nettime all that is solid melts into airwaves
All That is Solid Melts into Airwaves Theory and Event Vol. 9 No. 2 2006 Deborah Halbert http://muse.jhu.edu.libproxy.newschool.edu/journ als/tae/v009/9.2halbert.html#top McKenzie Wark. A Hacker Manifesto. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004. pp.196. $21.95 (hc). ISBN 0674015436. 1 Wark begins his reformat of The Communist Manifesto by suggesting that a double spooks the world, the double of abstraction (1). Unlike the specter of communism, which powerful forces aligned against to destroy, the double of abstraction is both feared and revered by those in charge (1). It is the hacker, a class that isn't a class so much as an abstraction (6), at the heart of the conflict. However, the class conflict involving the hacker will not be the product of collective action as understood in the past. Instead, mass politics will become a politics of multiplicity where all the productive classes can express their virtuality. (43) If this sounds a bit, well, abstract, that is because A Hacker Manifesto reads like a Baudrillardian simulation of Marx. Wark's manifesto, a manifesto of abstraction, virtuality, and third nature, melts into the (virtual) air. 1 The Hacker Manifesto is a trip intellectually and conceptually. The book is organized by paragraph, not by page number and is fractal in its organization non-linear often spiraling back to points made earlier where meaning can be derived not only from the text as a whole, but from each paragraph and each sentence. This is a much-needed book that recognizes the importance of intellectual property to contemporary capitalism and situates it within the ongoing tension created by the productive class of the information age (the hacker class) and the controlling class (the vectoral class). 1 A Hacker Manifesto enlighteningly describes class struggle in the information age more than it states principles; the primary focus is to make manifest the dimensions of class struggle in the globalized information age. Wark takes the concept of the hacker far beyond computer programming and applies it (writ large) to any individual working in the economy of information and creating under the rubric of modern capitalism. The hacker class is the new productive class (36). 1 It is difficult to know what course of action would work for a 'class' that coalesces under the banner of workers of the world untied (6), or what a manifesto would say to this 'class.' Wark doesn't seem concerned with providing answers. Even this manifesto, which invokes a collective name, does so without claiming or seeking authorization, and offers for agreement only the gift of its own possibility (213). Wark's gift is to hack the present and open the possibilities for a future where domination and exploitation can be resisted, not, necessarily, to show us the way to that future. 1 While the book is a trip, this review only offers a dull guide I can tell the story of the book, outline its argument and provide an assessment; however, I cannot capture the essence and poetry of the writing. The book does not set out to make a linear point but instead introduces you to a new world a world whirling with the concepts necessary to find meaning in the flows that make up the current global political economy. While Marxists may criticize Wark for postmodernizing Marx and postmodernists may criticize him for recovering categories such as class, and while it is not entirely clear that walking the line between the two always works, reading this book is a trip worth taking, even if you don't like the destination. 1 Here is at least part of the story told by Wark: History is a series of class struggles with each struggle focusing on an increasingly abstract form of property. The most recent permutation of the struggle over property is between the hacker and the vectoral class who seeks to control flows and vectors of information (100110). With each further abstraction of property from land to information ownership needs to rely even more deeply upon the law to enforce what is clearly a 'legal fiction (108).' When the vectoral class controls the economy, culture itself is colonized and sold back to the workers as a commodity (110). Intellectual property becomes the key to a vectoral economy and hackers play a crucial role in the construction of intellectual property and in the resistance to the rapidly growing control of the vecotoral class (197). 1 To the hacker, information wants to be free but is everywhere in chains (126). Through previous stages of ownership, information remained socialized as a commons because past controlling classes focused upon monopolizing land and industry. As information becomes a commodity, what was once a commons is forcibly privatized (117). As information becomes intellectual property, the vectoral class creates the chains that further enslave humanity (132). 1 The hacker
nettime Indestructible Life [on Bernadette Corporation]
Indestructible Life A review of: Bernadette Corporation, Reena Spaulings, Semiotext(e), New York, 2005 http://www.mitpress.com by McKenzie Wark http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/WARHAC.html http://www.ludiccrew.org/wark Both Reena Spaulings the novel, and Reena Spaulings the character in that novel, wage war on the self. Both Reenas are devoted to the struggle to escape identity, if necessary, through the production of extreme situations, those in which the self cannot luxuriate in its own self-containment. As Reena - which Reena? - says: Why do people making discoveries about this self always have to be sitting on a sofa with a giant cup of coffee, a jumbo-tasse, in a house or loft with hardwood floors? (157) These Reenas are multiples. They don't so much contain multitudes as exude them, leaking into their scenes. The novel was written, or so its preface claims, by 150 writers. What matters more than whether this is actually true or not is the disavowal of identity. If there's an author here, she or he or it keeps slipping out of reach. Reena Spaulings the character also slips away, from her authors, and from her readers. It is not possible to possess her by making her the object of an author's desire, or one's own. You can see that she has devoured tirelessly, inhumanly, way into the nights, the whole avant-garde corpus. Books, ideas, movements, figures, photos, data, other lives. I can almost tell the place on her body where she has digested Artaud, Rimbaud. Hers is an intellectual body of pure capability, but one that is also open, looking to be determined from outside, ready to rewrite everything, to co-write, to be written on... feature for any Now... co- efficient of glamour... faceless avant garde. (154) It's said of a minor character - so you can imagine what the major characters are like. Hell on wheels. Impossible beings. This is not the least of this books charms. There is only one place this could take place. As it says in the preface: Like the authors, the New York City depicted herein finds itself constantly exposed to the urges of 'communism' - that is, to a chosen indifference to private property, a putting-in-common of the methods and means of urban life and language. Perhaps this is the last possible communism. One that can't really hurt anybody other than its willing exponents. A communism of the immaterial, which has no power other than fleeting images. Reena Spaulings is dedicated to the pursuit, or rather the production, of these communal images, these images of the common. Reena is a security guard at the Metropolitan Museum, where she is discovered by Maris Parings, who is one of those people New York seems to breed. Maris is an entrepreneur of the immaterial. She cuts and pastes bodies, paring them down and pairing them with situations to produce the frisson of desire. A Maris Parings production is just close enough to the real thing to give you a jolt; just distant enough not to kill you. Maris procures Reena for an underwear ad. In her photo spreads, Reena turns out looking like a freshly dead thing lying by the side of the highway. (47) This is the moment of Reena's promotion from a face in the night club crowd to a whole new realm of possibility. 'Now', it occurs to Reena, 'I'm ready to extend the domain of pleasures.' (35) The money sure comes in handy, too. Only its funny money. It seems completely disconnected from any relation to labor. Holy shit a little money is alright. I just think I might have gotten a little more of it though. Why is it that when you do so little for it, no amount of recompense is enough. Holy shit this is six months' worth of standing guard at the Met. I just think that when you're serving time for it, a sense of reality allows the dollar amount to remain small and still seem OK, to trickle in at the same pace as the hours do, whereas when you're selling nothing you're selling an essence which is priceless. Why is it that essences are so light? Holy shit its my economy, an economy of essences. (63) And so Reena's adventures begin. With Maris she plans a spectacular event, trying to short-circuit desire's relation to the image, cutting out the commodity. Reena Spaulings finds communism in desire's relation to the image, outside of any tiresome dialectic of subject and object, of identity and commodity. It's a matter of doing away with contour, doing away even with your formerly cherished verticality. That's the kind of change the world could use more of. (103) This might sounds more like Arakawa Gins than Deleuze Guattari, only there's an impediment. There is a world outside of New York's hipster night clubs. There is a general context - Reena observed as she hopped into a taxi - capitalism, Empire, whatever... there's a general context that not only controls each situation but, even worse, also tries to ensure that, most of the time, there is no situation. (136) Whatever - we don't really have a name yet for this stage
nettime securing security
