It is a rare thing, and the measure of genuine intellectual creativity, when a writer is able to develop and deploy a fully-fledged, conceptual vocabulary and use it in a sustained way. The book becomes at once the staging ground and the first application of a new way of talking. And that is what is most appreciable about Ken Wark’s new book: it provides the reader with a full set of conceptual tools, none of which are obscure, just a little estranged from mainstream usage, which we can use in our own world-making and unmaking endeavours.
A hacker, in Wark’s lexicon, is very different from the image of the super-specialised anarcho-programmer which the term still conjures up for most people; indeed many readers will probably come to recognise themselves as hackers in reading the book. I certainly did. A hacker, we learn, is someone who hacks into knowledge production networks of any kind, and liberates that knowledge from an economy of scarcity. In a society based on private property relations, scarcity is always being presented as if it were natural; but in the contemporary context, where intellectual property is the dominant property form, scarcity is artificial, counter-productive – and the bane of hackers – for the simple reason that appropriating knowledge and information by no means deprives anyone else of it. This is a key issue in art-related practice – indeed, Wark discusses hacking as if it were an art-related practice – for the system of value-production in the mainstream artworld is also premised on a regime of scarcity, underpinned by the author’s signature.
Wark hacks his rather unorthodox theory out of Marxism: like Marx, Wark believes human history can be conceptualised in terms of class relations and conflict. Today, he argues, this conflict is most acute between what he calls the “vectoralist” class (which has come to supplant the hegemony of the capitalist class) and the new productive class that Wark describes as hackers. For now, he admits, hackers like artists continue to see each other as rivals, rather than as fellow members of a class with shared interests – a problem that he elegantly side-steps by arguing that “the hacker class does not need unity in identity but seeks multiplicity in difference.” In Wark’s mind, it seems, hackers of the world need not so much unite as continue to untie, freeing knowledge from illusions of scarcity. For those who might find Wark’s picture overly rosy, the book is full of accounts of actually existing zones of hacker liberty, including this gem from free software advocate and producer, Richard Stallman: “It was a bit like the garden of Eden. It hadn’t occurred to us not to co-operate.”
The upbeat manifesto form sits well with the spirit of the times; but Wark chose it, one suspects, because it is a particularly effective way of organising a tool box. And ultimately, that's what I took away with me from my read: that conceptual vocabularies are like worlds – other ones are possible and they are this one.