The Weaver Reads reviewed A Hacker Manifesto by McKenzie Wark
Goodreads Review of A Hacker Manifesto
2 stars
This really didn’t do it for me. It’s easy to get lost here, and there’s a lack of clarity throughout. I added a star, however, because I think Ward’s tripartite division of class relations makes a lot of sense. Moreover, I was pleased to see that she pushed back a bit against Marx’s determinism. Rather than successive stages of history, we get a marble cake with different property relations.
The three relations are (1) the pastoralist/farmer division with land as property, (2) the capitalist/proletariat division with capital as property, and (3) the vectoralist/hacker division with intellectual property as the point contention.
Marxist political economy tends to break when applied to the information/communication sphere, and I see here a way that Marxist political activism could still be upheld (even if I still cannot for the life of me understand what happens to IP when it becomes a commodity—if it can’t be …
This really didn’t do it for me. It’s easy to get lost here, and there’s a lack of clarity throughout. I added a star, however, because I think Ward’s tripartite division of class relations makes a lot of sense. Moreover, I was pleased to see that she pushed back a bit against Marx’s determinism. Rather than successive stages of history, we get a marble cake with different property relations.
The three relations are (1) the pastoralist/farmer division with land as property, (2) the capitalist/proletariat division with capital as property, and (3) the vectoralist/hacker division with intellectual property as the point contention.
Marxist political economy tends to break when applied to the information/communication sphere, and I see here a way that Marxist political activism could still be upheld (even if I still cannot for the life of me understand what happens to IP when it becomes a commodity—if it can’t be replicated a trillion times, the relative capital invested into it drops to zero.
Still, I get this was kind of a starting point. Or, maybe not. I don’t feel like my understanding advanced enough to have made this (albeit short) text worthwhile.
