A Hacker Manifesto (Hardcover)

by McKenzie Wark (Author)
Key Phrases: hacker class, pastoralist class, overdeveloped world (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review
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 (20040913)

Ours is once again an age of manifestos. Wark's book challenges the new regime of property relations with all the epigrammatic vitality, conceptual innovation, and revolutionary enthusiasm of the great manifestos.
--Michael Hardt, co-author of Empire (20040924)

A Hacker Manifesto is a highly original and provocative book. At a moment in history where we are starved of new political ideas and directions, the clarity with which Wark identifies a new political class is persuasive, and his ability to articulate their interests is remarkable.
--Marcus Boon, author of The Road of Excess (20041023)

McKenzie Wark's A Hacker Manifesto might also be called, without too much violence to its argument, The Communist Manifesto 2.0. In essence, it's an attempt to update the core of Marxist theory for that relatively novel set of historical circumstances known as the information age.
--Julian Dibbell, author of Play Money: Diary of a Dubious Proposition (20041201)

[Wark's] ambitious A Hacker Manifesto Googles for signs of hope in this cyber-global-corporate-brute world of ours, and he fixes on the hackers, macro-savvy visionaries from all fields who 'hack' the relationships and meanings the rest of us take for granted. If we hackers--of words, computers, sound, science, etc.--organize into a working, sociopolitical class, Wark argues, then the world can be ours.
--Hua Hsu (Village Voice 20041201)

Writers, artists, biotechnologists, and software programmers belong to the 'hacker class' and share a class interest in openness and freedom, while the 'vectoralist' and 'ruling classes' are driven to contain, control, dominate, and own. Wark crafts a new analysis of the tension between the underdeveloped and 'overdeveloped' worlds, their relationships to surplus and scarcity, and the drive toward human actualization.
--Michael Jensen (Chronicle of Higher Education 20050527)

Infuriating and inspiring in turn, A Hacker Manifesto will spawn a thousand theses, and just maybe spawn change.
--Mike Holderness (New Scientist 20050601)

McKenzie Wark's A Hacker Manifesto is a remarkable and beautiful book: cogent, radical, and exhilarating, a politico-aesthetic call to arms for the digital age...Whether or not A Hacker Manifesto succeeds in rousing people to action, it's a book that anyone who's serious about understanding the changes wrought by digital culture will have to take into consideration.
--Steven Shaviro (Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies )

McKenzie Wark's aptly named and timely A Hacker Manifesto is a remarkably original and passionate clarion call to question the increasing commodification of information in our digital age. The book is elegantly designed and written in a highly aphoristic style that evokes the grand essay tradition of Theodor Adorno, Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin and Friedrich Nietzsche...A Hacker Manifesto is indispensable reading for anyone who wishes to understand the multiplying complexities of digital culture. It is itself an example of hacking: forging a new world out of the ruins of the present one.
--John Conomos (Sydney Morning Herald )

The larger argument may not be novel (it's plagued by the same flaws as Marx's original utopian blueprint), but this updated version of that vision provides a clever repudiation of the commodification of art, ingenuity, and the creative impulses--and a useful lens through which to examine the complexities involved in the ownership of ideas in this digital age. (Ruminator Review )

A Hacker Manifesto is the Big Picture of not only where we are in the 'information age,' but where we're going as well. Adopting the [epigrammatic] style of Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle, as well as updating its ideas, Ken Wark establishes so-called 'knowledge workers' as an unrecognized social class: 'the hacker class.' Wark also updates Marx and Engels, Deleuze and Guattari, Nietzsche, and a host of others...Far from just being the story of 'us versus them' class struggles, Ken Wark's book is far more complex: It tackles many issues, historical, emergent, and emerging. Opening up new discursive spaces where none existed before, A Hacker Manifesto might well turn out to be one of the most important books of the new century.
--Roy Christopher (Frontwheeldrive.com )

A Hacker Manifesto will yield some provocative ideas and real challenges to a world in which everything is commodified.
--Eric J. Iannelli (Times Literary Supplement )

Wark's ideas about open-source culture, environmentalism, and the politics of information exchange are fresh enough to merit real attention. A Hacker Manifesto...might incite a genuinely important conversation about the shape of the future.
--Peter Ritter (Rain Taxi )

Product Description
"

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.

