This text by Ken is unprecedented, in its content and construction, its movement, what it produces, everything, is a jubilation. It makes me laugh and interests me. It interests me completely.
--Jean Baudrillard
Between the increasingly strident demands by drug and media corporations for the protection of their trademarks, copyrights or patents, and the pervasive popular cultures of file sharing and pirating, lies more than an incidental clash of interests. In this bold new book, McKenzie Wark argues that the struggle around so-called ‘intellectual property’ is not just a legal or technical matter. It signals a whole new era of class conflict.
Intellectual property creates a new possessing class whose power comes from monopolizing patents, trademarks, copyrights, and the means of realizing their value. It also creates a new class dispossessed of the information it alone creates – the hacker class, who produce the new concepts, new perceptions, and new sensations out of the stuff of raw data. The class struggle takes a new turn, with consequences for states and peoples all over the world.
Drawing in equal measure on Guy Debord and Gilles Deleuze, A Hacker Manifesto offers a systematic restatement of Marxist thought for this new age of empire, cyberspace and globalization. In the widespread revolt against commodifed information, 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.
Interview: Adriana Amaral
Interview: First Monday
Interview: Chronicle of Higher Education
Interview: Roy Christopher
Interview: Grain
Interview: Kritikos
Interview: Le Monde Diplomatique
Interview: Otherzine
Interview: Shuddhabrata Sengupta
Interview: Alessandro Ludovico
Review: Sydney Morning Herald, John Conomos
Review: The Nation, Terry Eagleton
Review: Village Voice, Hua Hsu
Review: Pinocchio Theory, Steve Shaviro
Review: Chronicle of Higher Education, Michael Jensen
Review: First Monday, Robert Vega
Review: Bidoun, Stephen Wright
Review: Cultural Studies, Michael Deiter
Review: Front Wheel Drive, Roy Christopher
Review: Technology Review, Simson Garfinkel
Review: Theory and Event, Deborah Halbert
Review: Sunday Herald, Pat Kane
Review: Neural.it, Alessandro Ludovico
Review: New Scientist, Mike Holderness
Review: Parachute, Stephen Wright
Review: PMC, Chris McGahan
Review: Popmatters.com, Vince Carducci
Review: Ruminator.com
Review: Scan.net, Graham Meikle
Review: Silicon Valley Watcher
Freeware: "Two Spectres," Jonathan Berger
Freeware: "Escape from Dual Empire," McKenzie Wark
Freeware: "Hacker's Delight," Paul Mathias
Freeware: "Infofree," McKenzie Wark
Freeware: "Abstraction" chapter
Freeware: "Hacking" chapter
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What People Are Saying:
"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
"Wark's quality is to generate general theory out of singular experiences. Peculiar identities are liberated from their ghetto subculture contexts and turned into hegemonic politics. Hacking, according to Wark, is not a belief system but an emancipatory toolbox, ready to be used throughout society."
Geert Lovink, author of Dark Fiber
"What Ken Wark's book does is take us deep into the philosophy of hacking: it gives us a new way of seeing those irreverent folks who play for keeps with digital culture. It's not every day that you get a book that takes you deep into the realm of practical analysis of the ways that we abstract thought and action in search for more kicks online."
Paul D. Miller a.k.a. DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid
"Wark's manifesto is an opening salvo in this fresh form of class warfare. We have moved from the handloom weavers to the hackers, but the social logic remains the same... A searching, thoughtful meditation. The question that inspires it--where are the sources of resistance in postindustrial capitalism?--is a compelling one. This is a perceptive, provocative study, packed to the seams with acute analysis."
Terry Eagleton, The Nation
"Type hello to the nascent ‘hacker class’, 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
“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. The writing is tight, compressed, and aphoristic, or a Wark himself likes to say, "abstract." 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.”
Steven Shaviro, author of Connected
“Infuriating and inspiring in turn, A Hacker Manifesto will spawn a thousand theses, and just maybe spawn change.”
Mike Holderness, New Scientist
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