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-[[File:Hacker manifesto.jpg|thumbnail|right]]
-== <small>'''Text'''</small> ==
-'''Manifestation'''
-. There is a double spooking the world, the double of abstraction. The fortunes of states and
-armies, companies and communities depend on it. All contending classes - the landlords and
-farmers, the workers and capitalists - revere yet fear the relentless abstraction of the world on
-which their fortunes yet depend. All the classes but one. The hacker class.
-. Whatever code we hack, be it programming language, poetic language, math or music,
-curves or colourings, we create the possibility of new things entering the world. Not always
-great things, or even good things, but new things. In art, in science, in philosophy and culture,
-in any production of knowledge where data can be gathered, where information can be
-extracted from it, and where in that information new possibilities for the world are produced,
-there are hackers hacking the new out of the old. While hackers create these new worlds, we do
-not possess them. That which we create is mortgaged to others, and to the interests of others,
-to states and corporations who control the means for making worlds we alone discover. We do
-not own what we produce - it owns us.
-. And yet we don't quite know who we are. While we recognise our distinctive existence as a
-group, as programmers, as artists or writers or scientists or musicians, we rarely see these
-ways of representing ourselves as mere fragments of a class experience that is still struggling
-to express itself as itself, as expressions of the process of producing abstraction in the world.
-Geeks and freaks become what they are negatively, through their exclusion by others. Hackers
-are a class, but an abstract class, a class as yet to hack itself into manifest existence as itself.
-'''Abstraction'''
-. Abstraction may be discovered or produced, may be material or immaterial, but abstraction
-is what every hack produces and affirms. To abstract is to construct a plane upon which
-otherwise different and unrelated matters may be brought into many possible relations. It is
-through the abstract that the virtual is identified, produced and released. The virtual is not
-just the potential latent in matters, it is the potential of potential. To hack is to produce or
-apply the abstract to information and express the possibility of new worlds.
-. All abstractions are abstractions of nature. To abstract is to express the virtuality of nature,
-to make known some instance of its manifold possibilities, to actualise a relation out of infinite
-relationality. Abstractions release the potential of physical matter. And yet abstraction relies on
-something that has an independent existence to physical matter -- information. Information is
-no less real than physical matter, and is dependent on it for its existence. Since information
-cannot exist in a pure, immaterial form, neither can the hacker class. Of necessity it must deal
-with a ruling class that owns the material means of extracting or distributing information, or
-with a producing class that extracts and distributes. The class interest of hackers lies in freeing
-information from its material constraints.
-. As the abstraction of private property was extended to information, it produced the hacker
-class as a class. Hackers must sell their capacity for abstraction to a class that owns the means
-of production, the vectoralist class - the emergent ruling class of our time. The vectorialist class
-is waging an intensive struggle to dispossess hackers of their intellectual property. Patents and
-copyrights all end up in the hands, not of their creators, but of the vectoralist class that owns
-the means of realising the value of these abstractions. The vectoralist class struggles to
-monopolise abstraction. Hackers find themselves dispossessed both individually, and as a class.
-Hackers come piecemeal to struggle against the particular forms in which abstraction is
-commodified and made into the private property of the vectoralist class. Hackers come to
-struggle collectively against the usurious charges the vectoralists extort for access to the
-information that hackers collectively produce, but that vectoralists collectively come to own.
-Hackers come as a class to recognise their class interest is best expressed through the
-struggle to free the production of abstraction not just from the particular fetters of this or that
-form of property, but to abstract the form of property itself.
-. What makes our times different is that what now appears on the horizon is the possibility of
-a society finally set free from necessity, both real and imagined, by an explosion in abstract
-innovations. Abstraction with the potential once and for all to break the shackles holding
-hacking fast to outdated and regressive class interests. The time is past due when hackers
-must come together with all of the producing classes of the world - to liberate productive and
-inventive resources from the myth of scarcity. "The world already possesses the dream of a
-time whose consciousness it must now possess in order to actually live it."
