View source for Design Documents - McKenzie Wark

McKenzie Wark: I'm showing you an image of this book, it called A Hacker Manifesto, I will sell you this book for 10 euros, the reason I say that is because I can also, if you have a memory stick or blank CD, give you this book for nothing. If I were to sell you this book I would no longer have it, if I were to put your memory stick in my computer and copy it, the stick does not dispossess me of it, and it is the strange ontological weirdness of information once it can be abstracted from its physical form, which is the topic that I would like to address today. And it seems related somehow to both documents and objects in ways I will tease out. I have a little presentation and a couple of provocation's that I got from this mornings papers that I have put into a couple of points for my presentation.

Two quotes from Matthew Fuller's Media Ecologies, "One of the powers of art, despite its current limitations to a special case, a zone of exception, is to insist on the possibility of the entirety of any part of life being always reinvented."

And number two, "What Marx named the proletariat, but which is always more than that mobilizing nominative act, is a class that, violently severed from god and gemeinschaft, welded itself together through a disjunctive alliance with such drives, numerical, metallurgic, massive, and ravaging."

Which are both sentences I love and their complexity seemed to me to say something that I want to address.

"There is a double spooking the world, the double of abstraction. The fortunes of states and armies, companies and communities depend on it. All contending classes - the landlords and farmers, the workers and capitalists - revere yet fear the relentless abstraction of the world on which their fortunes yet depend. All the classes but one." What I would call, "the hacker class."

"Whatever code we hack, be it programming language, poetic language, math or music, curves or colorings, we create the possibility of new things entering the world. 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."

"And yet we don't quite know who we are. While we recognize 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 a virtual abstract class, a class as yet to hack itself into manifest existence as itself."

"Hackers as a class are both producers and products of abstraction. To abstract is to construct a plane upon which otherwise different and unrelated matters may be brought into many possible relations. It is through the abstract that the virtual is identified, produced and released."

"Hackers must sell their capacity for abstraction to a class that owns the means of production, the 'vectoralist' class - the emergent ruling class of our time. The vectoralist class is waging an intensive struggle to dispossess hackers of their 'intellectual property'. Patents and copyrights all end up in the hands, not of their creators, but of the vectoralist class that owns the means of realizing the value of these abstractions."

"To 'hack' is to produce something more than 'intellectual property'. The hack produces both a useful and a useless surplus. The useful surplus goes into expanding the realm of freedom wrested from necessity. The useless surplus is the surplus of freedom itself, the margin of free production unconstrained by production for necessity."

"The production of a surplus creates the possibility of the expansion of freedom from necessity. But in class society, the production of a surplus also creates new necessities. Class domination takes the form of the capture of the productive potential of society and it's harnessing to the production, not of liberty, but of class domination itself."

"The class struggle returns again and again to the unanswered question - property - and the contending classes return again and again with new answers. As Marx puts it (to paraphrase only slightly): who are the advanced forces in any social movement? Those who ask the property question. In our time, it may be those who, in addition to asking the property question, design the arenas in which the question may be asked."

"And yet information, like land or capital, becomes a form of property monopolized by a ruling class, in this case a class of vectoralists, so named because they control the vectors along which information is abstracted, just as capitalists control the material means with which goods are produced, and pastoralists" or landlords, "the land with which food is produced."

"The vectoralist class rules by subordinating the production of goods to the circulation of information. The leading corporations divest themselves of their productive capacity, as this is no longer a source of power. Their power lies in monopolizing intellectual property - patents and brands - and the means of reproducing their value - the vectors of communication."

"The hacker class is the class with the capacity to create not only new kinds of object and subject in the world, not only new kinds of property forms in which they may be represented, but new kinds of relations beyond the property form."

"Property constitutes an abstract plane upon which all things may be things with one quality in common, the quality of property. The transformation of information into an even more abstract form of property, abstracted even from its material expression, takes commodification into a new, as yet uncharted phase of development."

