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A Hacker Manifesto

A Hacker Manifesto

McKenzie Wark

ISBN 9780674015432

Publication date: 10/04/2004

A double is haunting the world--the double of abstraction, the virtual reality of information, programming or poetry, math or music, curves or colorings upon which the fortunes of states and armies, companies and communities now depend. The bold aim of this book is to make manifest the origins, purpose, and interests of the emerging class responsible for making this new world--for producing the new concepts, new perceptions, and new sensations out of the stuff of raw data.

A Hacker Manifesto deftly defines the fraught territory between the ever more strident demands by drug and media companies for protection of their patents and copyrights and the pervasive popular culture of file sharing and pirating. This vexed ground, the realm of so-called "intellectual property," gives rise to a whole new kind of class conflict, one that pits the creators of information--the hacker class of researchers and authors, artists and biologists, chemists and musicians, philosophers and programmers--against a possessing class who would monopolize what the hacker produces.

Drawing in equal measure on Guy Debord and Gilles Deleuze, A Hacker Manifesto offers a systematic restatement of Marxist thought for the age of cyberspace and globalization. In the widespread revolt against commodified information, McKenzie Wark sees a utopian promise, beyond the property form, and a new progressive class, the hacker class, who voice a shared interest in a new information commons.

Praise

  • What Ken Wark's book does is take us deep into the philosophy of hacking: it gives us a new way of seeing those irreverent folks who play for keeps with digital culture. Think of his book as a lexicon that says "play with digital culture like you would play with DNA--carefully." It's not every day that you get a book that takes you deep into the realm of practical analysis of the ways that we abstract thought and action in search for more kicks on-line, and for almost all aspects of control in digital culture from the top down "Hacker Manifesto" says--this is about exploration, this is about freedom. Inside out, upside down, information always wants to be free, and this is the book that shows us why.

    —Paul D. Miller a.k.a. Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid author of Rhythm Science

Author

  • McKenzie Wark is Professor of Culture and Media Studies at Eugene Lang College and The New School for Social Research.

Book Details

  • 208 pages
  • 5 x 8-1/4 inches
  • Harvard University Press

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