Securing Security [Presented at Transmediale 05 http://www.transmediale.de] McKenzie Wark http://www.ludiccrew.org/wark http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/WARHAC.html 1. How one forgets. What was the ideology for which allies supposedly fought in world war two? Who remembers the four freedoms? They were these: Freedom of religion Freedom of speech Freedom from want Freedom from fear 02. Only now, in what was formerly the United States, perhaps the demand could be for four new freedoms: Freedom from religion Freedom from speeches Freedom to desire Freedom from security 03. Of these four demands, I will talk only of the last. What is the basis of security? What secures security? Its absence. Insecurity secures the necessity for security. The threat to security is oddly enough security itself. We have nothing to secure but security itself. 04. States act in the name of security but what could be more Orwellian? The security state is an engine of violence. What secures the state is the production of insecurity. Preferably of a kind that is manageable. 05. Insecurity getting out of hand every now and then is not the worst thing. For the state, its good for business. As the American GIs used to say: death is our business, and business is good.[1] 06. What is really threatening to the security state is the prospect of peace. From this point of view, the implosion of the Soviet bloc is a disaster. People really started to think about dismantling the security apparatus in the United States. There was talk of a peace dividend. 07. Thankfully, insecurity has returned to the scene and all is well for the stock holders of the military entertainment complex. Threats appear to abound, and their existence creates the appearance of necessity for the military apparatus, and the necessity of appearances for the entertainment apparatus. 08. The military entertainment complex is not quite the same as the former military industrial complex. Its infrastructure is not so much mechanical as digital. Everything we see here at transmediale is in part its progeny. 09. Where did the military entertainment complex come from? The military industrial complex produced ever faster, ever more complex machines for human warfare and welfare; so fast and so complex that they called into being whole new problems in surveillance and logistics, planning and command. 10. The military industrial complex struggled to secure for itself a second nature. It transformed nature into second nature, into a world that could act as the object of an instrument, a standing reserve. But this act of transforming the world piecemeal into object creates a supplementary problem the problem of the relationships of these instruments ton each other. 11. Work on this problems calls into being, initially as a supplement, the digital as a technological effect. Computing meets communication and simulation. But eventually, these technologies no longer supplement the world of the machine; they control every aspect of it. Thus, not a military industrial but a military entertainment complex, not the world as made over as a second nature but the world made over as a third nature. 12. The digital embraces not just logistics and command, but the fantasy and creation of threats to security and means to secure. The work of the military entertainment complex is two sided. It has its rational, logistical side; but it also has its romantic, imaginative side. The latter invents reasons for the former to exist. Insecurities cannot simply be taken as given. Thats no way to build a growth industry! They have to be fabricated out of whole cloth. Becker: With hindsight, whole empires could turn out to be the product of cultural engineering.[2] 13. The rise of the military entertainment complex is the mark of a society in decline. What was once the United States is no longer a sovereign state. It has been cannibalized by its own ruling class. They are stripping its social fabric bare. They have allowed its once mighty industrial complex to crumble. Theres nothing left but to loot the state, abolish taxes on capital and move all essential components of the production process elsewhere. 14. From now on, what was once the United States lives on whatever rents it can extract from an unwilling world. It has only two exports: guns and information. It has declared all invention, all creation, to be its private property. Your culture does not belong to you. You will have to rent back your own unconscious. 15. Unable to compete with others in an open market, what was once the United States finds itself reliant on force and the threat of force to find new ways to expand. Iraq may be in part about oil, but it is also about the contracts to rebuild everything destroyed by the last decade of sanctions and war. 16. In short, the military
nettime is education slavery? (and other questions)
FM Interviews: McKenzie Wark [extract] First Monday http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue9_12/wark/index.html McKenzie Wark teaches media and cultural studies at the New School University in New York City. His most recent book is A Hacker Manifesto (Harvard University Press, 2004). For many years he was an active participant in the nettime listserve, and also on fibreculture, syndicate, and a few other experiments in collaborative filtering. A Hacker Manifesto grows out of that experience, and attempts to provide a theory to go with the practice of creating and sharing free knowledge in a digital gift economy. He is the author of a number of other books, including Dispositions (Salt Books, 2002) and Virtual Geography (Indiana University Press, 1994) and was a coeditor of the nettime anthology Readme! (Autonomedia). This interview was conducted with First Mondays Chief Editor Ed Valauskas, stimulated in part by A Hacker Manifesto. First Monday (FM): In A Hacker Manifesto you write Education is slavery. Education enchains the mind and makes it a resource for class power. If that is true, then as a professor at the New School University, should I really identify you as an enslaver? How do you envision your role as an educator? McKenzie Wark (MW): I draw a distinction between education and knowledge. Knowledge is the practice of creating relatively stable islands of useful or interesting information, and its my belief that these should be available for everybody, and that everybody can work on creating and refining them. Education is the term I use for turning the practice of knowledge into something that can be administered and commodified. I argue that turning knowledge into education by making it a product is a bad idea. It makes a process into a thing. Of course, as a teacher in a private college Im living the contradiction. Students are always caught between buying school as a product and experiencing the pleasures of the free creation of knowledge. The New School, where I work, was founded by John Dewey (among others), who were very much alive to this tension, I think. The New School started as adult education in New Yorks East village. Another part of its story is the University in Exile, which saved Hannah Arendt and many others from the Nazis. So Ive landed in an institution that is all about thinking and working in this tension between the process of knowledge as free creation and external powers of market and state that distort it in their own own image. FM: There are repeated references in A Hacker Manifesto to cryptoMarxists. In one your footnotes you call Marx a cryptoMarxist. Can you explain cryptoMarxism? Is A Hacker Manifesto a cryptoMarxist work? If so, are true hackers cryptoMarxists? MW: Im always very ambivalent about the legacy of Marx, but where else can you go to find a rich intellectual tradition that is critical, that is wholistic, and that is historical? So I use this term cryptoMarxist, which I think has the image of a kind of secret code. One can take Marx as the sourcecode for a kind of ruthless criticism of all that exists, as he put it. But of course you have to turn this critical code against Marxists as well. I think the interesting writers who try to take on the whole world are doing this using Marx against himself. Guy Debord, Felix Guattari, or Toni Negri for example. I use them in the book too. And of course I try to turn them against themselves as well. I wanted to find a way of writing that took its distance from consensus reality in a critical way, but I didnt want it to be about resistance to the emerging neoliberal world order, where all information is privatized. I wanted an affirmative book that offered a new kind of social imagination. I think its useful to be able to imagine the world otherwise. Readers may not like my particular alternative world, but I hope the book can lead you toward your own acts of speculative thought. FM: Gisle Hannemyr wrote in First Monday in an essay entitled Technology and Pleasure: Considering Hacking Constructive [1] the following: The emergence of hackers as an identifiable group coincides closely in time with the introduction of various Taylorist methods in software development. Many of the most skilled programmers resented what was happening to their trade. One of the things that characterized the early hackers, was their almost wholesale rejection of Taylorist principles and practices, and their continued insistence that computer work was an art and a craft and that quality and excellence in computer work had to be rooted in artistic expression and craftsmanship and not in regulations. Would you agree? MW: Yes, thats well said, I think. If you take the long view, the commodity economy passes through three stages. The first commodifies land, and hence agriculture. The second commodifies capital, and hence manufacturing. The third stage is the commodification of information, and hence the so
nettime forging a new world out of the ruins of the present one