"As vectoral production develops, the means appear for the renewal of the gift economy, as an abstract gift economy. This is the gift of the hacker class to the design of a world beyond, or at least in part outside, the property form. Information has the ontological oddity that my possession of it does not dispossess another. The coming of the digital releases and realizes this potential, breaking with the scarcity that reigns in the realm of things."

"The hacker class has a close affinity with the gift economy. The hacker struggles to produce a subjectivity that is qualitative and singular, in part through the act of the hack itself. The gift, as a qualitative exchange between singular parties allows each party to be recognized as a singular producer, as a subject of production, rather than as a commodified and quantified object. The gift of information need not give rise either to conflict over information as property, or to the strict forms of obligation of the old gift economy."

"Information wants to be free but is everywhere in chains. The vectoralist class sees in the gift a challenge not just to its profits but to its very existence. The gift economy is the virtual proof for the parasitic and superfluous nature of vectoralist as a class."

"The hacker class seeks the liberation of the vector from the reigns of the commodity, but not to set it indiscriminately free. Rather, to subject it to collective and democratic development. The hacker class can release the virtuality of the vector only in principle. It is up to an alliance of all the productive classes to turn that potential to actuality. This, as always, is the key issue in design. How can form work across class differences? How and what can one make for the other?"

"Hackers must calculate their interests not as owners, but as producers, for this is what distinguishes them from the vectoralist class. Hackers do not merely win, and profit by owning information. They produce new information, and as producers need access to it free from the absolute domination of the commodity form. Hacking as a pure free experimental activity must be free from any constraint that is not self imposed."

"In the rise of the hacker class one can see then a synthesis of the critical role played by art, on the one hand, and the proletariat, on the other. Both were nodes of thought where the totality could appear from a point imminent to its own possible development as something else, as other to itself. The task of the hacker class is the art of the property question."

Progress is possible plagiarism implies it. And that is where I would like to conclude the formal part of the presentation of material from the Hacker Manifesto.

Just a couple of things to try to connect this line of thought to some of the things said this morning.

A. Interdisciplinarity is a term with no actual intellectual content I would like to argue. It is an administrative category only. It is about ownership and hence I would like the owner to use it in that context. If you are talking about interdisciplinarity lets just talk about in terms of whose department is going to pay for it, rather than thinking there is any intellectual content to the category. Because I don't think there is any at all.

All objects are about boundaries, but some are more bound than others. The key boundary I'd argue are those of property. I mean if you think about the concept of object it implies boundary and for Hegel it is the tension of attempting to remain separate that is the very constitution of the category of object in the first place.

But maybe there is a particular class of boundary that one needs to focus on, and I'd argue that is property.

Collaboration is more than heroic, we were saying this morning in some ways it is less than. I appreciate that, but in some ways it is more than, it is utopian. That it happens at all indicates that to be human might one day be possible. It seems to me that there is something extraordinary about the fact that collaboration can even happen at all.

And I thought here I should quote a Dutch genius, I can't pronounce his name but Who-izinga [Huizinga] says... Yeah I know, it is pretty good for a laugh too. I have no idea how you pronounce that. But he says, "Play imbues objects with thought." Which I think is an incredibly resonant way of thinking about things like the design document as being exactly that. But, and this connects to research I am doing now; the game contains objects within a thought. And there are some problems using play and game in this way, maybe not all forms of play/game are good, and one might look for an ethical distinction here in terms of which way this particular relation works.

That's all I have. Thank you.

Wark: Yes there is a gentleman right there if someone has a microphone.

Question one [Calum Selkirk]: Centering the discussion around property, there doesn't seem to be very much about the idea of power. Of course the free software movement or hackers are essentially a western phenomenon, but the people manufacturing the actual... you talked about the ideas and the virtuality of these things or the fact that you could copy and reproduce a copy and not be dispossessed yourself, however, all of that underlying technology requires the labor of China etc. to actually come into existence. So I am somewhat critical of the rhetoric around free software and open source, particularly as it doesn't talk about power. Stallman was a perfect example, he refuses to talk about hardware, he says it is not a software issue, however you cannot have software without hardware and that hardware has to be manufactured, in a capitalist intensive process. Now I wonder why this is left out of these utopian hacker dialogues?

