JL: Why revive the class struggle at this moment in time when other philosophers and sociologists are speaking about the dissolution of class society and the rise of the network society?
MW: When critical theory stops talking about class, that is when it becomes hypocritical theory. Class can't be wished away just because it is inconvenient. But its fair enough to say that the economy has changed, and hence class has changed. One cannot explain the world today with the old diagrams of class. We need a new one.
JL: Do you see the rise of the hacker class as a historic necessity in the Marxist sense? If so, what ís the relation between the working class and the hacker class?
MW: My book A Hacker Manifesto is careful to avoid the whole idea of 'necessity'. A lot of crimes are perpetrated in the name of 'historical necessity'. History always offers a number of possibilities. At the same time, I do think one can think historically, that there is a process of development. But that very process is one of increasing the realm of possibilities.
JL: Where do you see the hacker class coming into being?
MW: Where ever there is private property there is a class relation, between those who have it and those who don’t. Where ever there is a new kind of private property, there are new class relations. The development of so-called ‘intellectual property’ is actually quite new. It grows out of, but is distinct from, patents and copyrights. Intellectual property is the tendency to turn patents and copyrights into absolute private property rights.
As it becomes a private property right, intellectual property generates a class who come to own it – what I call a vectoralist class, controller of the vectors along which information flows. And it generates a class that produces new information but does not own and control the means of realizing its value – the hacker class. A hacker is anyone who produces new information, but has to sell the rights to it.
JL: What characterizes the workings methods and ethics of the hacker class?
MW: The hacker class are the producers of the new, of that which can take the intellectual property form. So there is no fixed identity, no one way of working, no particular cultural form for the hacker class. They are difference itself. You can’t pick them out by their haircuts or what kind of shoes they wear. The definition of the hacker class has nothing to do with ‘identity’ as consumerist society would like to define it. But hackers work to produce the new, and have a common interest in the free conditions within which that might be possible.
JL: You write “to hack is to release the virtual into the actual”. What do you mean by that?
MW: There is an ontological dimension to hacking. It produces what is different in what is. Hackers are scientists, artists, philosophers who change what it is that the world can be, and what it can become.
You say that the hacker class does not know who it is. Why is that and what does it take for it to gain self-awareness?
MW: In this era, ‘identity’ is all about shared external markers that can be stabilized into little worlds of sameness – what Bourdieu called ‘habitus’. But there’s no one habitus for hackers, and hackers are by definition always changing the ways they work and what it is that one can do. So in that sense there can’t really be a hacker identity.
What is bringing about a sense of a class interest is the activities of the vectoralist class, which wants to trap all of information within a private property form. And so we start to realize that there is a connection between their efforts to shut down file sharing, to stop generic drugs in the developing world, to own and market indigenous cures from the forest, to coopt ‘open source’ and make it a mere ‘business plan’.
JL: Isn’t the problem rather that the hacker class has too much self-awareness, that it is self-absorbed and isolates itself from the rest of the world? What is the hacker class doing for the excluded class of poor people in the underdeveloped world, for instance?
MW: I never said that the hacker class were saints or heroes, and I’m not interested in patronizing the poor or telling them what to do. It’s up to farmers and workers of the developing world to set their own agendas and fight their own fights. The contribution of the hacker class is to discover its self interest in free flows of information.
The hacker class prospers as a class when its means of production – information itself – is freely available. That free availability of information in turn contributes to the self-development of workers and farmers. If farmers have to pay licence fees to use their own seed stocks, if workers don’t have access to the latest production techniques because strict patent laws prevent the free dissemination of machine tools – those are barriers to development. We forget that what made rapid development possible in the early days of the United States was the pirating of ideas and tools from Europe. If the vectoralist class has its way, that road to development will be blocked.
JL: If the hacker class, as you argue, needs to abolish itself in order to realize itself how is class-consciousness created?
MW: The abolition of private property in information would be, at the same time, the abolition of the hacker class as a class. A somewhat utopian goal! But when I wrote A Hacker Manifesto I was tired of ‘resistance’ and of being ‘pragmatic’. I wanted to restore the romantic strain of radical thinking, summed up in the old Situationist slogan “be realistic, demand the impossible!” Which I would translate now as: the actual passes through the virtual.
The class consciousness of the hacker lies in its tension with the vectoralist interest. That’s the negative side of it. But the affirmative side is this impossible goal – that we could all live in a world of free creation.
JL: How does your somewhat idealistic and general description of the hacker class correspond with actual realities?
MW: A Hacker Manifesto may be utopian but it is not idealistic. It doesn’t call for people to be saints or heroes, merely to think about their self interest as a class. I’m tired of the confusion of moral discourse with political discourse. Particularly in the United States, to be left wing is for a lot of people to moralise about things and nag people into sainthood.
What I find more interesting is that the hacker class, whether it be programmers, scientists, artists, is starting to ask questions about who really benefits from the increasingly strict and repressive intellectual property regime. As the singer Courtney Love put it: “it’s the music industry who are the pirates”.
