, it was encrypted.

What a waste of time. It's completely unreadable. Prepare yourself for page-upon-page of babble such as:

"Abstraction is always an abstraction of nature, a process that creates nature's double, a second nature, a space of human existence in which collective life dwell among its own products and comes to take the environment it produces to be natural." (Stanza 016)

And this pretty much summarizes the entire experience of reading "The Hacker's Manifesto." It's an abstract of an abstract of an abstract--full of sound and fury, signifying NOTHING. (This probably explains why you can't "look inside" the book here at Amazon) The fact that the book contains no page numbers, written in semi-biblical stanza form reveals to me that this is entirely a work of ego and self-importance.

True hackers should look ELSEWHERE for literary inspiration. STAY AWAY FROM THIS BOOK; YOU'LL ONLY ENCOURAGE THE AUTHOR.

Rating:
Summary: I miss the commies....
Review: In this age where the anti-democratic evil empires are in the form of radical Islamic zealots and multi-national corporations, I sort of miss the commies. McKenzie Wark does more than pay homage to Marx in the Hacker Manifesto; he updates it using the same relentless logic of any good Marxist. However, unlike the original, or Manifesto 1.0, the Manifesto 2.0 seeks to remedy certain historical, cultural and empirical flaws of the original. However, like the original, Wark follows his own logic without looking out the window of reality, so to speak.

Wark begins his book with the delight of discovery and invention experienced by any good hacker (a hacker is creative, stylish and possesses technical skills -- more a concert pianist than a well-trained cyber-worker). What comes out of the hacker's essence is the experience of discovery, invention and a special freedom in the flow of creation in the cyber world. (Wow! That's what I've experienced!)

Alas, this experience is cut short by the (evil) vectoralists -- sort of a cyber bourgeoisie. Actually, updated in the latter part of the 20th Century, the bourgeoisie is the ruling elite who own the means of communication -- the vectors are the processes by which the hackers can hack. The creative work of the hackers is gobbled up by the vectoralists who slap copyrights on and make owned commodities out of product of the hacker's creation. The hacker's labor is no longer his/her own, but rather is owned by the vectoralists. For those of you who have read the story in Manifesto 1.0, this sounds more like Manifesto 1.1 than 2.0. Can alienation be the next step as the hacker is separated from not only the results of his/her labor, but also the process of creativity and one's very self? Yes, indeed, and we're off to the same great logic that made so much sense in 1848.

Hold up. First of all, the newest version of the hackers' world is the internet, and the internet is annoyingly (for the capitalist) un-owned. True, access to the internet can be expensive (or stolen) and you have to buy all that neat stuff like computers, Ethernet cards and all the rest, but if you want to hack into a creative world of one's own making (and spread it around the world even) you can. You can create anything you want and slap a Public Domain notice on it to keep the fruits of your labor available to one and all at no cost to them and out of the hands of the vectoralists. In fact, it's never been easier to take an idea (or virtual commodity like software) and spread it so far and so quickly and efficiently that the vectoralists don't have time to muster copyright notices and make users pay for it.

Or, you can sell it. If you create a killer app, you can sell the fruits of your labor just like a 19th Century guildsman. You can use anything from EBay to your own web site to establish an international merchant stall and trade in dollars, euros, yen or whatever currency suits your fancy. Alternatively, you can sell your killer app to the corporate elite and take the money and run. Or you can start your own corporation like Billy Gates did.

You've got a choice that the 19th century laborers, forced off the land, did not have. This is not to say the vectoralists do not have power. They do. They do everything from rig elections to write the law--at least in the U.S. However, like the Dilbert-managers of the world, the vectorlists are screw-ups and fighting each other as much as reining in hackers. (Sun and Microsoft represent one example of bickering vectoralists, but that's not the point.) The point is that this is not the 19th Century, and it hasn't been for some time. Wark doesn't seem to think it matters.

Wark readily dismisses the cultural ignorance of the Marxist position. He implies that Marx was not right to ignore culture but seems to do so himself. Likewise, he doesn't think that the reality of communism has to result in a ruling oligarchy like the old Soviet Union or China, but it's a bit murky about how his dissolution of the state will occur. Rather, Wark argues for a "de-commodification" of information in favor of free abstraction. This, in turn, will reduce the scarcity of information and stick it to the vectoral classes and their base of power.

Like Marx, Wark seems to hark back to the good old days of hunting and gathering societies. Like the Bushmen (or San) of South Africa, where all is shared, Wark envisions a world where information is free, freely produced and freely shared. This is not radical; it's a dream-like form of reactionary thinking. The good old days of pre-Feudal Europe? Of tribal China? The warring tribes of Afghanistan? The good old days never were very good, and they probably never existed to begin with.

The "producing classes" are harkened to unite to keep the commodization of information out of the greedy hands of the vectoralists, and that, thanks largely to the internet, is not all that hard. I guess, the producing classes are supposed to share and share alike and everyone will have plenty.

The numbered paragraphs may hit some as pretentious freely lifted from Wittengenstein and Nietzsche, but that's just so that you can easily find each pearl of wisdom. Also, one may ponder why a book like this was not slapped into a PDF file and made freely available. Giving Wark the benefit of the doubt, I would imagine that he believed that his book would be taken seriously if Harvard Univeristy Press published it instead of Wark's blog page. (I have it on good authority that Harvard Unversity Press has no sense of humor; ergo, the book must be serious.) Besides the promotion committee at New School where Wark is on the faculty will probably take a publication by HUP as more worthy than a treatise in a PDF file.

Wark snipes at Pekka Himanen, author of The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age, for "willfully confusing the hacker with the entrepreneur," making it sound like Himanen was pulling something shady. Nonsense. Himanen was aping Weber as Wark was Marx. Himanen was talking about entrepreneurs who were also hackers and not some pimply-faced 14-year old trying to break into a porn site or dreamy coders writing useless but fun software. The hacker ethnic is more about discovery and how hackers can internalize an entrepreneural spirit useful for inventive business than trying to pull the wool over anyone's eyes.

Finally, this is a 5-star review, meaning I really like this book. (Not a mistaken reviewer who cannot tell the difference between 1 and 5.) That's because despite disagreeing with the author, this is the first book to come along in a while that really provokes thought on these matters.

Rating:
Summary: Hackers of All Countries, Unite! You Have Nothing to Lose...
Review: 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.