A Hacker Manifesto
by McKenzie Wark
[from the October 25, 2004 issue]
As one of those pathetic evolutionary throwbacks who has never used e-mail
or the Internet, and has hardly ever handled a mobile phone, I can approach
this book with all the supreme disinterestedness of a eunuch in a harem. In
fact, however, the hacker of McKenzie Wark's title is more metaphorical than
literal. He means by it, rather oddly, researchers, authors, artists, biologists,
chemists, musicians, philosophers and the like, all of whom he sees as
"hacking" fresh concepts out of existing data. Hackers are the new
proletariat, whose creations are being confiscated by what Wark rather
obscurely calls the "vectoralist" ruling class. The time has now come for
dispossessed innovators everywhere to form a collective class, and Wark's
manifesto is an opening salvo in this fresh form of class warfare. We have
moved from the handloom weavers to the hackers, but the social logic
remains the same.
What's wrong with the word "intellectual," in its broad Gramscian sense, to
describe the group Wark has in mind? The modish word "hacker" is certainly
more eye-catching, and publishers (even the prestigious Harvard University
Press) are notoriously shy of allowing the leaden-footed word "intellectual"
into their book titles. But it seems perverse, as well as unduly romanticizing,
to hang a connection between intellectual workers and criminalized code-
busters on an arbitrary metaphor. Calling all these diverse types "hackers" is
also a touch homogenizing for a book that proudly declares that "to hack is
to differ." Do McKenzie Wark and the Master of the Queen's Music really
belong to the same class?
From a Marxist viewpoint, "class" is the wrong word in any case. Intellectuals,
like butchers or lap dancers, form a group rather than a social class. They
don't, for example, necessarily share a single location within the means of
production. Social classes are not just bunches of people with things in
common. Senior citizens or people with bushy eyebrows don't constitute a
potentially revolutionary class, since they are not so positioned within the
capitalist system as to be capable of taking it over. You do not become a
revolutionary class simply by being militant, visionary, impoverished or
oppressed. The peculiarity of Marxism on this score is that it is not up to us
to nominate who will transform the system. Unlike a pope, the system
nominates its own successor.
However, since doubts first began to emerge on the political left about
whether the industrial working class was any more capable of revolution than
people with bushy eyebrows, socialists have been looking anxiously about
them for a candidate with a CV impressive enough to fill this role. Students,
peasants, women, schizophrenics: All have at some time or other been
auditioned for the part. Now, with A Hacker Manifesto, it is the turn of the
intellectual innovators, or "infoproles," to inherit this august role. "All power
to the computer programmers!" might be the book's less than resonant
slogan.
It is not, even so, a project to be sniffed at. There is indeed a need to
rethink classical Marxism in the epoch of video games, and this book, even if
it takes itself a touch too seriously, is a searching, thoughtful meditation.
The question that inspires it--where are the sources of resistance in
postindustrial capitalism?--is a compelling one, even if the answers it provides
leave something to be desired. A Hacker Manifesto is not just another
postmodern carve-up of Marxism; on the contrary, it clings to a quasi-Marxist
grand narrative, all the way from pastoralism to capitalism, in order to
demonstrate its claim that the infoproles have now replaced the industrial
proles as the last revolutionary class in history. Marxism is turned against
itself, rather than fashionably dismissed.
Just as The Communist Manifesto is laced with upbeat revolutionary idealism,
as befits its genre of political agitation, so is this curious blending of Marx,
the French Situationist Guy Debord and the French anarchist philosopher
Gilles Deleuze. Throughout the text, the hacker is resolutely romanticized. In
Marxist terms, he or she stands for the dynamic productive forces striving to
break through repressive social relations. But this notion of artists,
programmers, biologists and the like as creative innovators is absurdly
overgeneralized. Wark tells us excitedly that such types "create the
possibility of new things entering the world." But only avant-gardists and
Americans believe that the new is inherently positive. The twentieth
century's big new political idea was known as fascism. The antiglobalization
movement is new, but so is the war in Iraq. Biologists cultivate anthrax as
well as penicillin. Programmers work for the Pentagon as well as for peace
campaigns. Philosophers can be reactionary as well as enlightened. It is
marketplace ideology, not radical thought, that imagines that the new is
always to be championed over the old. It was Leon Trotsky who remarked
that socialists had always lived in tradition. In his downgrading of the old in
light of the new, Wark is unconsciously in accord with Donald Rumsfeld's view
of Europe, and very much a product of the social order he rightly criticizes.
A Hacker Manifesto also has a starry-eyed view of future possibility. In this
respect, it has a remote affinity with Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's
rather too ebullient Empire. "Every hack," Wark enthuses, "is an expression of
the inexhaustible multiplicity of the future, of virtuality." But the future is
not in fact inexhaustible. We are closing down some of its possibilities
forever by the actions we take in the present. Nor is the potential always to
be preferred to the actual. If socialism is possible, so is nuclear catastrophe.
Wark has an admirable vein of idealism; all he needs, in order to modulate it
into realism, is a good dose of old-European skepticism. It is naïve to believe,
as he appears to, that something called "information" is inherently valuable,
and all that is wrong is the act of restricting it. Lots of information is either
useless, trivial or pernicious, and there are restrictions on it--not sending
the Central Intelligence Agency a detailed schedule of McKenzie Wark's
average day, for example--that are beneficial rather than malign.
A less glamorous word than "intellectual" for hackers, if a less euphonious
one, would be the petite bourgeoisie. When A Hacker Manifesto tells us that
hackers are hard to collectivize, feel suspicious of mass politics, stand
somewhere between rulers and masses and cherish their differences, he is
describing that "contradiction incarnate" (Marx), the lower middle class.
Their interests, Wark remarks, are separate from those of the working class
but potentially in alliance with them. It is, in fact, just this ambiguity that has
made the lower middle class so slippery a political bedfellow in its day, as
likely to be seduced by fascism as enlisted by socialism. There is little reason
to believe that Wark's army of French horn players and fashion designers
would be any more reliable.
Even so, this is a perceptive, provocative study, packed to the seams with
acute analysis. It is true that one's faith in the nuanced nature of its author's
judgments is somewhat undermined by statements like "education is slavery"
or "all representation is false." There is an audible clashing of genres here, as
the scrupulous academic in Wark does battle with the flamboyant polemicist,
New School University meets the Left Bank. On the whole, Wark is at his best
when he is not trying to sound like Gilles Deleuze. But then, who is not?