A Hacker Manifesto

McKenzie Wark

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 i
nto a working, sociopolitical class, Wark argues,
then the world can be ours. — Hua Hsu, Village Voice

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
i
nformation — 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.

For more information on the book:

Harvard University Press