A Hacker Manifesto
by McKenzie Wark (Harvard University Press, 2004)
Didactic and nearly free of examples, this work nonetheless kept pulling me back to it, almost against my will. For Wark, a "hacker" is anyone who can "create the possibility of new things entering the world." Writers, artists, bio-technologists, and software programmers belong to the "hacker class" and share a class interest in openness and freedom, while the "vectoralist" and "ruling classes" are driven to contain, control, dominate, and own. Wark crafts a new analysis of the tensions between the underdeveloped and "overdeveloped" worlds, their relationships to surplus and scarcity, and the drive toward human actualization.
Sharing more DNA with Marx's Communist Manifesto than with, say, Stallman's GNU Manifesto, it's not light reading, but I found myself underlining, margin-writing, and having "Aha!" moments throughout.
Michael Jensen is director of publishing technologies for the National Academies Press and director of Web communications for the National Academies.