Wark: Chapter 3...

Question one [Calum Selkirk]: I haven't read your book so maybe you could illustrate that for us...

Wark: Yes, I think what you say is extremely important. You might notice I don't talk about open source, because it is a somewhat fetishized object. Indeed where the movement in copy culture is really centered, it seems to me, to be in China, India, and Latin America, where if you go to [Pelico] market in Delhi, there must be a million pirated disks available for sale...

Question one [Calum Selkirk]: This is the evil Asian piracy...

Wark: I didn't say it was evil; in fact I am refusing to make a distinction between piracy and legitimate forms of copy culture.

Question one [Calum Selkirk]: I'm not saying you are a representative of the free software movement but in terms of the whole dialogue; there is the hacker, the coder...

Wark: I didn't say hackers were coders. I said anybody who produces new information that can be captured in the form of virtual property is a hacker. I think it is appropriate to take an understanding of this as a class form; it has a bleeding edge. But by no means excludes other forms of virtual property at all. In fact it is partly to get us out of our little cultural ghettos, where programmers think they are a subculture, musicians think they are a subculture, writers think they are a subculture, when in fact in relation to property and the dialectic of possession and not possession of property we all have a common interest.

Question one [Calum Selkirk]: Okay, good.

Wark: In relation to... Yes, indeed even the production of the materiality of the industrial world is now very much alive and well, in lets say places like China, depending on how you count it there are 80 to 100 million industrial workers in China now. That's more than the population of two or three European countries. So don't tell me that labor is dead, it is alive and well, but a lot of the world is even yet to reach that.

The big struggle still going on revolves around land, the transformation of peasants into farmers, the capturing of land that was once collectively owned by forms of private owner ship.

So in my view there are three kinds of class conflicts going on, one around the form of property due to land, one around capital, and the new one, the one about information, but the additional point one might make is that this third one feedbacks all the way through the whole system and then transforms it. So if one is a farmer ones life chances can be materially changed, and sometime adversely, by the fact that you may no longer own your seed stocks. The category of intellectual property has seized what was once something collectively and communitively owned, and takes it out of their possession. One needs to look at these developments to understand the transformation of the life chances of precisely peasants and workers outside of the European metropolis.

Question one [Calum Selkirk]: It has to be accepted that the term hacker was something born of the technological boom and of programming culture.

Wark: It is a word that was probably made up by Saxon peasants a thousand years ago, that's the etymology your interested in. To hack is to cleave and to cut.

Question one [Calum Selkirk]: Okay I don't have my etymological dictionary right now. But I don't think in common usage it is certainly not going back to the Saxon farmers, it is certainly something born in the 70s with the advent of UNIX etc. Anyway, don't care!

Wark: Why should anyone care?

Question one [Calum Selkirk]: Because if I say a certain word and I have a certain association with it, then that is how...

Wark: What writers do is change how language works. So my job is to try to show you that words can do more things, than one thinks they mean. In this case it is to recover something very old, that we've restricted the sense of the meaning of this word hacker. I am going to say, no actually its roots, r-o-o-t-s are also routes r-o-u-t-e-s. That there is a way through the etymology of the word to understand that this is a much more broader, more interesting concept. So yes you can impose your readings on what I am doing if you like, but you won't have any fun with it.

Question one [Calum Selkirk]: I am basically trying to open the debate rather than...

Wark: You are imposing your reading on what I am doing which you are fully entitled to do, it is what readers do, but I certainly don't think it is a very interesting one.

Question one [Calum Selkirk]: We are all imposing meaning. For you to accuse me of this is nonsense. Anyway to go back...