"

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: Harvard University Press (October 4, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674015436
• ISBN-13: 978-0674015432
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #693,840 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hackers of All Countries, Unite! You Have Nothing to Lose..., November 16, 2004

By	Ted Striphas "Ted Striphas" (Bloomington, IN USA) - See all my reviews

McKenzie Wark's *A Hacker Manifesto* is a bold and daring effort to rethink the composition of society in the age of digital media and to constitute a politics appropriate to the tenor of the times. Like Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels' *The Communist Manifesto,* to which *Hacker* represents a clear homage, Wark deftly walks a fine rhetorical line. On the one hand, he attempts to describe the character and tendencies of contemporary society, a society in which capitalism's reach extends ever deeper by producing new and increasingly abstract forms of private property. On the other hand, like all manifestos worth their salt, Wark's book also is constitutive, helping to call a new creative subject - the hacker class - into being. Their interests and practices, Wark shows, are set against those of the vectoralist class, a group intent on capturing and expropriating the products of those who hack or creatively rework existing cultural raw material. *A Hacker Manifesto* thus serves as a junction point of sorts - both a call and an answer - for an emerging class consciousness and set of creative practices.

*Hacker* also owes a debt to Guy DeBord's *Society of the Spectacle,* given its methodically aphoristic style. And like *Spectacle,* Wark deftly moves between philosophy and social theory, history and economics, politics and media, creation and criticism. The result is a powerfully interdisciplinary - and astonishingly insightful - book whose recombinant style at once embodies and emboldens the politics of hacking that he so admires.

If you choose to read this book (and I hope that you do), bear in mind that what you'll find is eminently quotable. The task at hand is not to quote Wark's book, however, for to do so would be tantamount to transforming his insights into deadened theoretical abstractions. Quotation is the hobgoblin of the vectoralist class. *Hacker* asks not to be quoted, but to be, well, hacked - to be plundered for insights whose only end is their radical reworking and recombination.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hackers of the World Unite (in difference!), February 15, 2005

By	John Percival Hackworth (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

A Hacker Manifesto is essential and engrossing reading.

Graciously avoiding the definite article, Wark's book successfully breathes new life into a debate which has been stumbling around directionless for some time now, last spotted muttering to itself about the "crisis of the humanities" and the "death of theory." Taking the premise that Marx's legacy is more crucial than ever - especially after 1989 and the rise of the information economy - this carefully-structured collection of aphorisms functions as a positive alternative to the toothless Cultural Studies' mantra celebrating "RTS" (Resistance-Transgression-Subversion). Instead, Hacker Manifesto offers a sophisticated framework for understanding the historical potential latent within an emerging class: the hacker class - needed by the "vectorialist class" (informational entrepreneurs) to do their sterile dirty work, but not completely controlled by them either. Erudite, poetic, and richly condensed, Wark's little red book is as beautifully designed as it is argued.

Indeed, no-one grappling with "the network society" - or the political and ethical stakes of our increasingly digital world - can afford to ignore the challenges and insights offered here. Like Hardt & Negri's Empire, this book is a strategic experiment in optimism, and a vigorous rejection of the passive-nihilism of much diluted French-inspired theory in the 1980s and 90s. There is something of the Pascalian wager here; but in relation to the potential for radical change, rather than divine life after death. Indeed, Wark's expansion of the term "hack" outside computer subcultures and into the wider world of political economy (laws, discourses, institutions, modes of production, etc.), may be his most lasting gift to the continuing hacking and retrofitting of established ideas and virtual options.

After noting that "information wants to be free but is everywhere in chains," the author calls for a "third politics" for the third era of abstraction of labor (beyond the pastoralists and the capitalists). "New circumstances call for new theories, and new practices, but also for the cultivation of variants, alternatives, mutant strains."

It's true that Wark assumes a certain familiarity with the Big Ideas of the last few hundred years, and this book will therefore seem somewhat elusive to those who are not versed in Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Benjamin, Debord, Deleuze, etc. But like all manifestos worth their salt, it allows - even encourages - re-reading and prolonged reflection. In other words, this is not for people looking for 5-second brain-abs, but a commitment to thinking through the issues associated with living in a time of "weapons of mass seduction."

Poetic without being florid, inspiring without being overly inflated, Hacker's Manifesto satisfies the criteria of all important books; reminding us that things could - and *should* - be otherwise.

But for Wark's sake, please don't make a bumper sticker out of his pithy phrase: "Hack the lack that lacks the hack."

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars McKenzie Wark's 'A Hacker Manifesto', February 17, 2005

By	Graham Meikle - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Intellectual property may become the defining question of our times for those who work in and between the media and the academy. McKenzie Wark's 'A Hacker Manifesto' is a major intervention in this arena, one that suggests new ways of asking (and answering) 'the property question.' Wark's manifesto is beautifully written in spare, elegant prose of rare economy. The book is structured in short numbered theses, borrowing from Guy Debord's 'Society of the Spectacle', and these are often built around irresistible aphorisms - 'education is slavery', 'invention is the mother of necessity', 'information wants to be free but is everywhere in chains.' Other versions of this text exist online, but this is the one to get: the notes alone (exclusive to this version) are stimulating reading, and the book is handsomely designed. It is a work which deserves to be widely read, used, discussed, taught, argued with - and hacked.