The digital age throws up questions of equity Author: Reviewed by John Conomos, who teaches film and media studies at Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney. Date: 27/11/2004 Publication: Sydney Morning Herald Section: Spectrum Page: 11 http://www.smh.com.au A Hacker Manifesto By McKenzie Wark Harvard UP, 208pp, $Aust48.95 (hb) http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/WARHAC.html McKenzie Wark's aptly named and timely A Hacker Manifesto is a remarkably original and passionate clarion call to question the increasing commodification of information in our digital age. The book is elegantly designed and written in a highly aphoristic style that evokes the grand essay tradition of Theodor Adorno, Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin and Friedrich Nietzsche. A Hacker Manifesto comprises short, numbered paragraphs or theses with quotes from past and present thinkers central to Wark's uncompromising and profound vision of a better, shared world of creativity, knowledge and social equality. It asks us to systematically examine the property question in our public and private lives as consumers and hackers of digital information. This means, Wark argues, that we need to ask who is benefiting from the exploitation and expropriation of information. Just as common land was privatised 500 years ago in Europe, Wark believes that information is rapidly being privatised by multinational drug, media and technology corporations. These corporations - particularly since the introduction of the internet and related new technologies - trademark well-known expressions and copyright concepts and texts that have been in public circulation for years. This even includes our human genes. The producers of information, who are exploited by the multinationals, include the emerging class of hackers: artists, musicians, software developers, scientists, biologists, researchers. Anyone, in fact, who is innovative and is producing knowledge. Consequently, we are witnessing a new class conflict shaping our world of scarcity around the concept of intellectual property. That is to say, a conflict between the hacker researchers of the new ideas, perceptions and sensations that emanate from raw data and the powerful class of corporations that want to possess this information. The expropriators of information form the so- called vectoralist class (named after the many vectors of communication that information moves along as it is transmitted from one site to another). A Hacker Manifesto is indispensable reading for anyone who wishes to understand the multiplying complexities of digital culture. It is itself an example of hacking: forging a new world out of the ruins of the present one. http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/WARHAC.html ___ http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors0/warktext.html ... we no longer have roots, we have aerials ... ___ # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
nettime Journal of High Tech. Law review of A Hacker Manifesto
A Hacker Manifesto by McKenzie Wark Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 2004, Paper: ISBN 0-674-01543-6 (Price $21.95) pp. 208. http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/WARHAC.html Reviewed by Kyle Bjornlund Journal of High Technology Law Suffolk University Law School http://www.jhtl.org/bookreviews.html As countless odd and interesting property decisions demonstrate, significant resources have been dedicated over the years to the clarification of lines on a map, notes in a song, or words in a sentence. Occasionally, a case or movement appears that extends the bounds of property ownership in a direction not yet seen or understood.1 At present, a movement of such significance is underway. In A Hacker Manifesto, McKenzie Wark discusses the impact of information technology on the law, politics, and society. Employing a critical theory-inspired vocabulary, Warks Manifesto elucidates a contemporary political movement in a quasi-Marxist framework. In the end, however, the appeal of Warks Manifesto may well depend on how the reader feels about Open Source theory and the Free Software movement discussed below.2 Practically speaking, Warks discussion of the interplay between social theory and information technology is likely to intimidate. Warks vocabulary is conceptual and potentially incoherent to the uninitiated reader. On the other hand, a reader familiar with recent copyright, or copyleft, disputes is likely to grasp and appreciate the depth of Warks hacker philosophy. In any event, a brief primer on both Open Source and Free Software is likely to be beneficial for our discussion of Warks Manifesto. The Free Software movement, founded by former software engineer Richard Stallman, questions whether there is a natural right to copyrights and other intellectual property concepts. As a means of circumventing the copyright mechanism, Stallman conceived of the General Public License (GPL), which allows for the free distribution of software covered by the license.3 At the heart of the Free Software movement is the ethic that software, and thus information, should be freely accessible.4 Open Source, meanwhile, is distinguished from the Free Software movement in that it relates to the development and modification of software.5 Proprietary software packages, like Microsoft Windows, do not allow end users to modify or customize code to meet the needs of a particular operating system. In contrast, Open Source is nonproprietary and allows the owner to modify code and customize the operating system to their particular needs. Most recently, litigation over the putative donation of copyrighted code to an operating system known as Linux resulted in a highly publicized lawsuit between software manufacturer SCO Group, Inc. and International Business Machines.6 Although Wark only references Open Source and Free Software in passing, the underlying current in his Manifesto is that the contemporary equivalent of a massive land-grab is in progress throughout the United States and around the world. At issue, however, is not land for farming or grazing, nor is it a property interest in ones own labor. Rather, Wark has focused on the emergence of intellectual property as a means of oppression. According to Wark, a new ruling class has emerged with the goal of controlling the use and ownership interests associated with intellectual property. Wark alleges that the vectoral class is employing intellectual property constructs like patents, copyrights, and trademarks to monopolize information.7 By controlling how information is accessed and utilized, the vectoral class has artificially created a new scarce resource information.8 One need look no further than the Open Source litigation referenced above for an example of the vectoral classes legal maneuvering. Building on the vocabulary employed by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Wark likens the vectoral class to the capitalist factory owners and land rich real property owners of Marx-era property conflicts. The copyright and patent, meanwhile, are the contemporary equivalent of farmland and factories. For Wark, hackers are in some ways the equivalent of peasant farmers and factory workers because the vectoral class controls access to the means of production, namely information. Please note that Warks concept of a hacker is distinguishable from the juvenile delinquent stereotype. Rather, Wark perceives hackers as individuals with the desire to open the virtuality of information, and an ethic of freedom and cooperation. Unlike farmers and factory workers, hackers are a unique class with a productive potential independent of either other workers or the vectoral class. What makes hackers unique? Information, the medium in which hackers operate, is a non-rivalrous resource that knows no natural scarcity. According to Wark, hackers have the ability to produce independently of tangible resources like land or a factory, which should allow hackers to operate
nettime Steven Shaviro on A Hacker Manifesto
By Steven Shaviro The Pinoccio Theory http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/ October 21, 2004 A Hacker Manifesto McKenzie Wark's A Hacker Manifesto is a remarkable and beautiful book: cogent, radical, and exhilarating, a politico- aesthetic call to arms for the digital age. The book really is, as its title says, a manifesto: a public declaration of principles for a radically new vision, and a call to action based on that vision. It's written as a series of short, numbered paragraphs or theses; the writing is tight, compressed, and aphoristic, or a Wark himself likes to say, abstract. It's not difficult in the way that certain post-structuralist philosophical texts (Derrida, Lacan, etc) are difficult; rather, A Hacker Manifesto is characterized by an intense lucidity, as if the writing had been subjected to intense atmospheric pressure, so that it could say the most in the least possible space. Deleuze writes somewhere that an aphorism is a field of forces in tension; Wark's writing is aphoristic in precisely this sense. I read the book with both delight and excitement, even when I didn't altogether agree with everything that Wark said. A Hacker Manifesto owes something -- both in form and content -- to Marx and Engels, and more to Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle (a book about which I feel deeply ambivalent). Wark's ambition (which he calls crypto- marxist) is to apply Marx's ideas to our current age of digitization and intellectual property. Unlike cultural marxists and post-marxists (who tend to refer to Marx's general spirit more than his actual ideas), Wark focuses squarely on the property question, which is to say, on issues of economic production, of ownership of the means of production and the results of the production process, and therefore of exploitation and expropriation. Class is the central category of Wark's analysis, and Wark defines class as Marx defined it, as grounded in people's diverse relations to production and property, rather than using the vaguer sociological sense (a group of people with a common sense of identity and values) that is most often used today. It's always a question of conflicting interests between the producers of value, and the legal owners who gain profit from the producers' labor, and who control the surplus that the producers produce. Modern capitalism begins in the 16th and 17th centuries, when -- in the wake of the decline of feudalism -- wealthy landowners expropriate formerly common lands, reducing farmers or peasants to the status of (at best) paid laborers (but more often, landless people who own nothing, and can't even find work). (This is the stage of what Marx calls primitive accumulation, a useful term that Wark oddly fails to employ). Capitalism then intensifies in the 18th and especially the 19th