Wark: Well you started with the accusations my friend.

Question one [Calum Selkirk]: I didn't...

Wark: I just said it right back at you. [Laughter]

Question one [Calum Selkirk]: How was I accusing?

Wark: Well you said, you mean this, and the means that and so on. And my answer is you are free to do that but you are also free not to.

Question one [Calum Selkirk]: I think I said, I think it is fair to accept that this is a term that really came into our parlance from the 70s... Anyway, to go back to people who did historically reclaim property such as the Diggers, it was mud and brick, or mud and stone, rather than... Okay there was a recent [Nicolas] Negriponte interview where it is about the 100-dollar computer for the Third World; however, you have to manufacture these things.

Wark: We are exactly in agreement on that. But who owns the patent on it? Who owns the copyright, and how does that materially change and indeed perhaps control the production system. That is the very question I want to ask.

Question one [Calum Selkirk]: The problem is, and I am sure you bring this up in your book, that this produces consumers and...

Wark: So we are not in disagreement other than the meaning you wish to impose on what I am doing.

Question two [Caroline Nevejan]: Hi I consider myself a hacker since the 80s, not having done any software development. I have a question for you, could you apply your model of hackers and vectoralist class on the Intel example of Nina [Wakeford]?

Wark: Sorry, which example?

Question two [Caroline Nevejan]: Nina told this story this morning about working for Intel, being a research group using queer theory, feeding into a large corporation...

Wark: Oh yes.

Question two [Caroline Nevejan]: Could you try to extrapolate from her example with you model?

Wark: Ah, I don't want to impose on someone else's work...

Nina Wakeford: Go on.

[Laughter]

Question two [Caroline Nevejan]: Just for the sake of argument.

Wark: I was just fishing for the license there. I am interested in, and I don't propose hacker as a heroic category, what I ended up with is a much more compromised position, in that, is this not where all of us end up? And this example may be included, where, if what you do is produce new things which can fall under the heading of intellectual property unless you own the means of production you end up having to negotiate with somebody else, who does own those means of realizing the value of what you do.

You end up in one of several pathways in very large organizations. You could say outside is the independent contractor but at some point you are still negotiating the rights. Or you can be on the inside, which is more the role of the consultant, but you've usually signed some agreement before you are even in the door that prescribes what happens to the results. It seems to me that her example may fall under one of the two headings.

But I am trying to dissent a little bit from that model of innovation being entirely the role and province, and creation of the entrepreneur, which I think is the Wired discourse. So no I don't see qualitative change coming out of that at all. I think that is another category; it is another, class position that creates that. And I've tried to name that as hacker. And that is available for anyone who wants to think it works that way, or call it what you like.

Question two [Caroline Nevejan]: [Audio drop out]...

Wark: You may recall a book called Forget Foucault, that Jean Baudrillard wrote about twenty years ago, I'm thinking about an update, which would be called Fuck Off Foucault. Along the lines that, that is a diagram of power that tells you some things, but in his early work it was meant to go alongside certain other diagrams, and then we forgot what those were.

One of the diagrams, and he talks about, this is in Discipline and Punish, one was indeed the binarizing force of property, as something that is either possessed or not possessed. Lawyers will tell you it is a lot more complicated than that, but at the end of the day it seems to me there is a tension, are relations, between possession and not possession. All of our actions as designers or scholars tend to fall on that continuum, unless you happen to own Intel, you are mostly going to be somewhere in the middle and trying not to be at the very extreme end of complete dispossession. And this might include some people for example in the developing world who find themselves completely dispossessed, of what it is they produce.

So I think the tendency of the age has been, oh, it is all more complicated, oh, it is all more different, and it is necessary to do that, but one can then lose sight of some very tactically useful diagrams that are actually quite simple to explain not everything, but something about the world.