A lot of ordinary people feel the same way. People don’t see why they should be prevented from having life saving drugs just so the drug companies can make super profits. They don’t see file sharing as a criminal act. They believe science and culture belongs to everybody – and they want it back. File sharing is a social movement in all but name. And the vectoralist class knows it – hence its war through the courts on Grokster. I didn’t put many examples in the book, because the only example you need is your own experience of these struggles around who owns culture, who owns science.
JL: Do you connect hacking to “the practice of everyday life” described by Michel de Certeau? And in a wider sense to the avant-gardistic fusion of art and life?
MW: In some ways what I’m doing heads away from De Certeau, at least in the context of media and cultural studies. The dominant tendency there has been to fetishise an ‘other’ who is in possession of some authentic current of resistance. This strand is no longer interested in the avant garde, it is only interested in everyday life and sees all it needs of the old avant garde virtues there.
There is also a minor tendency that has retreated back to pseudo-avant gardes – arcane art or literature with specialized languages, safe within the academy or the art world.
I think my book reinvigorates the romantic tendency which is only interested in the linkage of the avant garde to everyday life: Schiller and Rimbaud to Dada and Debord. I acknowledge that tradition but try to overcome it and reimagine it.
JL: The hacker class is just one of several “productive classes”. What are the others?
MW: The productive classes are: farmers, workers, hackers. In talking about ‘capitalism’ we tend to collapse farmers and workers together, but the relation between them was the central problem of social democracy in the 19th century. Kautsky, Bernstein, Gramsci – everyone argued about it. Social democracy was successful where it managed to broker a relation between these classes without collapsing the difference. From what little I know about Scandinavia, I think this patterns holds good there.
JL: You oppose the hacker class to what you call the vectoral class. Can you explain what characterizes this powerful class?
MW: the three exploiting classes are: pastoralists, capitalists, vectoralists. Ricardo and Marx were very much aware of the tension and difference between pastoralists (landlords) and a rising capitalist class. It’s the whole basis of Ricardo’ political economy.
And so: in the 19th century there is an awareness that the commodity economy has already had two stages: one based in agriculture, the next in manufacturing, and two successive but also overlapping class struggles; one pitting pastoralists against farmers; one pitting capitalists against workers. So why not a third, pitting vectoralists against hackers? In each case, it is a question of the development of the private property relation into a new form.
JL: Will the vectoral class end up destroying itself?
MW: Who knows? That’s the thing about history – without ‘historical necessity’, all critical theory can do is explore the shape of the space of possibility.
JL: The hacker class is able to produce beyond the property form, you write. How does it do that? Or I could ask, how do the new things that the hacker class makes enter the world differ from the ones created by the vectoral class?
MW: The vectoralist class is completely dependent on the hacker class to produce new information so that it can acquire it in the form of new patents, new copyrights. But it renders everything the hacker class does equivalent. X amount of my copyrights are worth Y amount of your patents.
A glance at the business pages confirms this. The value of vectoralist firms is in a large part a portfolio of intangibles: patents, copyrights and brands. Everything we do is rendered equivalent when it takes the commodity form. Development under vectoralist command can only pursue pathways of the same kind, dedicated to the quantitative expansion of the same. What can’t be realized is difference itself.
But: once information becomes a commodity, the possibility arises for the production and sharing of something beyond scarcity. Information can escape the commodity form. My possession of a piece of information does not deprive you of it. It is, as the economists say, a ‘non-rivalrous good’. It is in other words always and already something held in common. Hence the vectoralist class struggles to contain and control the very thing that can render it superfluous.
JL: The famous hacker slogan has it that “information wants to be free” but is “everywhere in chains” as you write. What does it take to free information from its chains today?
MW: I added the last part “but is everywhere in chains”, which I pinched from Rousseau. There’s a whole social movement now, with many overlapping and competing strands, some political, some cultural, some social, which develops the free movement outside the private property form. There’s Free Software, there’s Creative Commons, there’s industrial scale piracy in the developing world, there’s everyday file sharing from people’s home or work computers, or from terminals you can rent in the bazaar.
I think we have to look at all these things together as responses to a certain conjuncture. On the one hand, the development of productive forces makes the freeing of information from scarcity possible on a massive, unprecedented scale. On the other, a class arises which tries to put this genie back in the bottle, to restrict this development and contain it within private property relations, which now appear as a fetter.
JL: How does this information-based class struggle relate to former class struggles?
MW: It is important to say that the other layers to class conflict, between farmer and pastoralist, between worker and capitalist are not ‘superceded’ and have not gone away. Dispossessing peasants of their land and turning them into farmers is still going on. The struggle of farmers against the pastoralists who own their land, that is still going on. There’s 80 million or more industrial workers in China alone now. Their struggles occur under the same repressive conditions as the early labor movement in Europe, only on a much bigger scale.
And what makes it different is that there’s a new layer to it: the struggle of vectoralist vs hacker. The hacker produced, and the vectoralist came to own, the very means of making production global. The vectors along which information shuttle, the software to manage inventories, the patents on the seed stocks, even the brands on the sneakers – its all hacker made but vectoralist controlled, and its transforming production worldwide.