century, when industrial workers, in order to survive, must sell their labor to capitalists, who control the means of production, and who reap the profits from the massive economic expansion of industrialization. Wark sees a third version of this process in our contemporary Information Age, where the producers of information (understood in the widest sense: artists, scientists, software developers, and all sorts of innovators, anyone in short who produces knowledge) find their labor expropriated from them by large corporations which own patents and copyrights on their inventions. Wark calls the information producers hackers, and refers to the owners/expropriators of information as the vectorialist class (since information travels along vectors as it is reproduced and transmitted from place to place). This formulation allows Wark to synthesize and combine a wide range of insights about the politics and economics of information. As many observers have noted, what used to be an information commons is increasingly being privatized (just as common land was privatized 500 years ago). Corporations trademark well- known expressions, copyright texts and data that used to circulate in the public domain, and even patent entire genomes. The irony is, that even as new technologies make possible the proliferation and new creation of all sorts of knowledge and information (from mash-up recordings to database correlations to software improvements to genetic alterations), the rules of intellectual property have increasingly restricted this proliferation. It's paradoxical that downloading mp3s should be policed in the same way as physical property is protected from theft; since if I steal your car, you no longer have it, but when I copy your music file I don't deprive you of anything. Culture has always worked by mixing and matching and altering, taking what's already there and messing with it; but now for the first time such tinkering is becoming illegal, since the very contents of our common culture have been redefined as private property. As I'm always telling my students, under contemporary laws
nettime a hacker manifesto 001-006
-- from the uncorrected page proofs. For the book, see: http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/WARHAC.html A Hacker Manifesto 001-006 McKenzie Wark 001.A double spooks the world, the double of abstraction. The fortunes of states and armies, companies and communities depend on it. All contending classes, be they ruling or ruled, revere it -- yet fear it. Ours is a world that ventures blindly into the new with its fingers crossed. 002.All classes fear this relentless abstraction of the world, on which their fortunes yet depend. All classes but one: the hacker class. We are the hackers of abstraction. We produce new concepts, new perceptions, new sensations, hacked out of raw data. Whatever code we hack, be it programming language, poetic language, math or music, curves or colourings, we are the abstracters of new worlds. Whether we come to represent ourselves as researchers or authors, artists or biologists, chemists or musicians, philosophers or programmers, each of these subjectivities is but a fragment of a class still becoming, bit by bit, aware of itself as such. 003.And yet we don't quite know who we are. That is why this text seeks to make manifest our origins, our purpose and our interests. A hacker manifesto: Not the only manifesto, as it is in the nature of the hacker to differ from others, to differ even from oneself, over time. To hack is to differ. A hacker manifesto cannot claim to represent what refuses representation. 004.Hackers 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 produced, there are hackers hacking the new out of the old. Hackers create these new worlds, yet we do not possess them. That which we create is mortgaged to others, and to the interests of others, to states and corporations who monopolise the means for making worlds we alone discover. We do not own what we produce -- it owns us. 005.Hackers use their knowledge and their wits to maintain their autonomy. Some take the money and run. (But one cannot run far.) We must live with our compromises. (Some refuse to compromise.) We live as best we can. All too often those of us who take one of these paths resent those who take the other. One lot resents the prosperity it lacks, the other resents the liberty it lacks to hack away at the world freely. What eludes the hacker class is a more abstract expression of our interests as a class, and of how this interest may meet those of others in the world. 006.Hackers are not joiners. We're not often willing to submerge our singularity in any collective. What the times call for is a collective hack that realises a class interest based on an alignment of differences rather than a coercive unity. Hackers are a class, but an abstract class. A class that makes abstractions, and a class made abstract. To abstract hackers as a class is to abstract the very concept of class itself. The slogan of the hacker class is not the workers of the world united, but the workings of the world untied. http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/WARHAC.html # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
nettime A hacker manifesto 0
fellow nettimers, writing is always more collaborative than anyone can ever imagine. Now that A Hacker Manifesto is out in book form, i have to say that it is really nothing more than my personal filtering of ideas from nettime. So its only appropriate that it return here. But i don't want to jam people's mail boxes, so i'll release it in bits. So first, some info about the book, and then, as a first attempt to repay the gift, the first chapter, as a separate posting. thanks Ken Ours is once again an age of manifestos. Wark's book challenges the new regime of property relations with all the epigrammatic vitality, conceptual innovation, and revolutionary enthusiasm of the great manifestos. --Michael Hardt, co-author of Empire Type hello to the nascent hacker class, McKenzie Wark's loose confederation of fixers, file sharers, inventors, shut-ins, philosophers, programmers, and pirates... The Lang College professor's ambitious A Hacker Manifesto Googles for signs of hope in this cyber-global-corporate-brute world of ours, and he fixes on the hackers, macro-savvy visionaries from all fields who hack the relationships and meanings the rest of us take for granted. If we hackers-of words, computers, sound, science, etc.-organize into a working, sociopolitical class, Wark argues, then the world can be ours. --Hua Hsu, Village Voice For more information on the book: http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/WARHAC.html A Hacker Manifesto McKenzie Wark 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. -- and the book party: Harvard University Press McKenzie Wark invite you to a party to celebrate McKenzie's new book, A Hacker Manifesto. 6-8PM Thursday 21st October The Orozco Room, New School University 66 w 12th st, 7th floor with DJ Javier Feliu DRINKS, EATS BOOKS, BEATS rsvp: mw35 (at) nyu.edu # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nettime review of Paul Miller's Rhythm Science
Matze asks: Rip, mix, play: Information leaks and escapes from the boundaries of the object. the boundaries of the object? what could that be? I see information as having an abstract relation to materiality. Information does not exist without a material form, but it has no necessary relation to that form. For example, the cd in computer's drive is a material object, but I can extract the information on it while leaving the material object intact. Thus, information, when it becomes digital, can 'leak' from the bounds of the object. The trouble with writing is that it escapes the body* mh, as if writing would be a simple bodyly product of the body and not a symbolic one. This goes back to Plato's Phadrus, and the difference between writing and speech. Writing is the sign that can escape from the necessity of a body to support it, which is always the case with speech. Or at least it was, until recording took away the privileged relation of the sign to the body. On which see Kittler. questioning: where does information (this strange im-material) come from? though it is the »king's argument« of the school of informationalism (digital information goods are free from loss and so on) the argument of a new ontology is to short. I was thinking after I wrote the review that this is the question to ask, and you asked it! My provisional answer is that, by analogy with the labour theory of value, I want a cognitive theory of information. The ideology of information 'naturalises' it, obscuring the work of cognition in its production. Cognition is here a kind of labor, but with special qualities, or rather, it is labor that is qualitative, that produces the new. And so: an ontology of information as what escapes from the material but which must always return to it, and of the labor that produces it as qualitative difference. Thanks for the questions -- if the answers are inadequate, its just a measure of the size of the problem. # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nettime Agamben: No to Bio-Political Tattooing