-'''Production'''
-. Production produces all things, and all producers of things. Production produces not only
-the object of the production process, but also the producer as subject. Hacking is the
-production of production. The hack produces a production of a new kind, which has as its
-result a singular and unique product, and a singular and unique producer. Every hacker is at
-one and the same time producer and product of the hack, and emerges in its singularity as the
-memory of the hack as process.
-. Production takes place on the basis of a prior hack which gives to production its formal,
-social, repeatable and reproducible form. Every production is a hack formalised and repeated on
-the basis of its representation. To produce is to repeat; to hack, to differentiate.
-. The hack produces both a useful and a useless surplus, although the usefulness of any
-surplus is socially and historically determined. The useful surplus goes into expanding the
-realm of freedom wrested from necessity. The useless surplus is the surplus of freedom itself,
-the margin of free production unconstrained by production for necessity.
-. The production of a surplus creates the possibility of the expansion of freedom from
-necessity. But in class society, the production of a surplus also creates new necessities. Class
-domination takes the form of the capture of the productive potential of society and its
-harnessing to the production, not of liberty, but of class domination itself. The ruling class
-subordinates the hack to the production of forms of production that may be harnessed to the
-enhancement of class power, and the suppression or marginalisation of other forms of hacking.
-What the producing classes - farmers, workers and hackers - have in common is an interest in
-freeing production from its subordination to ruling classes who turn production into the
-production of new necessities, who wrest slavery from surplus. The elements of a free
-productivity exist already in an atomised form, in the productive classes. What remains is the
-release of its virtuality.
-'''Class'''
-. The class struggle, in its endless setbacks, reversals and compromises returns again and
-again to the unanswered question - property - and the contending classes return again and
-again with new answers. The working class questioned the necessity of private property, and
-the communist party arose, claiming to answer the desires of the working class. The answer,
-expressed in the Communist Manifesto was to "centralise all instruments of production in the
-hands of the state." But making the state the monopolist of property has only produced a new
-ruling class, and a new and more brutal class struggle. But perhaps this was not the final
-answer, and the course of the class struggle is not yet over. Perhaps there is another class that
-can pose the property question in a new way - and offer new answers to breaking the monopoly
-of the ruling classes on property.
-. There is a class dynamic driving each stage of the development of the vectoral world in
-which we now find ourselves. The pastoralist class disperse the great mass of peasants who
-traditionally worked the land under the thumb of feudal landlords. The pastoralists supplant
-the feudal landlords, releasing the productivity of the land which they claim as their private
-property. As new forms of abstraction make it possible to produce a surplus from the land with
-fewer and fewer farmers, pastoralists turn them off their land, depriving them of their living.
-Dispossessed farmers seek work and a new home in cities. Here farmers become workers, as
-capital puts them to work in its factories. Capital as property gives rise to a class of capitalists
-who own the means of production, and a class of workers, dispossessed of it - and by it.
-Dispossessed farmers become workers, only to be dispossessed again. Having lost their land,
-they lose in turn their culture. Capital produces in its factories not just the necessities of
-existence, but a way of life it expects its workers to consume. Commodified life dispossess the
-worker of the information traditionally passed on outside the realm of private property as
-culture, as the gift of one generation to the next, and replaces it with information in
-commodified form.
-. Information, like land or capital, becomes a form of property monopolised by a class of
-vectoralists, so named because they control the vectors along which information is abstracted,
-just as capitalists control the material means with which goods are produced, and pastoralists
-the land with which food is produced. Information circulated within working class culture as a
-social property belonging to all. But when information in turn becomes a form of private
-property, workers are dispossessed of it, and must buy their own culture back from its owners,
-the vectoralist class. The whole of time, time itself, becomes a commodified experience.
