Originally from Australia, McKenzie Wark lives in New York City and teaches at The New School.
1. How do you define a 'hacker'?
Hackers are a class, and as with all class relations, its all about property. The development of copyright and patent into something colse to full private property rights as 'intellectual property' makes information a stake in a class conflict, just as land and capital are. So in the information economy, you have those who create new information -- hackers -- and those to whom they must sell their labor because they do not own the means of realizing its vale -- what I call a vectoralist class, the new ruling class of our time.
2. The peer-to-peer networks actually constitute a free, massive and continously technically evolving exchange of copyrighted information. They are not seriously threatening the music or the film industry's economy, that continues to grow, but they are significantly improving the personal cultural exchange. What you think of this incredible and (mostly) invisible failure of the copyright extremist?
Well, the battle is not over yet, and the combination of legal and technical sanctions could be very damaging to organic cultural production. The vectoral class, which includes the media conglomerates, sees all information through the prism of property. What they don't realize is that it is an ontological property of information that they are up against. Information wants to be free but is everywhere in chains. It is in its nature to escape from scarcity, identity, to refuse the boundaries of property. Culture and science have always been built on this ontologically slippery quality ofr information. Digital technologies just force the issue. They expand the realm of freedom for information, but at the same time provide the tools for its restriction with the property form.
3. You define the 'Vectoralist class' as "those who own intellectual property and the vectors which are the means of realizing its value", and the 'Vectoral Power' a power "based on ownership and control of information". Don't you think that technically speaking it is very difficult to control information, due to the infinite duplication possibilities (that has always succeeded even with proprietary formats, from the tape to the dvd)? Can you list some example of Vectoral Power?
There's a famous music store in New York called Mondo Kim's. On 8th June they were raided by the cops, who confiscated all of the hip hop mixtapes. Five store employees spent the night in jail for failure to disclose the origin of a recording (in the second degree) and trademark counterfeiting in the third degree. Most of those arrested are muscians themselves. This came just a month after the Recording Industry Association of America called for a crackdown on the mixtape industry.
Mixtapes are an interesting example of the feedback loop between gift and commodity in culture. Many people in hip hop, even those with contracts, and complicit in leaking recordings onto the street via the mix tapes. Its where the mixes that are too good for radio are. And yet, as this example shows, the old feedback relation between gift and commodity is being outlawed. To me its a straightforward example of vectoral power. The vectoral class extracts its margins from information as private property, and is attempting, legally and technically, to squeeze the gift relation out of the circuit of information, with the full complicity of the state.
4. The 'plagiarist' music movement is another example of the evident absurdity of the corporate information control. After the exaggerated Negativland's legal punishment for their sarcastic 'U2 ep' ten years ago, now juxtaposing and sequencing samples of copyrighted songs is a common practice (the so-called 'mashup' or 'bastard-pop') even if not officially allowed in the market. What you think of this popular, artistic and entertaining phenomenon?
As Marcel Mauss once said: most people instictively view the whole of culture as in some sense collective and common property. It's 'ours'. So if you like this hook and and that chorus, why not put them together. Either for fun or profit. And in practice, this can be a way into mainstream legitimacy. Look at Danger Mouse and The Black Album, or the DJ Reset mashup of Beck, Pharrell and Jay-Z, 'Frontin' on Debra'. Or to remix Lautreamont: "Progress is possible, plagiarism implies it." Writers have a lot of freedom to do this, so why not musicians and film makers? As we say in English, "the law is an ass." I wrote A Hacker Manifesto by using the detournement method. I copied whole chunks of Society of the Spectacle and 'corrected' them. I learned this from my dear departed friend Kathy Acker. She applied it to fiction, I did it with nonfiction.
5. In your 'Hacker Manifesto' you write: "The greatest hacks of our time may turn out to be forms of organizing free human expression, so that from this time on, abstraction serves the people, rather than the people serve the ruling class." Actually many companies on the net seem to use 'free human expression' as a marketing tool, like Flcker for sharing pictures, of Friendster for keeping in touch with potential friends or the now Google-owned Blogger for easily create your own blog. Could you point out the differences between your concept of 'free human expression' and this commodified one?
There's always this tension between gift and commodity with information. The smart members of the vectoral class realize that it can be counterproductive to try to squeeze the gift element out, so they take the opposite path, encouraging but controlling it. They think we will be satisfied with control of some content, while they control the infrastructure -- the "means of production."
6. Surveillance and biometric technologies can be considered among the most important economical strategic fields for the Vector Power? If so, why?
I'm not so interested in surveillance. This is just what the state does. It maps the objects in its domain. What's interesting is that in many ways it may not have the best maps any more. It's possible Wal Mart knows more about you than the CIA. Mapping 'consumer behaviour" is such a huge industry now. This has its vectoral aspect: control over production and distribution not through owning the physical layer, but through owning the information about what runs through the physical layer.
7. You wrote that "the commodification of information began to accelerate with the advent of the telegraph". Can you elaborate more in this concept?
I see the telegraph as the historical break. It separates the speed at which information moves relative to objects or subjects, and thus becomes the means of organizing the movement of objects and subjects. Everything else -- from the internet to satellites -- expands on this break. It's the phenomena of 'telesthesia', or perception at a distance. Marx and Engels often note in their letters and journalism how the telegraph changed the shape of political events and makes possible the world market. They jujst never developed this insight into a coherent theory.
8. Talking about the 'Hacker Manifesto' you said that you "wanted an affirmative book that offered a new kind of social imagination". Can you tell us more about your idea of this 'social imagination'?
It's not utopian so much as 'atopian'. Maybe its a kind of fiction. It's the conviction that things could be otherwise. If critical theory does not have that commitment to seeing how things could be otherwise it just descends into hypocritical theory.
9. What you think of the so-called 'samaritan hackers' like Adrian Lamo who never damages the network they get into, but often expose the security holes to the owners and collaborate with them to fix them? What'd be their role in a collective hacker perspective?
I wanted to get the term 'hacker' out of the ghetto. We think of it too narrowly. To me it is anyone who produces new information, in any field. I'm not interested in the specialized and restricted worlds information creators cling to. I am interested in what we all have in common. 'Hackers' have been particularly obssessed with possessing arcane knowledge, excluding others, and so on. So I say we are all hackers. Everyone produces new information. The extension of the private property relation to information creates a specific class of hackers, and a class antagonist, the vectoral class, which owns the means of realzing the value of information. But to think the hacker politically is to think about what hacking implies for everybody. I like the image of the hacker as a benign transgressor of private property in cyberspace, but its an emblem. Much more is at stake.
10. What you think of the Hacker Ethic described by Pekka Himanen in his book?
It's a good book, but it confuses hackers and vectoralists. It does not confront the question of class. So it thinks only at the subjective level about hacking as a kind of work. It pays no attention to how things change once their is property, ownership -- class. If Himanen wants to be the Max Weber of the vectoral economy, I wanted to rewrite Marx. Yes, its a 'new' economy -- but so long as there is private property there is still a class relation, even if it now includes new class antagonisms alongside, and over determining -- the old ones.