Hacker Baud

[...] In the underdeveloped world arises envy and resentment; in the overdeveloped world, fear and bigotry. Even when the productive classes become aware of the vectoral dimension to their exploitation, they represent their interests purely in local or national terms, and become deaf to the contradictions between different local interests. The struggle for an abstract expression of the interests of the global producing classes finds itself beset by thickets of local and particular interest that refuse reconciliation, but which class awareness on a global scale is not abstract and multiple enough to embrace. 

The hacker class always finds its interest in the free productivity of information subordinated to the interests of the vectoral class in extracting a surplus from the hack and from furthering only those hacks that generate a surplus. But it also finds that the vectoral class recruits more and more subjects into this world in which they appear to themselves as nothing more than what they lack, thus leading the productive classes into the thicket of particular and local representations, which are more and more the product of nothing but an abstract and universalizing vector. 

As difficult as it may be, the hacker class can commit itself to the free alliance of productive classes everywhere, and can make its modest contribution to overcoming the local and contingent interests that pit the productive classes everywhere against themselves. This contribution may be technical or cultural, objective or subjective, but it can everywhere take the form of hacking out the virtuality that a free global abstraction would express as an alternative to the commodified subjection that both local and global domination by private property represents. 

Commodity production is in transition from the domination of capital as property to the domination of information as property. The theory of the transition to a world beyond commodity production has yet to make this same transition. This body of theory has been through two phases, which correspond to two kinds of error. In the first phase, when theory was in the hands of the workers' movement, it fetishized the economic infrastructure of the social formation. In the second phase, when theory was in the hands of the academic radicals, it fetishized the superstructures of culture and ideology Theory of the first kind reduces the superstructure to being a reflection of the economy; theory of the second kind awards the superstructure a relative autonomy. Neither grasps the fundamental changes in commodity production that render obsolete this understanding of the social formation or the new kinds of class struggle now emerging under the sign of the domination of information as property Property is a concept that occupies a liminal, undecidable place between economy and culture. Our task today is to grasp the historical development of commodity production from the point of view of property, fulcrum on which not only infrastructure and superstructure hinge, but also the class struggle.  

Through the renewal of history, as hacker history; emerges a theory of the vector as class theory This theory offers at one and the same time an abstraction through which the vector as a force of abstraction at work in the world can be grasped, as well as a critical awareness of the chasm between the virtual powers of the vector and its actual limitations under the reign of the vectoral class. From this emergent perspective, past attempts to change the world appear as mere interpretations. Present interpretations, even those that claim filiations to the historical tradition, appear as captives of the commodification of information under the reign of the vectoral class. 

In this tiresome age, when even the air melts into airwaves, where all that is profane is packaged as if it were profundity; the possibility yet emerges to hack into mere appearances and make off with them. There are other worlds and they are this one. 

A Hacker Manifesto (2004) - McKenzie Wark

 

The following was written shortly after my arrest...

 \/\The Conscience of a Hacker/\/

 by

 +++The Mentor+++

      Another one got caught today, it's all over the papers. "Teenager arrested in computer crime scandal", "Hacker arrested after bank tampering"...

        Damn Kids. They're all alike.

     But did you, in your three-piece psychology and 1950's technobrain, ever take a look behind the eyes of a hacker? Did you ever wonder what made him tick, what forces shaped him, what may have molded him?

        I am a hacker, enter my world...

      Mine is a world that begins with school... I'm smarter than most of the other kids, this crap they teach us bores me...

       Damn underachiever.  They're all alike.

       I'm in junior high or high school. I've listened to the teacher explain for the fifteenth time how to reduce a fraction. I understand it. "No, Mrs. Smith, I didn't show my work. I did it in my head..."

       Damn kid. Probably copied it. They're all alike.

      I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait a second, this is cool. It does what I want it to do. If it makes a mistake, it's because I screwed up. Not because it doesn't like me...

                Or feels threatened by me...

                Or thinks I'm a smart ass...

                Or doesn't like teaching and shouldn't be here...

       Damn kid. All he does is play games. They're all alike.

      And then it happened... A door opened to a world... Rushing through the phone line like heroin through an addict's veins, an electronic pulse is sent out, a refuge from the day to day incompetencies is sought... A board is found.

      "This is it... This is where I belong..."

     I know everyone here... Even if I've never met them, never talked to them, may never hear from them again... I know you all...

      Damn kid. Tying up the phone line again. They're all alike...

     You bet your ass we're all alike... We've been spoon fed baby food at school when we hungered for steak... The bits of meat that you did let slip through were pre-chewed and tasteless. We've been dominated by sadists, or ignored by the apathetic. The few that had something to teach found us willing pupils, but those few are like drops of water in the desert.

      This is our world now... The world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering  gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore... And you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without  religious bias... And you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, you cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals.

      Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for.

      I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto. You may stop this individual, but you can't stop us all... after all, We're all alike.

 January 8, 1986

(Loyd Blankenship)