Q: So why hackers?

A: Whenever you try to describe something new you have to reach into the language and find an old word that can do a new job. I like 'hacker' because it's a good old sturdy English word. There's nothing Latinate about it.

What I want this word to do is to describe a new kind of class interest. Hackers are people who create new ideas. Hackers innovate. But they don't own the means of realizing the value of what they create. So a hacker could be a computer programmer or a musician or a novelist or a bio-chemist.

Q: Most people would think of hackers as kids who break into computers.

A: It used to mean people who create new computer code, but it is interesting how it's a term that's been trivialized and demonized. I think that's always the case with new kinds of political force. The word 'democrat' used to be an insult.

I want to do the opposite with the term: make it broader and more inclusive, not something narrow and marginal. Hackers could be working in any field, not just computing. Although it seems only appropriate to name a whole class over one of its leading new forms of creativity - the programmers.

Q: Why is the book a 'Manifesto'?

A: There are so many pointed by very temporary political books around today; and there are so many academic books built to last but which take the treatise as a model - big 500 page slabs. I wanted to find a form in which to write something pointed but of more than passing interest.

The manifesto as a form addresses the reader in a quite particular way. The reader can either align with the voice of the text or reject it. It's a form that calls for a decision. The manifesto addresses the reader as someone with the power to say yes or no to the world.

Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle is I think still the great manifesto of our time. He wants the reader to say no to the world. I want the reader to say yes, to affirm that another world is possible.

Q: Is your book a utopian one, then?

A: Actually, no. Utopias are dangerous. My book is about affirming the best of what already exists, rather than trying to negate this world in the name of an imaginary one.

But where my book I think does diverge from a lot of political works from the left these days is that it does imagine a better society. It's not about 'resistance' to anything. It's a new way to imagine what's possible.

Q: Who is your book aimed at?

A: It may not be a book for everyone but it is for anyone. Sometimes I look at the price on the back of a book and I think: 'this book is not really twenty dollars. Its real price is twenty thousand dollars. That's the minimum amount of graduate school you need to understand it.

My book is a theory book. It tries to abstract from particulars and draw a diagram of how power works now. But it is not a work of Capital-T Theory. It defines all of its own terms. Everything you need to understand it is either in the book, or in your own experience. You can use it as a prism for seeing what's going on in the world as a whole.

It's a book I hope anybody who creates things might have a look at, regardless of what tribe you belong to within the so-called 'knowledge economy'. We have to get beyond our own little subcultures and see a common interest.

Q: So what from your own experience led you to this book?

A: Signing contracts with publishers! I'm not kidding. I realized, as many people do, that you have very little control over the terms under which you sell the product of your own mind. The 'intellectual property' laws, which pretend to protect the interests of the creator, really protect the interests of the owner. And since most of us don't own the means of production, we don't stay owners for long.

But I also had a positive experience, on listservers like nettime.org, where I met a whole community of people trying to put into practice a new, global gift economy of knowledge. So that was the practice; A Hacker Manifesto is the theory. I think a lot of people could recognize themselves in this book. It tries to map the possibilities for the free creation of knowledge that we have all experienced, no matter how distorted it gets when gets reduced to a commodity.

McKenzie Wark is Professor of Cultural and Media Studies at Lang College, New School University. He is the author of several books, most recently Dispositions.