Question three [Lev Manovich]: I have two questions that may be related and may be not. I think one part of your thesis you mentioned was that hackers should have access to means of production and I am wondering what sort of means of production? Are you talking about compilers? Or what?

And the second question is, as another person who questioned you; I also expect a contemporary notion of a hacker. For me a hacker is, as opposed to an artist or a designer, is somebody who takes an existing system and does something with that. And this to me sets certain limits to your otherwise very powerful and very inspiring and very logical presentation, but there are certain kinds of hacks that you can see immediate social benefits: hacking AIDS medicines like Brazil is doing at the moment, or creating Fire Fox, but I think if we look at what the majority of hackers are doing, they are creating alternatives to various software tools, various systems, which are all very implicated in the global capitalist order. What I am afraid of is that this is a very particular type of creativity. I am going to make a better spreadsheet. What I am afraid of with this utopia that you call for is that if hackers own means of production and are free to create, what in fact are they going to create, if they are not employed in companies [corporations] building up resistance to these [corporate] tools of exploitation?

Wark: To take the first one. It is worth asking what the means of production are. One of the things I liked about Matt's [Fuller] sense of the metallurgical properties of the self construction of the proletariat, was a nice... I have this image of bodies and molten metal coming together and that is a really powerful image of an era. For someone from a steal town, it describes my childhood, when you would hear giant machines going KLANG, five miles away in the middle of the night. It describes a world. But it seems to me there is a whole layer that has been added to that, that seizes control of that and it is things like who owns and controls bandwidth? How is bandwidth made scarce and restricted? That is the sense of the new means of production that I would like to think about. That you don't achieve strategic control by building the steal works even though in both the Soviet Union and South Korea people did that and it worked in a moment, but now you can subcontract even steal. There are dozens of people who do that. We don't actually have to physically own it. It is this new layer, and the control of the previous layers through a new one, which strikes me as interesting.

The second question. One of the things that attracts me to the term hacker is precisely that sense of it being different from the romantic model of the artist as unique creator, which is often a theological concept. There is a real problem with that and it is worth getting away from it. Yes a hack is transformative rather than originating, and it gets us away from a lot of the problems involved in the discourse of the artist. Which is something I want to take out of that quote from Matt, about the role of art as the production of absolute difference, as the production of possibilities. But to separate it from the romantic ethos a little bit, would strike me as being timely and could move sideways to this term, and repurpose a little bit, while trying to respect where it comes from. I had a lot of trouble with this thing at MIT because they said, "WE OWN THAT WORD!!" And in that context it's just, fuck off. No body owns a word. There are other terms that are being proposed, but it seems to me rather than just say things like "late capitalism" or "post-industrial", which are dependent terms, lets re-imagine the commodity economy in its own terms now, and then think retrospectively to what its previous stages were. That is the necessary intellectual exercise.

Question four [Fabian Voegeli]: First, this fight that is emerging about these words is also the way you are selling your book. Then I would like to know in addition to what you just mentioned, about the romantic idea of the artist as a genius, what do you mean when you say producing new information. And I would like to ask you to clarify the words data and information and knowledge, what do you see as the differences between these words.

Wark: How long have you got?

Question four [Fabian Voegeli]: I have some time.

Wark: You want it in a minute? Yeah, this gets a little complicated because one does have to attempt to account for where difference comes from and that get very slippery. I think there is ultimately something theological about the notion of the artist as creator of the new. Try this as a thought experiment; if I produce an absolute original work we wouldn't even know what it was. I could say there is an absolutely original work in this room, but then how would any of us have access to it? It doesn't connect to any current language style that we are already using. In its absolute form it is an impossible object, hence its theological nature. What we do have access to, and Hume is a wonderful resource here, is a set of transformations of what exists, and that might be the practice, that the elements are always pre-given but you re-arrange them. That's why plagiarism might be a better model to understand what creativity is, although that might be another word to go on the scrap heap now that the entire advertising industry is in love with it.

