On a Hacker Manifesto

This really didn’t do it for me. It’s easy to get lost in, and there’s a want of clarity throughout. The one thing that redeemed it was Wark’s tripartite division of class relations, which makes a great deal of sense, and I was glad to see her push back against Marx’s determinism: instead of successive historical stages, we get a marble cake of overlapping property relations.

The three relations are the pastoralist and farmer, with land as property; the capitalist and proletarian, with capital as property; and the vectoralist and hacker, with intellectual property as the point of contention. Marxist political economy tends to break down when applied to the information and communication sphere, and I can see here a way that Marxist political activism might still hold — even if I still cannot for the life of me work out what happens to intellectual property once it becomes a commodity, since if it can’t be replicated a trillion times the relative capital invested in it drops to zero.

I take it this was meant as a starting point. Or maybe not. Either way I don’t feel my understanding advanced enough to have made even this short text worthwhile.