-. Vectoralists try to break capital's monopoly on the production process, and subordinate the
-production of goods to the circulation of information. The leading corporations divest
-themselves of their productive capacity, as this is no longer a source of power. Their power lies
-in monopolising intellectual property - patents and brands - and the means of reproducing
-their value - the vectors of communication. The privatisation of information becomes the
-dominant, rather than a subsidiary, aspect of commodified life. As private property advances
-from land to capital to information, property itself becomes more abstract. As capital frees land
-from its spatial fixity, information as property frees capital from its fixity in a particular object.
-. The hacker class, producer of new abstractions, becomes more important to each
-successive ruling class, as each depends more and more on information as a resource. The
-hacker class arises out of the transformation of information into property, in the form of
-intellectual property, including patents, trademarks, copyright and the moral right of authors.
-The hacker class is the class with the capacity to create not only new kinds of object and
-subject in the world, not only new kinds of property form in which they may be represented,
-but new kinds of relation beyond the property form. The formation of the hacker class as a
-class comes at just this moment when freedom from necessity and from class domination
-appears on the horizon as a possibility.
-'''Property'''
-. Property constitutes an abstract plane upon which all things may be things with one
-quality in common, the quality of property. Land is the primary form of property. Pastoralists
-acquire land as private property through the forced dispossession of peasants who once shared
-a portion of it in a form of public ownership. Capital is the secondary form of property, the
-privatisation of productive assets in the form of tools, machines and working materials. Capital,
-unlike land, is not in fixed supply or disposition. It can be made and remade, moved,
-aggregated and dispersed. An infinitely greater degree of potential can be released from the
-world as a productive resource once the abstract plane of property includes both land and
-capital - such is capital's 'advance'.
-. The capitalist class recognises the value of the hack in the abstract, whereas the
-pastoralists were slow to appreciate the productivity that can flow from the application of
-abstraction to the production process. Under the influence of capital, the state sanctions forms
-of intellectual property, such as patents and copyrights, that secure an independent existence
-for hackers as a class, and a flow of innovations in culture as well as science from which
-development issues. Information, once it becomes a form of property, develops beyond a mere
-support for capital - it becomes the basis of a form of accumulation in its own right.
-. Hackers must calculate their interests not as owners, but as producers, for this is what
-distinguishes them from the vectoralist class. Hackers do not merely own, and profit by owning
-information. They produce new information, and as producers need access to it free from the
-absolute domination of the commodity form. Hacking as a pure, free experimental activity must
-be free from any constraint that is not self imposed. Only out of its liberty will it produce the
-means of producing a surplus of liberty and liberty as a surplus.
-. Private property arose in opposition not only to feudal property, but also to traditional forms
-of the gift economy, which were a fetter to the increased productivity of the commodity
-economy. Qualitative, gift exchange was superseded by quantified, monetised exchange. Money
-is the medium through which land, capital, information and labour all confront each other as
-abstract entities, reduced to an abstract plane of measurement. The gift becomes a marginal
-form of property, everywhere invaded by the commodity, and turned towards mere
-consumption. The gift is marginal, but nevertheless plays a vital role in cementing reciprocal
-and communal relations among people who otherwise can only confront each other as buyer
-and sellers of commodities. As vectoral production develops, the means appear for the renewal
-of the gift economy. Everywhere that the vector reaches, it brings into the orbit of the
-commodity. But everywhere the vector reaches, it also brings with it the possibility of the gift
-relation.
-. The hacker class has a close affinity with the gift economy. The hacker struggles to
-produce a subjectivity that is qualitative and singular, in part through the act of the hack itself.
-The gift, as a qualitative exchange between singular parties allows each party to be recognised
-as a singular producer, as a subject of production, rather than as a commodified and quantified
-object. The gift expresses in a social and collective way the subjectivity of the production of
-production, whereas commodified property represents the producer as an object, a quantifiable
-commodity like any other, of relative value only. The gift of information need not give rise to
-conflict over information as property, for information need not suffer the artifice of scarcity once
-freed from commodification.