Eugene asks about Georgio Agamben. Below is a short note on him. I find his writings on the state les interesting and useful than his return to the question of commodity fetishism, which is a refreshing revisiting of a neglected concept. On the state, his approach seems more philological than historical. By not bringing his thinking on the commodity and on the state more closely together, one is not really given much of a handle on how developments in the commodity form may have transformed the state. 'Biopower' becomes a vague, transhistorical notion in Agamben. Agamben is one of the few contemporary thinkers to try to think *past* Debord's Society of the Spectacle, which I think is still an untranscended horizon in its matching of political and theoretical intransigence. And so in the note below I concentrate on his handling of Debord. k In the final analysis the state can recognize any claim for identity But what the state cannot tolerate in any way is that singularities form a community without claiming an identity, that human beings co-belong without a representable condition of belonging. Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End: Notes on Politics, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2000, p87 How can we have fidelity to Debords memory? Agamben suggests we apply Deleuzes image of picking up tools on the run as a way to use Debords books, as if they were tactics for thinking. They might be tactics to turn not least against what became of Marxist thought in its long march through the academic institutions. Debords thought runs counter to much late 20th century Marxism in that it did not abandon the question of the fetish character of the commodity. Louis Althusser excised this troubling part of Marxs legacy, allowing Marxist thought to devolve into academic specialisms, each of which addressed the economic, political or ideological instance which, without the theory of commodity fetishism, no longer formed an integrated complex. Marxist thought in its post-Althusserian guise was unable to think through the becoming-image of the commodity, in which exchange value eclipses use value, opening the Debordian spectacle toward Jean Baudrillards world of pure sign value. The spectacle may be the alienation of language itself, the expropriation of the logos, of the possibility of a common good, but Agamben rightly perceives a way out, at the end of the spectacle. What we encounter in the spectacle is our linguistic nature inverted. It is an alienated language in which language itself is or can be revealed. The spectacle may be the uprooting of all peoples from their dwelling in language, the severing of the foundations of all state forms, but this very alienation of language returns it as something that can be experienced as such, bringing language itself to language. Agamben finds the emerging crisis of the state in this complete alienation of language. The state now exists in a permanent state of emergency, where only the secret police are its last functioning agency. As Agamben says, the state can recognize any identity, so proposing new identities to it is not to challenge it, merely to require of it that it extend its logic. New identities may push the state towards a further abstraction, but on the other hand merely recognizes in the state a grounding it really doesnt possess as final authority on the kinds of citizenship that might belong within it. The coming struggle is not to control the state, but to exceed and escape it into the unrepresentable. For Agamben Tiananmen is the first outbreak of this movement that did not want to be represented, but rather to create a common life outside of representation. Tiananmen might be a spontaneous outbreak of a new Situationist movement. The situation, in Agambens reading of Debord, is beyond the fusion of art and life sought by the historic avant gardes. It comes after the supercession of art. Surprisingly, Agamben offers Nietzsches eternal return as an image of the situation, where everything repeats itself as the same, only without its identity as such. What never occurs to Agamben is to inquire into the historical rather than philological -- conditions of existence of this most radical challenge to the state. Agamben reduces everything to power and the body. Like the Althusserians, he too has dispensed with problem of relating together the complex of historical forces. In moving so quickly from the commodity form to the state form, the question of the historical process of the production of the abstraction and the abstraction of production disappears, and with it the development of class struggle. It may well be that the coming community is one in which everything may be repeated, as is, without its identity but what are the conditions of possibility for such a moment to arrive the first time? That condition is the development of the relations of telesthesia, webbed together as a third nature, which present as their negative
nettime China's New Left
Any consideration of the state of the worldwide anticapitalist movement necessarily faces, at some point, the question of China, which is rapidly becoming the workhouse of the world. George Bush may be right when he says his policies are creating jobs -- jobs in China. This story makes mention of Wang Hui's book, China's New Order, which is available in English from Harvard University Press, and is an excellent account of the fallout from the student/democracy movement of 1987 and Chinese political/intellectual life today. McKenzie Wark New York Times Week in Review http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/25/weekinreview/25kahn.html?pagewanted=printposit= January 25, 2004 LOSING GROUND China's Leaders Manage Class Conflict Carefully By JOSEPH KAHN BEIJING If Karl Marx were alive today, Guangdong might be his Manchester. Like England's 19th century industrial center, 21st century Guangdong, China's southern commercial hub, is the world's factory. And like Manchester, Guangdong is also creating a stark divide between labor and capital, a split that once became the ideological basis for revolutions around the world, including China's own. Tens of millions of industrial workers are struggling toward basic rights, to earn enough to send their children to school, for laws that would allow them to bargain collectively. And they are losing. If Marx could see Guangdong today he would die of anger, says Dai Jianzhong, a labor relations expert at the Beijing Academy of Social Science. From that perspective, China is speeding in reverse. Even more than England or the United States in their industrializing heydays, China's growth relies on cheap labor. The foreign-invested factories here, including production centers for most multinational companies, depend on a flexible work force that actually grows cheaper by the year. Guangdong has grown by more than 10 percent annually for the past decade. But its factory workers, mostly migrants from the interior, earn no more today than they did in 1993, several Chinese studies have found. The average wage of $50 to $70 a month also buys less today than it did in the early 1990's, meaning workers are losing ground even as China enjoys one of the longest and most robust expansions in modern history. This is partly a paradox of globalization. China has attracted more foreign investment by far than any other developing country, nearly $500 billion since it began internationalizing its economy. But it continues to draw capital essentially because it is willing to rent workers for falling returns. The free-market economic policies have not left China worse off on the whole. They have lifted it out of the ranks of the world's poorest countries, created a nascent middle class of service industry workers in the big cities, and made China the largest Asian exporter to the United States. But China is living through a Gilded Age of inequality, whose benefits are not trickling down to the 700 million or 800 million rural residents who live off the land or flock to the cities for factory or construction jobs. The situation has given rise to a new group of Marxist critics who call themselves China's new left. Wang Hui, a new left thinker, published a book late last year, titled China's New Order, attacking China's leaders for using state interference and even violence to enforce its vision of international capitalism. He says the leaders have colonized their own citizens. Not surprisingly, Chinese officials do not put it that way, and few here believe that China needs another Marxist revolution. Nor would Communist Party officials say that democracy, rather than an authoritarian political system, is needed to bring greater social justice to China. Still, Communist leaders increasingly seem convinced that neither economic growth nor China's tattered legacy of socialist laws will prevent social unrest, even violent upheaval of the kind that helped bring the party to power in 1949. President Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao, the prime minister, have vowed to raise peasant incomes and stop the most egregious abuse of workers. Executives of multinational corporations say they have a harder time getting appointments with Mr. Wen and Mr. Hu than they did in the past. Inequality these days is too stark to be ignored, says Kang Xiaoguang, a leading political analyst in Beijing. The party has begun to recognize that its legitimacy cannot come from economic reform as such. It needs to stress fairness and justice. Doubts remain, though, whether Mr. Hu and Mr. Wen have the power, or desire, to do much about it. The capitalist road China has traveled since the latter years of Deng Xiaoping's rule in the early 1990's is Darwinian by the historical standards of the United States, England - even East Asia. The British working class first got the right to vote in the 1880's, amid England's industrialization. American industrial unions trace their roots to the early 20th century, when hazardous work
nettime Luther Blissett's Q
