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January 22, 2007
The last text that I'd read of McKenzie Warks was Celebrities, Culture and Cyberspace, (1999). I wasn't much impressed. A Hacker's Manifesto looks more interesting.
It is centred around the concept of intellectual property in a world of digital technology and the enclosure of the commons. Wark argues that this has created a class division between "hackers" -- producers of information, be they academics, creative artists, or others -- and a"new ruling class" that has seized ownership of this property via patents, copyrights, and trademarks. This privatizing of information in the new emerging neo-liberal world order demands by drug and media companies for protection of their patents and copyrights is counterposed to an abstract-gift economy, which includes the free-software movement, for example, and the rise of listservs, and the file-sharing movement and the pervasive popular culture of file sharing and pirating. This is really a social movement in all but name that is creating pressure for change embodied in a movement around sharing information as a gift.
'Hackers ' can be misleading here, given the existence of hackers as spammers as producers of information. Obviously the word “hacker” itself has since been distorted and debased, and Wark is thinking in terms of digital resistance that creates new things aaand, as a movement, ththreatens to undermine the enforcement of valuable patents and copyrights. Wark says:
Whatever code we hack, be it programming language, poetic language, math or music, curves or colourings, we create the possibility of new things entering the world. Not always great things, or even good things, but new things. In art, in science, in philosophy and culture, in any production of knowledge where data can be gathered, where information can be extracted from it, and where in that information new possibilities for the world are produced, there are hackers hacking the new out of the old. While hackers create these new worlds, we do not possess them. That which we create is mortgaged to others, and to the interests of others, to states and corporations who control the means for making worlds we alone discover. We do not own what we produce - it owns us.
This 'we'--intellectuals on my interpretation -- is confused:
And yet we don't quite know who we are. While we recognise our distinctive existence as a group, as programmers, as artists or writers or scientists or musicians, we rarely see these ways of representing ourselves as mere fragments of a class experience that is still struggling to express itself as itself, as expressions of the process of producing abstraction in the world. Geeks and freaks become what they are negatively, through their exclusion by others. Hackers are a class, but an abstract class, a class as yet to hack itself into manifest existence as itself.
Well it's time for academics to go digital: move the monograph into a truly electronic mode of publishing and start thinking in terms of a debate involving multiple voices.
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For an academic gone digital in a debate with multiple voices, see:
http://www.futureofthebook.org/gamertheory/