-. The vectoralist class contributed, unwittingly, to the development of the vectoral space
-within which the gift as property could return, but quickly recognised its error. As the vectoral
-economy develops, less and less of it takes the form of a social space of open and free gift
-exchange, and more and more of it takes the form of commodified production for private sale.
-The vectoralist class can grudgingly accommodate some margin of socialised information, as
-the price it pays in a democracy for the furtherance of its main interests. But the vectoralist
-class quite rightly sees in the gift a challenge not just to its profits but to its very existence.
-The gift economy is the virtual proof for the parasitic and superfluous nature of vectoralists as a
-class.
-'''Vector'''
-. In epidemiology, a vector is the particular means by which a given pathogen travels from
-one population to another. Water is a vector for cholera, bodily fluids for HIV. By extension, a
-vector may be any means by which information moves. Telegraph, telephone, television,
-telecommunications: these terms name not just particular vectors, but a general abstract
-capacity that they bring into the world and expand. All are forms of telesthesia, or perception at
-a distance. A given media vector has certain fixed properties of speed, bandwidth, scope and
-scale, but may be deployed anywhere, at least in principle. The uneven development of the
-vector is political and economic, not technical.
-. With the commodification of information comes its vectoralisation. Extracting a surplus
-from information requires technologies capable of transporting information through space, but
-also through time. The archive is a vector through time just as communication is a vector that
-crosses space. The vectoral class comes into its own once it is in possession of powerful
-technologies for vectoralising information. The vectoral class may commodify information
-stocks, flows, or vectors themselves. A stock of information is an archive, a body of information
-maintained through time that has enduring value. A flow of information is the capacity to
-extract information of temporary value out of events and to distribute it widely and quickly. A
-vector is the means of achieving either the temporal distribution of a stock, or the spatial
-distribution of a flow of information. Vectoral power is generally sought through the ownership
-of all three aspects.
-. The vectoral class ascend to the illusion of an instantaneous and global plane of calculation
-and control. But it is not the vectoralist class that comes to hold subjective power over the
-objective world. The vector itself usurps the subjective role, becoming the sole repository of will
-toward a world that can be apprehended only in its commodified form. The reign of the vector
-is one in which any and every thing can be apprehended as a thing. The vector is a power over
-all of the world, but a power that is not evenly distributed. Nothing in the technology of the
-vector determines its possible use. All that is determined by the technology is the form in
-which information is objectified.
-. The vectoral class struggles at every turn to maintain its subjective power over the vector,
-but as it continues to profit by the proliferation of the vector, some capacity over it always
-escapes control. In order to market and profit by the information it peddles over the vector, it
-must in some degree address the vast majority of the producing classes as subjects, rather
-than as objects of commodification. The hacker class seeks the liberation of the vector from the
-reign of the commodity, but not to set it indiscriminately free. Rather, to subject it to collective
-and democratic development. The hacker class can release the virtuality of the vector only in
-principle. It is up to an alliance of all the productive classes to turn that potential to actuality, to
-organise themselves subjectively, and use the available vectors for a collective and subjective
-becoming.
-'''Education'''
-. Education is slavery, it enchains the mind and makes it a resource for class power. When
-the ruling class preaches the necessity of an education it invariably means an education in
-necessity. Education is not the same as knowledge. Nor is it the necessary means to acquire
-knowledge. Education is the organisation of knowledge within the constraints of scarcity.
-Education 'disciplines' knowledge, segregating it into homogenous 'fields', presided over by
-suitably 'qualified' guardians charged with policing the representation of the field. One may
-acquire an education, as if it were a thing, but one becomes knowledgeable, through a process
-of transformation. Knowledge, as such, is only ever partially captured by education, its practice
-always eludes and exceeds it.
-. The pastoralist class has resisted education, other than as indoctrination in obedience.
