1. Where does the idea of writing the manifesto came
from? Why did you choose the concept of hacking?
A manifesto is a way of writing that cuts through a complicated
reality and reveals it by asking the reader to position themselves
as either for or against. I thought that would be a good way to
keep a book that wanted to look at the whole system of the new
information commodity society fairly short!
It seemed to me, as a writer signing contracts, who knows musicians
and programmers and film makers who all have to sign contracts,
that we had a common problem and a common interest. So-called
'intellectual property' is not like the old patent and copyright regimes
of the past, which were short lived and left a lot of work in the public
domian. Now intellectual property is an absolute and permanent
private property right. But far from being in the interests of creative
people, it really serves to consolidate the interests of those who
own the means of communication. My friends and I end up signing
away out creations to those who own the means of realizing its
value. This seems to me to be a whole new kind of class relation.
And so I call those of us who create things a 'hacker class', even
if we are not all programmers, we are all hackers.
2. Through all the text you emphasize and stress the
crypto-marxism behind some structures and theories. In
your opinion, in which way a crypto-marxist theory
could help us understand cyberculture? Do you consider
yourself a crypto-marxist?
Marx says in his manifesto that the communists are the ones, in
every progressive movement, who ask the 'property question':
Who owns this? I think he was right about the question but wrong
about the answer. Putting all property in the hands of the state is
the wrong answer. And so I use this term crpto-Marxist, which
is really a bit of a joke terms. Let's use Marx where he's useful
but not too seriously. Let's no
t turn him into a dogma. He said
himself that he was not a 'Marxist', so perhaps Marx was the
first crypto-Marxist!
3. We watch everyday these social movements like the
free software, or even smart mobs, the works from
Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Hakim Bey and so on.
They all have, in a certain level, this political
engagement behind its surface. How do you see this
merge of technology and politics and in which way this
social movements can be or not political narratives in
the postmodern society? Do you think that it has any
relation with the 60s countercultures and movements?
Hardt and Negri are very useful because they are optimists
about social change, because they think history from the
bottom up, as made by people, and because they think
historically and systematically. Where I depart from them
is that I think that capitalism is giving way to a whole new
kind of commodity economy. I think there is a whole new
class struggle, between hackers
, who create new information,
and what i call a vectoralist class, who monopolise the
means of realizing its value. In America, we see the big
corporations being hollowed out. Production is exiled to
the 'developing' world, while head office maintains
control of the patents, trademarks and brands.
I think that the term 'multitude' that Hardt and Negri use
obscures this new dimension of class conflict, and
misses the key changes in the form of property through
which the commodity eocnomy is expanding into a new
phase.
What is significant about this attempt to transform
information into private property is that it can fail. As I
say in A Hacker Manifesto: "information wants to be
free but is everywhere in chains." Information can
escape from scarcity. It can only be squeezed into the
private property form with an intense amount of legal
coercion.
So perhaps the moment finally arrives when a "political
narrative" for "postmodern society" can make sense.
The 60s social mo
vements were too late and too early.
Too late for the worker's movement; too early for the
appearance of the figure of the hacker, and the real
possibility of a realm without scarcity, the realm of
information.
4. Your text is critique and optimist at the same
time. How do you deal with this contradiction?
It's not a contradiction at all. I'm saying that the
commodity economy is producing the means by
which it can be superceded. This was the classic
argument of critical theory before it got mired in
the pessimism of the 40s. The commodity economy
is becoming so abstract that it treats things as
entirely secondary to the commodification of
information. But information has no necessary
relation to scarcity. Anyone can copy anything
in the information realm without depriving anyone
of it. That's the point where the commodity economy
produces the conditions for its own overcoming.
5. I would like you to talk more about intelectual
property. How do you see its r
ole and its use in the
struggle between the hacker class and the vectorial
class?
The ideology of intellectual property is that it protects
the creator, but in reality it protects the interests of the
owners of the means of realizing its value -- the media
companies, the tech companies, the drug companies,
and so on. A Hacker Manifesto tries to split the creator's
interests off from the owner's, and show how they are
different. The creator's interests may be closer to that
of the consumer -- the interests of the people.