Luther Blissett, Q, William Heinemann, 2003 reviewed by McKenzie Wark [EMAIL PROTECTED] Q is a terrific read, an epic from the bowels of history.(517) The story follows two main characters. One wants to overthrow the social order. The other is a spy in the service of the forces who want to maintain it. Q is the spy, in the pay of Father Carafa, an ultra conservative figure, rapidly rising up the hierarchy of the Catholic church. The other main character is a radical protestant, who sets himself against both the corrupt power of the Catholic church, and also against Luthers Protestant reformation. For the more radical protestants, Luther is a political tool in the hands of a rising mercantile class, not a friend of the peasants and artisans. His is just a new kind of authority, which is putting a priest in our souls (353) These two characters cross paths many times, from one end of Europe to the other, until coming together for a final confrontation, in Venice, where their identities will finally be revealed to each other If that were all there were to it, this would be a fascinating, but ultimately over-long genre novel the historical thriller. But Q is not so much a novel as an anti-novel. The confrontation between the two characters ends up something of an anti-climax. It provides a narrative impulse to get the reader through to the end, but the real narrative strategy it conceals is quite different. In Q, conflicts are never resolved, merely deflected, transformed, shifted to another level. Yet that does not mean that in renouncing the bourgeois novels sense of narrative closure and harmony, that Q falls for the other dominant form, pulp serial fiction, which creates the necessity for each new installment out of the inevitable incompleteness of the episode. In Q, our hero learns from his struggles, grows wiser, avoids old mistakes. This is a didactic novel, but with a different purpose. It is about learning how to struggle against the ruses of power and get by. One of Qs lessons is not to get too bogged down in identity. Our hero changes his name many times. He adapts, he sheds failed strategies. He finds new friends, new structures of belief and methods for reading the signs. This is not unlike the authors of the book themselves. The Luther Blissett who wrote this book is Roberto Bui, Giovanni Cattabriga, Federico Guglielmi and Luca Di Meo. They emerged out of a milieu in which Luther Blissett was a popular pseudonym for all kinds of radical actions, avant-garde provocations and spectacular pranks. But they too have moved on, and now call themselves Wu Ming. In Q, the Blissett crew finds a form and a narrative to hold together a popular account of all that a generation has learned in various struggles. The book can be read as an allegory for the history of the late 20th century. The folly of Mao and the prudence of George Soros can all be read between the lines in the actions of the books many walk- on characters. Or, one can read Q as a more local allegory, for a series of struggles waged by the Italian left from the 80s to the 90s. It may not matter whether these allegorical readings are actually intended. One of the effects of the book is to encourage allegorical reading and some skepticism about it. The many radical protestant leaders who populate the first third of the book are forever using the bible as an allegorical machine for reading the signs of the times with very mixed results. Just as 60s Marxists read every hiccup of capitalism as heralding the crisis, Qs true believers see everywhere the coming apocalypse. English language readers will find some of the background material familiar if they have read Norman Cohns book about radical sects, The Pursuit Of The Millennium, or Raoul Vanegeims The Movement of the Free Spirit, or even Greil Marcus Lipstick Traces. The latter was famous for insisting on a subterranean link between the Sex Pistols John Lydon and the radical Anabaptist John of Leyden. Leyden is a featured character in Q, but a much less romantic one. This Leyden is emblematic of the reactive, persecutory forces that can seize hold of a radical movement from within, just at its moment of triumph. There is a remarkable study here of the forces and pressures that can lead a militant movement into self- delusion, worthy of Guattari. Those familiar with radical European avant- gardes will find much to chuckle over in Q. In this version of the 16th century, radical forces use theology and religion in much the same way as the avant-gardes use theory and art. There is a useful dialogue with the Situationists in these pages. Blissett seems to have a fondness for the practical strategies of the SI. The derive, or the drift: the wandering through cities, cutting across the order of the working day is artfully applied here to give wonderful portraits of medieval Venice, Antwerp and Münster. The whole book can be read as one long exercise of the other SI
nettime Xbox hacking
As William Gibson famously said, the street finds its own use for things. I find this story interesting on so many levels. Tactics for the underdeveloped world, the irony of Linux and Microsoft coming together, the inevitable tightening of the screws of IP that will no doubt ensue... Some Xbox Fans Microsoft Didn't Aim For By SETH SCHIESEL New York Times, July 10, 2003 http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/10/technology/circuits/10xbox.html FTER a 31-year-old Manhattan financial executive received Microsoft's Xbox video game system as a gift in January, he walked to a store and bought a half- dozen game titles. The video game industry would have been pleased to hear it. After he played those games a few times against computer-controlled opponents, he got a bit bored and signed up for Microsoft's Xbox Live service, which enabled him to play against other people online. The video game industry, again, would have been pleased. After a few months on the Xbox Live network, in May, he got a bit bored again. This time, however, he opened his Xbox and soldered in a chip that allowed him to change the console's basic computer code and bypass its internal security technology. After installing a new hard drive, he transferred about 3,000 MP3 music files to the system and downloaded illegal copies of 3,500 old- time arcade games. Then he installed the Linux operating system, which allowed him to use the box essentially as a personal computer. Needless to say, the video game industry would not have been pleased. When Microsoft released the Xbox in November 2001, it was heralded as far more than a game machine. Even as the Xbox took aim at Sony's PlayStation 2 game empire, the console was meant to lead Microsoft's broader invasion of the living room. Incorporating a hard drive, which made it more readily adaptable than other consoles, the Xbox had the potential to be a digital-entertainment nerve center. Bill Gates, Microsoft's chairman, said at the time, We're going to put new software that runs on Xbox that, both in the gaming dimension and other dimensions, will amaze people with the power that's in this box. That is happening, but not necessarily as Microsoft planned. All sorts of new software is indeed running on Xbox consoles these days, and they are in fact becoming home-entertainment hubs, but it is not Microsoft doing the amazing. Rather, an online confederacy apparently numbering in the thousands - including accomplished hackers of varied motives and everyday technophiles like the Manhattan financial executive (who shared his experience on the condition of anonymity) - is taking the lead. Those involved often call their efforts unleashing or unshackling - freeing the Xbox to express its inner PC. Technology industry executives, however, often call such activity a bald attempt to hijack the Xbox illegally. It is a battle that involves many of the ethical and legal issues facing the technology and media industries at this digital moment. What rights do consumers have to tinker with products they own? How far should companies go to protect their intellectual property? What happens when the desires of consumers conflict with the business models of companies they patronize? Who gets to decide just what a particular product may be used for? The Xbox is a particularly attractive target for hackers because while it is essentially a standard PC modified to do only a few things, like play Xbox games, it is much cheaper than a PC. It is like an economy car modified to follow only a few roads - but one potentially as powerful as a far more expensive model. In the Xbox, that power comes in the form of a 733-megahertz Intel processor, comparable to a midrange personal computer, and sophisticated graphics and audio systems. Its limited operating system, based on a version of Windows, can be used by a programmer to run simple software like a music player - or the machine can run a new operating system altogether, namely Linux. The reality is that if you could bypass Microsoft's operating system you would end up with a fairly powerful computer for less than $200, the Manhattan financial executive said. In fact, Microsoft lowered the price for Xbox to $179.99 in May. In a sense, Xbox hackers are exploiting Microsoft's business model, which is to sell Xbox hardware at a loss (to build penetration of the system) and make the money back on royalties from the sale of Xbox software. A PC manufacturer like Dell, meanwhile, has to recoup its costs and generate a profit from the initial sale. So someone who buys the Xbox hardware, modifies it into a general- purpose computer and does not buy Xbox games potentially undermines not only Microsoft but also the personal computer industry. But that is not how some Xbox hackers think about it. Especially in Europe, computers are more expensive than they are here, and the Xbox is the cheapest computer you can get, Andrew Huang, author of a new book called Hacking the Xbox: An
nettime from the archives.... (1)
' of the war were distortions or outright lies. Quite a few people know that now. How do we know? Through other media. More slow and considered media, like articles in the highbrow monthlies, but media all the same. Both the dangers and our ability to do anything about it tie in to our everyday experience of the vector. It is that experience that this book is about. from: McKenzie Wark, Virtual Geography: Living With Global Media Events, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1994 _ # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
nettime Escape from the Dual Empire
Escape from the Dual Empire McKenzie Wark [EMAIL PROTECTED] 15. What confronts the world now is a dual empire, not a unitary empire. The military-industrial complex of the cold war era has been replaced, not by a juridical empire of global law and trade, but by a new duality, a military-entertainment complex. The two aspects of this empire, its commodity-space and strategy-space, overlap and contradict one another. Both are driven by the same imperative the vectoralization of the world. The vector is what produces the world as such, as a space of property and strategy, a plane upon which things are identified, evaluated, commanded. Both empires emanate from the United States, but are not identical to it. They are, if anything, what are tearing the United States apart. The stress of this dual empire upon the fabric of American democracy and society is what prevents it from becoming, if you will, a normal state. Complete audio version of this text available at: http://www.criticalsecret.com/n10/McKENZIE%20WARK/ Paper presented at the Précarité-instabilité colloque http://www.criticalsecret.com/n10/ organized by criticalsecret, Paris, December 2002 http://www.criticalsecret.com/ Panel: Philosophie prospective et représentations With: McKenzie Wark, Véronique Bergen, Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, Dolorès Marat, Jean Baudrillard Moderated by Henri-Pierre Jeudy Special thanks to Aliette Guibert ___ http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors0/warktext.html ... we no longer have roots, we have aerials ... ___ _ MSN 8 with e-mail virus protection service: 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/virus # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