-When capital required 'hands' to do its dirty work, the bulk of education was devoted to training
-useful hands to tend the machines, and docile bodies who would accept as natural the social
-order in which they found themselves. When capital required brains, both to run its
-increasingly complex operations and to apply themselves to the work of consuming its
-products, more time spent in the prison house of education was required for admission to the
-ranks of the paid working class.
-. The so-called middle class achieve their privileged access to consumption and security
-through education, in which they are obliged to invest a substantial part of their income. But
-most remain workers, even though they work with information rather than cotton or metal.
-They work in factories, but are trained to think of them as offices. They take home wages, but
-are trained to think of it as a salary. They wear a uniform, but are trained to think of it as a suit.
-The only difference is that education has taught them to give different names to the
-instruments of exploitation, and to despise those their own class who name them differently.
-. Where the capitalist class sees education as a means to an end, the vectoralist class sees it
-as an end in itself. It sees opportunities to make education a profitable industry in its own
-right, based on the securing of intellectual property as a form of private property. To the
-vectoralists, education, like culture, is just 'content' for commodification.
-. The hacker class have an ambivalent relationship to education. The hacker class desires
-knowledge, not education. The hacker comes into being though the pure liberty of knowledge in
-and of itself. The hack expresses knowledge in its virtuality, by producing new abstractions that
-do not necessarily fit the disciplinary regime of managing and commodifying education. .
-Hacker knowledge implies, in its practice, a politics of free information, free learning, the gift of
-the result to a network of peers. Hacker knowledge also implies an ethics of knowledge subject
-to the claims of public interest and free from subordination to commodity production. This puts
-the hacker into an antagonistic relationship to the struggle of the capitalist class to make
-education an induction into wage slavery.
-. Only one intellectual conflict has any real bearing on the class issue for hackers: Whose
-property is knowledge? Is it the role of knowledge to authorise subjects through education that
-are recognised only by their function in an economy by manipulating its authorised
-representations as objects? Or is it the function of knowledge to produce the ever different
-phenomena of the hack, in which subjects become other than themselves, and discover the
-objective world to contain potentials other than it appears?
-'''Hacking'''
-. The virtual is the true domain of the hacker. It is from the virtual that the hacker produces
-ever-new expressions of the actual. To the hacker, what is represented as being real is always
-partial, limited, perhaps even false. To the hacker there is always a surplus of possibility
-expressed in what is actual, the surplus of the virtual. This is the inexhaustible domain of what
-is real without being actual, what is not but which may be. To hack is to release the virtual into
-the actual, to express the difference of the real.
-. Through the application of abstraction, the hacker class produces the possibility of
-production, the possibility of making something of and with the world - and of living off the
-surplus produced by the application of abstraction to nature - to any nature. Through the
-production of new forms of abstraction, the hacker class produces the possibility of the future -
-not just 'the' future, but an infinite possible array of futures, the future itself as virtuality.
-. Under the sanction of law, the hack becomes a finite property, and the hacker class
-emerges, as all classes emerge, out of a relation to a property form. Like all forms of property,
-intellectual property enforces a relation of scarcity. It assigns a right to a property to an owner
-at the expense of non-owners, to a class of possessors at the expense of the dispossessed.
-. By its very nature, the act of hacking overcomes the limits property imposes on it. New
-hacks supersede old hacks, and devalues them as property. The hack as new information is
-produced out of already existing information. This gives the hacker class an interest in its free
-availability more than in an exclusive right. The immaterial nature of information means that the
-possession by one of information need not deprive another of it.
-. To the extent that the hack embodies itself in the form of property, it gives the hacker
-class interests quite different from other classes, be they exploiting or exploited classes. The
-interest of the hacker class lies first and foremost in a free circulation of information, this being
-the necessary condition for the renewed statement of the hack. But the hacker class as class
-also has an interest in the representation of the hack as property, as something from which a
-source of income may be derived that gives the hacker some independence from the ruling
-classes.