Freed from intellectual property, creativity finds its own
form. When it is constrained by property, it serves merely
to reproduce property in its existing form. We need to
create new kinds of property relation so that creative
activity can be opened up in new ways.
There's an enormous range of struggles where you see
this happening all the time. The Free Software Movement
and to some extent Open Source. The Creative Commons
licence as an alternative
to copyright. The struggle over
generic drugs, particularly in the deveoping world. Not to
mention the whole popular movement in which people
copy and share music, movies, texts as a kind of giant
gift economy. These are all attempts to hack the property
system and expand it for the era of digital creativity.
6. How do you place corporativism in all this context
of hacking and information? And when I talk about
corporativism I'm not only speaking about the great
corporations or the music industry, but also the
struggle of some professions to retrieve information
or knowledge to their own field, like scientists, etc.
How do you see this relationship?
I think there's a struggle within the sciences between a
corporate model and a public interest model. The two
competing human genome projects would be an example.
generally, most 'real' science is created in the public
system -- corporate science is really just development.
But this is a problem because a lot of
publicly funded
work is being quietly appropriated and privatised.
This tension runs right through everything that what I
call the hacker class is involved in, whether it be science,
the culture industries, or programming. Creativity is always
a collaborative act. Nobody can claim to have created
the Portugese language, for example, or mathematical
notation. We are all standing on somebody's shoulders.
But what you might call the romantic ideology of the
author insists that there is a unique creator for every
creation. The point of which of course is to secure the
creation as the private property of the creator -- at least
until she or he has to sell it to a corporation.
So I think we have to emphasise the collaborative, social
aspect of creation, and hence the need for an expansive
commons wherein as much of creation can be freely
shared. The more you privatise it, the less creativity you
end up getting, because its from the sharing and
collaborating on common things
that new things really
emerge.
7. I've just mentioned music and I was thinking about
the changes in the music industry after the Napster
case and also all the exchanges of mp3 files. How do
you think this situation between the artists (hackers)
and the music industry and majors (vectorialists) will
be settled down? And how do you analyze the role of
the independent labels in it? And, besides that I was
also thinking about the role of electronic music and
the act of sampling in these context. Do you think
electronic music has increased the interest of people
in becoming a hacker?
Music was always a gift economy. Tunes and stories
and choruses were passed around and modified as if
they were something held in common. The anomaly
is the world of private ownership of a tune or a
performance. What the new technologies open up is
a return to the gift economy of music, where you borrow
freely from what's around and make your mark by just doing
it better. H
ip Hop does this spontaneously in the 70s, and
now its everywhere -- sampling, mixing, appropriating,
mash ups, and so on. And you notice people making a
living without the protection of the property system. You
download the song for free and it makes you want to see
the band perform.
8. In a certain degree your book has reminded me of
the Preface of the Mirrorshades, by Bruce Sterling. Do
you think that, in a sort of sense or level, there's
a connection between cyberpunk fiction and the
movement that took place on the 80s and all this
changes in "real" life that we've been experiencing
through technology?
I loved that book. William Gibson was a big influence. He
was the first realist novelist for the digital age. It's not
science fiction at all. He was just describing reality -- but
it took a genius to figure out how to do it. I wanted with
A Hacker Manifesto to write the book some of those
characters might be hiding in an encrypted file somewhere...
9. One last question, you talked about Nietzsche being
the originator of critical media theory. How do you
see his legacy in the field of communication theories
post-humanism and cyberculture?
The Birth of Tragedy is a great bit of media studies. He
points us towards trying to imagine how the regime of
communication within which we find ourselves might be
an artefact of power, a particular network of relations.
I would argue that its important not to lose sight of the
extent to which class relations in particular are alive
and well in our time. That's why we have to keep asking
'the property question', as Marx called it -- even if we
come up with different answers.