nettime Bohos in Purgatory
Bohos in Purgatory Andrew Ross, No Collar: The Humane Workplace and its Hidden Costs, Basic Books, New York, 2003 Reviewed by McKenzie Wark [EMAIL PROTECTED] The bourgeois and the bohemian stand in a dialectical relation to each other. The bohemian's revolt is purely relational. It appears as revolt only because it upsets the bourgeois. The bourgeois, in turn, measures proprietary in the mirror of the bohemian's transgressions. This is an established historical pattern, governing cultural life for most of the 20th century. One new wrinkle, which appeared at the dawn of the 21st century, was a shift in the location of this dialectic. In the 20th century, its locus was the street, and its time was in the off hours. The bohemian refusal of work, and dedication to everyday life, confronted the bourgeois in the cafes and nightclubs. At the start of the 21st century, the locus moved to the workplace, and into the daylight hours. What was unusual about the version of the bourgeois versus bohemian dialectic that longstanding Nettime lurker Andrew Ross recounts is that it occurs within the very place both sides would have once thought off limits. No Collar, is about the industrialization of bohemia. (10) It investigates two versions of the new 'permissive' workplace -- Razorfish and 360hiphop -- in New York's so-called 'Silicon Alley'. There are many books about the dotcom bubble, but this one is unique in that its focus is on how the workers themselves thought about their work. It is dotcom history 'from below'. The idea of the permissive, playful workplace sat oddly at the turn of the century with a quite different idea, the 'shareholder revolution'. The former harked back, perhaps, to Thorstein Veblen's dream of the revolt of the engineer against vested business interests. The shareholder revolution, on the other hand, subordinated everything about the corporate citizen to maximizing returns to the shareholder. The idea of stock options for everybody within the company was supposed to align every subordinate interest with the interests of the majority stock holders. The wider context is amply covered in Thomas Carr Frank's book One Market Under God. The stock market became the master signifier in a system of moral values which saw market value as equivalent to moral worth. The image of the entrepreneur's business struggle against the big corporations was blended with that of the bohemian's cultural struggle against bourgeois inhibitions. In a remarkable feat of ideological engineering, business became an agent of changing an social order based on, well, on business. Here the odd coupling of the permissive workplace and the shareholder revolution starts to make sense. The association of the entrepreneur with 'radical' change made the new digital workplace the site where that change was to be affected. But to make the workplace 'cool', it had to appear to embrace bohemian values. And so it did. A new labor aristocracy arose, which mixed some modest technical knowledge with cultural capital. They entered a seller's market, and took it out not so much in telephone-number salaries as in control of the workplace. You could still be an artist, and get paid, too. The ideological short-circuit, by which business is the only radical alternative to business, fostered the belief that some kind of social change could be pursued inside the company. As one temporarily wealth dotcommer says: As a romantic soul with big aspirations for what technology can do to change the world, I can realize these aspirations much faster with 20 million in the bank, maybe even 200 million. (129) As Ross points out, what might appear as a radical kind of workplace innovation could have quite unintended consequences: Features that appeared to be healthy advances in corporate democracy could turn into trap doors that opened on to a bottomless seventy-hour-plus work week. Employee self- management could result in the abdication of accountability on the part of real managers and an unfair shouldering of risk and responsibilities on the part of real individuals. (18) In a workplace where workers wear their everyday clothes, and imagine themselves to be applying their creative identity to the job, perhaps the most insidious occupational hazard of no-collar work is that it can enlist employees' freest thoughts and impulses in the service of salaried time. (19) But this was what Bruce Sterling calls the belle époque. The ideology of radicalism as business and business as radicalism gave rise not only to a host of start-ups, but put their 'enemies', the big corporations on the defensive, looking for new technologies that meshed with new images. To meet the demand, design companies and technology companies merged, and recruited business strategists and MBA types to present a full package of make-over services. The darling of this new marketplace was Razorfish, started in 95 by Jeff Dachis and Craig Kanarick. The Razorfish mantra
nettime revenge of the concept
I found Brian's paper very interesting. Here are a few thoughts: Gift exchange and commodity exchange seem to me to be mutually implicated in each other. No commodity system exists without the gift. Economic doctrine treats the commodity system as 'pure' when a good deal of the production of use values occurs in a gift exchange form. Not surprisingly most of what women caregivers and others who work within the home do is excluded. Likewise, the commodity was always implied in the gift form. This is Deleuze and Guattari's argument in Anti-Oedipus, that the commodity form stalks the gift economy as a possibility, as a potential for abstraction. I would like to reverse their formula. I think we have reached a technological threshold where the gift stalks the commodity. We have arrived at the posibility of the abstract gift. Having abstracted information from any particular material support, information becomes (potentially) a new kind of gift. One that economists can only describe with an oxymoron: a 'non-rivalrous good'., i.e. not a good a all. The utopian promise of a universal gift economy strikes me as romantic, at best, Stalinist at worst. But the possibility of an atopian information gift economy is very real and within our grasp. The vigorous struggle of the vectoralist class to use extraordinary legal and technical means to commodify information, 'against its will', is the great unheralded struggle of our times. I very much like Brian's idea of the 'flexible personality', which seems to me related to the commodification of information, and hence the transformation of all relations into subject-object relations. The vectoralization of information has taught us all to be 'subjects', i.e. consistent nodes in a network of property relations. I don't find the concept of 'real subsumption' that Negri takes over from Marx at all adequate. It makes of capital a transhistorical essence. As if commodity exchange were not as transformed by what it subsumes as the cultural world was by its subsumption! It is a way of thinking that is, ironically enough, dated precisely because it is unhistorical. Rather, we need to think the historical phases of commodification. Then we can discover why Benkler's 'commons-based peer production' is romantic when applied to the production of things, but progressive when applied to the production of information. The new social movement has yet to think through this hetereogeneity in its thought. There is indeed something of interest in Situationism and Conceptual Art, which at the moment is not strongly integrated into Brian's argument. A topic for another time Just as we must distinguish information as non-rivalrous gift from other gifts, one must distinguish gift from potlatch. The gift is a temporality, an exchange that implies a future and a past, woven together by obligation. Potlach as it has come to be practice in the overdeveloped world is more like Bataille's bonfires of pure consumption. Potlatch is a singular moment, spectatcular and final. I think it worth distinguishing commodity exchange also from capitalism. (Some will remember Marx's two formulas: C-M-C = commodity echange, M-C-M = capitalism, or the use of money to make money.) A long line of petit-bourgeois argument accepts the value of the former but attacks the monopolization of exchange under capitialism. DeLanda revived this position, among other places, here on Nettime, in 1996. Ironically, for all its up to date theorization, De Landa was reverting to 19th century petit-bourgeois thinking -- commodity yes, capital, no. Its still a powerful force in the movement, not surprising given its class origins, Keith is right to insist that we re-evaluated liberalism. The liberals were in favor of commodity exchange and against the state. But there is a wrinkle. They were opposed to a state that was in partnership with a previous stage of monopoly over the commodity system -- the agrarian landlord class. Ironically, it is the opponents of 'neo-liberalism' ( a badly chosen name) who best embody this aspect of the liberal program. The vectoralization of commodity exchange seems to me the missing object of analysis. 'Globalization' is only one aspect of it. The other is a micro-vectoral extension of the commodity form into everyday life (hence flexible personality). It strikes me as entirely symptomatic that there should be an as yet somewhat incoherent new social force opposed to vectoralized commodity relations, and their monopolization by an emerging new ruling class formation. Follow the line of resistance and you find the new line of development. ___ http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors0/warktext.html ... we no longer have roots, we have aerials ... ___ _ Tired of spam? Get advanced junk