-. The very nature of the hack gives the hacker a crisis of identity. The hacker searches for a
-representation of what it is to be a hacker in the identities of other classes. Some see
-themselves as vectoralists, trading on the scarcity of their property. Some see themselves as
-workers, but as privileged ones in a hierarchy of wage earners. The hacker class has produces
-itself as itself, but not for itself. It does not (yet) possess a consciousness of its consciousness.
-It is not aware of its own virtuality. It has to distinguish between its competitive interest in the
-hack, and its collective interest in discovering a relation among hackers that expresses an open
-and ongoing future.
-'''Information'''
-. Information wants to be free but is everywhere in chains. Information is the potential of
-potential. When unfettered it releases the latent capacities of all things and people, objects and
-subjects. Information is indeed the very potential for there to be objects and subjects. It is the
-medium in which objects and subjects actually come into existence, and is the medium in
-which their virtuality resides. When information is not free, then the class that owns or controls
-it turns its capacity toward its own interest and away from its own inherent virtuality.
-. Information has nothing to do with communication, or with media. "We do not lack
-communication. On the contrary, we have too much of it. We lack creation. We lack resistance
-to the present." Information is precisely this resistance, this friction. At the urgings of the
-vectoralist class, the state recognises as property any communication, any media product with
-some minimal degree of difference recognisable in commodity exchange. Where communication
-merely requires the repetition of this commodified difference, information is the production of
-the difference of difference.
-. The arrest of the free flow of information means the enslavement of the world to the
-interests of those who profit from information's scarcity, the vectoral class. The enslavement of
-information means the enslavement of its producers to the interests of its owners. It is the
-hacker class that taps the virtuality of information, but it is the vectoralist class that owns and
-controls the means of production of information on an industrial scale. Privatising culture,
-education and communication as commodified content, distorts and deforms its free
-development, and prevents the very concept of its freedom from its own free development.
-While information remains subordinated to ownership, it is not possible for its producers to
-freely calculate their interests, or to discover what the true freedom of information might
-potentially produce in the world.
-. Free information must be free in all its aspects - as a stock, as a flow, and as a vector. The
-stock of information is the raw material out of which history is abstracted. The flow of
-information is the raw material out of which the present is abstracted, a present that forms the
-horizon the abstract line of an historical knowledge crosses, indicating a future in its sights.
-Neither stocks nor flows of information exist without vectors along which they may be
-actualised. The spatial and temporal axes of free information must do more offer a
-representation of things, as a thing apart. They must become the means of coordination of the
-statement of a movement, at once objective and subjective, capable of connecting the
-objective representation of things to the presentation of a subjective action.
-. It is not just information that must be free, but the knowledge of how to use it.
-Information in itself is a mere thing. It requires an active, subjective capacity to become
-productive. Information is free not for the purpose of representing the world perfectly, but for
-expressing its difference from what is, and for expressing the cooperative force that transforms
-what is into what may be. The test of a free society is not the liberty to consume information,
-nor to produce it, nor even to implement its potential in private world of one's choosing. The
-test of a free society is the liberty for the collective transformation of the world through
-abstractions freely chosen and freely actualised.
-'''Representation'''
-. All representation is false. A likeness differs of necessity from what it represents. If it did
-not, it would be what it represents, and thus not a representation. The only truly false
-representation is the belief in the possibility of true representation. Critique is not a solution,
-but the problem itself. Critique is a police action in representation, of service only to the
-maintenance of the value of property through the establishment of its value.
-. The politics of representation is always the politics of the state. The state is nothing but the
-policing of representation's adequacy to the body of what it represents. Even in its most radical
-form, the politics of representation always presupposes an abstract or ideal state that would
-act as guarantor of its chosen representations. It yearns for a state that would recognise this
-oppressed ethnicity, or sexuality, but which is nevertheless still a desire for a state, and a state
-that, in the process, is not challenged as an statement of class interest, but is accepted as the
-judge of representation.
