A Spectre is haunting the World-the Spectre of Hackerism

When I first started reading McKenzie Wark’s A Hacker Manifesto, my brain first recalled the anti-capitalistic Sociology courses I took in college and then moved on to publications like Adbusters, before I came to the obvious conclusion that I have of course heard all of this before. But Wark seems like a well educated (or well knowledged as he would likely prefer) and intelligent person who knows enough about economics, Marxism in particular, that led me to believe that he is clearly not writing in a vacuum. Marx and Engels are present in Ward’s manifesto and the two works are in clear dialogue with each other in what seems almost like an updated (technological replaces industrial) version of the Communist Manifesto.

Although there were arguments I found to be compelling (though as I said before, arguments I have heard before) such as his comparison of offices and factories, education and imprisonment, it was hard for me to take this manifesto too seriously. Maybe that was Wark's point. The entire abstraction section is written in abstractions which is absurd if not funny and really, there are very few concrete moments in the entirety of the first 59 points that I read (which makes the reading tedious and often confusing). Sentences like the following cannot have been written for the primary purpose of being understood:

“They must become the means of coordination of the statement of a movement, at once objective and subjective, capable of connecting the objective representation of things to the presentation of a subjective action.”

The language throughout the manifesto is clearly not directed at an uneducated audience which actually makes the content and the arguments of the manifesto more interesting. Here is a manifesto that is arguing for information to be truly free as it calls for an end to privileged ownership of information, and yet one has to be extremely privileged in order to access the information provided in this manifesto. They must have been provided with the means to obtain education, advanced literacy access to a computer with an internet connection and enough time to read it. The manifesto does however, come around again and respond to this contradiction. Wark argues that information is like any other commodity-until the larger economic inequality problems are solved, information, like food or money, will be distributed unequally. The manifesto is self conscious that it is a part of this inequality and perhaps uses that contradiction, paired with its absurd style, to draw attention to that problem.

As an artist/writer/whatever, I of course was drawn in by the representation section of the manifesto.

“All representation is false. A likeness differs of necessity from what it represents. If it did not, it would be what it represents, and thus not a representation.”

Again this is not a new argument and it is and has been applied to language. Words are not things alone, they point to other things, they represent. Even in the attempts of concrete poets like B.P. Nichol whose words appear to simply exist and not represent anything else, words always point to something else. And those words, those representations are a socially constructed phenomenon that we all share and use to communicate, to express ourselves, to exchange information. Yet, we still try to control and privatize it. This relates back to Wark’s discussion about the absurdity of owning shared information, especially now that information is as much as if not more of commodity than anything else.

Finally, I felt like Wark was actually helping artists by explaining the societal factors that influence why we cannot simply provide our work for free. It is not the individual’s fault but Society’s. Our hands our clean, what a relief.