nettime re: joxe's empire of disorder (etc)
As Are reminds us, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act is no joke, and there is already a criminal proceeding. Heiko points out that there are 'traditional exceptions' in the WIPO treaties. I would say these reveal a kind of 'class compromise', which in any case may be made moot by developments in the 'technical-economic base' which make read- write media a thing of the past. While I agree with Phil that we ought not to take the dogmatic versions of 'base and superstructure' too seriously, the coherence of a Marxist view of history does depend on showing a coherent relationship between economic development and class conflict. This is what my Hacker Manifesto text seeks to do. It looks at the same nexus Marx looked at: property. Property is what connects the possessing classes to the dispossessed, and its evolution in the institution of law formalises the relations of production. To pick up the thread of a debate between John H and Felix: the abstraction of property has proceeded through three rough phases. 1. The astraction of land as property, cut from a continuum or fabric of relations. This is the basis of agrarian commodity production and the rise of a landlord or pastoralist class. 2. The abstraction of the thing from the land. This is the basis of manufacturing and the rise of a capitalist class. 3. The abstraction of information from the thing, which is the basis of the current phase of the commodification of information and, i argue, a new fraction of the ruling class, the vectoralist class. In each phase, the abstraction of property creates a plane upon which resources can be combined in new ways, and a new phase of economic development. But it also creates a class antagonism, of have and have nots, which is quite different from traditional forms of the 'commons' or communal right. We are experiencing the potential extinction of the last domain of common right, common cultural and communication rights, as we speak -- witness the ElComsoft Prosecution, as just one example. Note, please that while information can now be abstracted from any *particular* material base, it cannot be abstracted from materiality in general. One avoids flights of cyberhype fantasy -- the 'weightless economy' etc by making this clear conceptual distinction. Kermit has as usual contributed a very dense and thought-provoking post. I would like to see some of these connection spelled out more. Perhaps I can start where I think I follow the arguement. Negri's concept of the 'general intellect' comes from Marx. It's not quite the case that the Negrists and the neoliberals are agreed that knowledge is capital. The Negrist position is Marx's: knowledge may be capital, but capital is labor. Marx's critique of liberal economic theory applies just as readily to the neoliberal. In treating only the space of exchange, not the space of production, (neo)liberalism erases the space of exploitation, where property is at work not as trade among its possessors, but as (unequal) exchange between its possessors and those it has dispossessed. Knowledge is labor. But labor is dispossessed of its capacity to utilise the value of what it 'knows'. It has to sell what it knows to those who possess the means of realising its value. Knowledge, however, is very slippery stuff. As information, it has no particular material expression. And so it is quite difficult -- and contrary to nature -- to make it a commodity, where its value rests on its unique attachment to a material form which can in turn be commodified. Far from being progress, the commodification of information retards its development by *limiting* the range of possible combinations and permutations intowhich it can be put. Commodity development really does reach a limit, as Marx anticipated, although not in the form he anticipated. To put it another way: As Lessig argues, information is a non-rivalrous good. My possession of it need not dispossess you of it. This is not true of either the land or the thing. The property relation, when applied to the land or the thing, is always a relation of dispossession. At the price of the inequality this dispossession causes, one gets a remarkable economic development. The abstraction of property allows for a remarkable permutationof combinations of things. Yet with information, this is not the case. Property intervenes as an *artificial* scarcity. It extends commodity logic where it need not belong. Unlimited wants do not confront scarce resources, where information is concerned. The continuous innovation in the process of production is a given in Marx's thinking. If one finds this idea in Negri and the Austrians, it is not necessarily from Sorel, but from Marx, who in turn takes in from some of his sources in classical political economy. But as a *theory*, it is Marx's. It arises out of the producing classes, the dispossed classes. Only those classes are no longer farmers and workers, but also
Re: nettime joxe's empire of disorder
What is living and what is dead in liberalism? (Neo or otherwise). What is living and what is dead in leftism? (new or old style) These are good 'Hegelian' questions, and while as Brian says, they have been raised on nettime before, the discussion was far from comprehensive or conclusive. I don't much dissent from Keith Hart's excellent primer on the political economy of the 19th century. However, it seems to me to be the kind of explanation one might describe as late 20th century orthodoxy. I'm not sure we are still living in the world for which that was the relevant history. Everyone to his taste, however. It seems to me to under estimate the role of communication vectors and the abstraction of information, and to be far from precise and clear in following this aspect of the transformation of material reality. One has to rethink what is base and what is 'superstructure.' On information as property: Yes, obviously, patent and copyright exist since the 18th century. But they are *not* intellectual property -- a term not much used before the late 60s. They were the 'commons' on which the progressive privatisation of information in law and policy has been built. Copyright was not a form of property at all. The change in terminology is significant. Information itself arises at the nexus of technical, economic and legal determinants. Technically, its roots are in the telegraph, first technology to separate the speed of movement of information from the movement of people or goods. Thus making possible the coordination of the movement of people and goods by the movement of information. Marx was already onto this in the Grundrisse. There is no such thing as the 'world market' without a space of communication wherein values can be identified and transmitted. The great weakness of Marx's otherwise seminal discussions of exchange value is that when he compares, say, 5 coats to 4 bales of linen as euivalents, he speaks as if there were a purely ideal space where these exchange values met. He doesn't address the materiality of exchange value, which rests on the capacity to transmit information about use values -- prices -- across space and time independently of the ability to move the thing itself. Echange value only emerges in a space of communication. This space grows in radius as communication develops. First within the space of the nation, then without. But it is the same process. The interaction of the technical and legal creation of information as an autonomous, abstract value creates a whole new sphere of economic valuation and exploitation. As Keith suggests, it is always useful to look at scale. Look at the proportion of the assets that make up the market value of corporations. The intellectual property portfolio occupies an increasingly large proportion. What comes together to create the economic value of 'intellectual property' is firstly is much more rigid legal protection, and secondly the communication vectors that make it so much easier to store or to transmit. When Brian speaks of efforts to make universal rights substantial by constructing and defending 'commons' where free access does not equal destruction of resources... he is talking about what will in the first and last instance be a commons constructed out of communciation vectors and in which information circulates, where both are outside the logic of commodification. The establishment and management of any other kind of commons depends on this. One has to confront the vctoral with its own tools, as Critical Art Ensemble remind us. I've always found it more useful to speak of a vectoralisation rather than a globalisation. The latter term is a bit too freighted with ideological baggage. And it misses the extent to which the becoming-abstract of space (what Felix, quoting Castells, called a 'space of flows') is a vectoral phenomenon before it is anything else. Putting places in touch with each other, which proceeds in a much more haphazzard way than 'globalisation' would lead one to suspect, and which does not produce the liberal-enlightened result of transparency of communication and rational coordination of wants and resources, has proceeded apace for century and a half since the creation of telegraphy. The internet revolution, after all, is really just telegraphy, on a vastly expanded scale, with bells and whistles. This historical movement -- the becoming vectoral of space -- has been going on for a while. But it comes to interact with the transformation of information into property only quite recently. One only has to look at the flurry of legislation -- the Communications Act and Digital Millenium Copyright Act in the US. Or the remarkable amount of GATT and then WTO time taken up with issues of patent and copyright protection. These are relatively new developments, and their significance is not really plumbed by the tools of historical materialism as we have them to hand. While there are aspects of 'neo'-liberalism that seem