JL: Why adopt the modernist concept of a manifesto for writing about this post-modern phenomenon?
MW: In part to say that the postmodern was a name for a symptom but not an adequate analysis of the symptom, and that we have to think again, to paraphrase Croce, about what is living and what is dead in the ‘modern’.
The manifesto is a genre that cleaves a complex reality along certain lines, revealing but not attempting to exhaust that complexity, but revealing it from a particular poinit of view. The manifesto is addressed to a subject with an interest in its own self transformation. After the ‘postmodern pause’, I think we’re back into history again.
JL: You don’t mention any specific or concrete cases of hacking, which lead me to ask you if your text is itself an abstraction like the ones, you write about? Or I could ask do you consider the book to be a hack? And if so, of what?
MW: Writers hack language. You try to make it do new things. You try to discover new possibilities in language. For instance, to return to neglected forms and re-imagine them.
A Hacker Manifesto is not a book for everyone but it is a book for anyone. It is a self extracting file. The tools are there to interpret it for yourself. But it does not waste time or space explaining to people things they already know. Everybody knows there’s a struggle going on. Only the vectoralist class has an interest in denying it. And this is not a book written for them or their apologists.
Since the book came out I’ve had conversations with artists, scientists, engineers, programmers from all over the world. They don’t always agree with it, but they get it. It’s a theory book, but one which can connect immediately to your everyday life, without all the dead verbiage in between. If you want the latest news or the latest facts and figures, use Lexus-Nexus, use Google. What’s the point of putting that in a book?
A book, these days, has to be untimely. It has to be something worth reflecting on, or leaving on the coffee table for your friends to pick up and argue about. Or in short: one has to hack the form of the book as well. That’s what I tried to do with A Hacker Manifesto. It tries to be like slow food: small portion, lean, chewy but tasty and with a few vitamins!
Follow-up:
JL: I'm in the process of editing the interview and have some follow-up questions. You write that you'd translate the Situationistic slogan into 'the actual passes through the virtual'. Can you elaborate that a little?
MW: It's that history is full of surprises. It doesn't operate in a linear way. The virtual is one name for the place that the surprises come from. One thing that is striking about the Situationists is that they were saying all through the dull, conformist 50s and 60s that the riots were coming. And indeed they are coming again. Last year there was a record number fo civil disturbances in China, according to the New York Times. There's some desire there that the system can't contain.
JL: You say that the left wing 'nags people into sainthood'. I'm not familiar with that expression. What do you mean?
MW: Particularly in the United States, a dominant kind of leftist posture is to appear to be more moral than other people. To drive a hybrid car, eat organic food, and feel superior because of it. But this is to confuse moralism with politcs. This kind of moralism has had its victories -- the anti-slavery movement is a good example. But also its disasters -- such as the temperance movement.
JL: You talk about the romantic tendency - from Schiller to Debord. Can you characterize that tendency a little more? And how do you wish to reimagine it?
MW: Schiller thought that art could be the means to reintegrated a fragmented society in which everyone had become specialized and detached from common feeling. There's a strong element of that still in Debord, who imagines that the separation and alienation of the spectacle can be overcome and we can all live a life of direct immediacy. It's a fantasy, a secular version of the promise of redemption. The question is what to put in its place. That's the question I try to answer in A Hacker Manifesto.
JL: You write 'so why not a third, pitting vectoralists against workers?' Do you mean 'workers' or hackers?
MW: Sorry, a mistake -- it should read "pitting vectoralists against hackers"
JL: Why do you mention that you pinched the quote - 'but is everywhere in chains' - from Rousseau? Can you explain in more detail?
MW: Going back to Lautreamont, and forward via Debord to Kathy Acker, there's a whole tradition of a literature of plagiarism. It's thesis is that authorship is the property system art work in culture. Hence plagiarism as a means of returning fragments of the common culture to the people who collectively create it.
JL: You write that software, patents and brands are hacker made. I understand how software is hacker made, but patents and brands to me are exactly the products of the vectoral class?
MW: With a patent or a brand its still people's labor, making information do new things. Even brands. As Baudelaire said, a language is the genius of a people. These days the people express their genius in wierd iconic signs that corproations mistakenly think they 'own'. Well maybe, but they only exist through the labor of making them mean something. In short, wherever information can be made to do new things, and someone is going to end up owning the resultant product, you have the tension between hacker and vectorialist -- creator and owner. I never said that what hackers make is always going to be worthy or redeeming.
JL: What do you mean by 'we're back in history again'?
MW: Francis Fukuyama is the last in a long line who has declared history over, this time with the fall of the Soviet Union. Stalinism was a bankrupt model, so for Fukuyama that just leaves liberal capitalism as the last model standing. History ends with the triumph of capitalism. I think quite the opposite has happened. With the collapse of the Soviet model, a false alternative has crumbled, openning the way for accelerated development of capitalism, which is itself now mutating into a new kind of commodity economy. We're back in history -- where it is no longer clear what the 'end state' will be or if there could ever be one.