[Cddc] The Hacker Manifesto

[Colleen McEwen]

Announcing a new book from Harvard University Press...

The Hacker Manifesto
by McKenzie Wark

"[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

"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

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/reviews/WARHAC_R.html

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.

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/WARHAC.html

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.

October 2004   Cloth   208 pages   ISBN 0-674-01543-6    $21.95
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