Data, knowledge, and what was the third one? Information. Okay to put it really simply and the terms only work within the framework of the definition, you could define it otherwise. If data is raw transformation of the world into points that are different in relation to each other and at some level digital is key to that, information is the capacity to build a relation out of it.

Question four [Fabian Voegeli]: So how can I copy information if it is the capacity to build a relation out it? How can we copy information as you said before?

Wark: What one copies is the data. What one copies and what digital technology allows you to do is realize... and we all know that it doesn't work perfectly but it works enough that one creates a new space through the capacity, technically for me to give you the data that is on here. And like I said if you want the book, just give me the stick and I'll give it to you because I don't want to lose that sense of wonder that that is now possible. But information, a very difficult category, probably has more to do with the relation. There is something relational about information, where as data can exist, if you like, in itself. And knowledge is the practice that makes the two previous levels do something.

Matthew Fuller: We have time for one more question and then we will proceed to the next presentation.

Question five: I'm sorry but I would like to go back to the word hacker, because you talk about a hacker manifesto. I also have some criticism on the usage of this word because I mostly think that even the historical meaning of word, for instance there is the Jargon File maintained by Eric Raymond, where this file has been written and stored and you can go there and see the historical meaning... I think hacking is a practice and it is a practice that comes inside certain social groups and certain social environments, it is something that can be distributed but I don't think it is something you can attach to class. I don't think hacking is an equivalent of the old working class, because you have hacking practices on almost all social classes. If you think about a lot of the people that do software hacking, many of them are entrepreneurs, people from Sun Microsystems are hackers. They've built up FreeBSD and Java, and from a hacker point of view at the beginning. But at the same time they were vectoralists. We can even question a GPL [General Public License] model of information economy whether it is really an anti-capitalistic way of developing an information economy.

Wark: I never said anti-capitalist. It might be outside of, or alongside of, or within, it is not necessarily a frontal confrontation at all.

Question five: It can be perceived in this way because it seems that your conceptual scheme is a little bit of an adaptation of the old Marxist category to the new landscape. That is my larger criticism of you presentation.

Wark: I don't see why that would be a criticism. It seems to me that the commodity economy is still with us...

Question five: I don't see a hacking class.

Wark: Okay. The thing about class, the misunderstanding is, the attempt to read it sociologically in the sense of putting people into categories.

Question five: But class is a sociological.

Wark: No it's not, never was. You're completely mistaken there. Sociology of class doesn't work forget about it. It is a relation. Yes of course you can find people occupying positions along a continuum between extremes and those extremes are absolute possession of property and absolute dispossession of property.

Question five: Sorry I have a sociological background and that is why I tend to think in this way.

Wark: All I am saying is, that the attempt to read it as categories you put people in was uninteresting. It really didn't get us very far, because the whole point about it is, is that it is a tension, a relation between extremes. So yes of course if you are a hacker in the proper sense of the word you might want to think I'll start my own company, I'll try to get some investors, I'll try and not be working for someone else. That is exactly like the aristocracy of labor that tried to get out of the condition of being working class and invested in its own tools to recover some degree of autonomy. But you are always doing it in a continuum, where the commanding heights of economy are things that you can't own or control. So we get a lot of reporting of those magic instances of the person who manages to transform themselves from hacker to vectoralist, in my terms. Many of the stories are how often it happens in the opposite direction. That you are obliged to return to working for a wage precisely because your company failed, precisely because you are unable to control the commanding heights of the new means of production.

Point one, class is always relational and people in the middle do not negate the category at all, in fact it might prove it, that there is a tension between these two things. Point two there is always an assent and descent. Any kind of class relation is not entirely analogous to the previous examples. The thing about land and property is it does tend to be pretty absolute, it is very hard to get out of the position of farmer. But it seems to me that class is alive and well and still with us and the much discussed complexity and difference of the contemporary world ought not to blind us to the fact that it might still be organized by some pretty simple diagrams of which this is one.