-. And always, what is excluded even from this enlightened, imaginary state, would be those
-who refuse representation, namely, the hacker class as a class. To hack is to refuse
-representation, to make matters express themselves otherwise. To hack is always to produce a
-difference, if only a minute difference, in the production of information. To hack is to trouble the
-object or the subject, by transforming in some way the very process of production by which
-objects and subjects come into being and recognise each other by their representations.
-. The politics of information, of knowledge, advances not through a critical negation of false
-representations but a positive politics of the virtuality of statement. The inexhaustible surplus
-of statement is that aspect of information upon which the class interest of hackers depends.
-Hacking brings into existence the inexhaustible multiplicity of all codes, be they natural or
-social, programmed or poetic. But as it is the act of hacking that composes, at one and the
-same time, the hacker and the hack, hacking recognises no artificial scarcity, no official licence,
-no credentialing police force other than that composed by the gift economy among hackers
-themselves.
-. A politics that embraces its existence as statement, as affirmative difference, not as
-negation can escape the politics of the state. To ignore or plagiarise representation, to refuse to
-give it what it claims as its due, is to begin a politics of statelessness. A politics which refuses
-the state's authority to authorise what is a valued statement and what isn't. A politics which is
-always temporary, always becoming something other than itself. Even useless hacks may come,
-perversely enough, to be valued for the purity of their uselessness. There is nothing that can't
-be valued as a representation. The hack always has to move on.
-. Everywhere dissatisfaction with representations is spreading. Sometimes its a matter of
-breaking a few shop windows, sometimes of breaking a few heads. So-called 'violence' against
-the state, which rarely amounts to more than throwing rocks at its police, is merely the desire
-for the state expressed in its masochistic form. Where some call for a state that recognises
-their representation, others call for a state that beats them to a pulp. Neither is a politics that
-escapes the desire cultivated within the subject by the educational apparatus.
-. Sometimes direct democracy is posited as the alternative. But this merely changes the
-moment of representation - it puts politics in the hands of claimants to an activist
-representation, in place of an electoral one.. Sometimes what is demanded of the politics of
-representation is that it recognise a new subject. Minorities of race, gender, preference
-demand the right to representation. But soon enough they discover the cost. They must now
-police the meaning of this representation, and police the adherence of its members to it. Even
-at its best, in its most abstract form, on its best behaviour, the colour blind, gender neutral,
-multicultural state just hands the value of representation over to the commodity form. While
-this is progress, particularly for those formerly oppressed by the state's failure to recognise
-their identity as legitimate, it stops short at the recognition of expressions of subjectivity that
-seeks to become something other than a representation that the state can recognise and the
-market can value.
-. But there is something else hovering on the horizon of the representable. There is a politics
-of the unrepresentable, a politics of the presentation of the non-negotiable demand. This is
-politics as the refusal of representation itself, not the politics of refusing this or that
-representation. A politics which, while abstract, is not utopian. In its infinite and limitless
-demand, it may even be the best way of extracting concessions precisely through its refusal to
-put a name - or a price - on what revolt desires.
-'''Revolt'''
-. The revolts of 1989 are the signal events of our time. What the revolts of 1989 achieved
-was the overthrow of regimes so impervious to the recognition of the value of the hack that
-they had starved not only their hackers but also their workers and farmers of any increase in
-the surplus. With their cronyism and kleptocracy, their bureaucracy and ideology, their police
-and spies, they starved even their pastoralists and capitalists of innovative transformation and
-growth.
-. The revolts of 1989 overthrew boredom and necessity. At least for a time. They put back
-on the world historical agenda the limitless demand for free statement. At least for a time. They
-revealed the latent destiny of world history to express the pure virtuality of becoming. At least
-for a time, before new states cobbled themselves together and claimed legitimacy as
-representations of what revolt desired. The revolts of 1989 opened the portal to the virtual, but
-the states that regrouped around this opening soon closed it. What the revolts really achieved
-was the making of the world safe for vectoral power.
-. The so-called anti-globalisation protests of the 90s are a ripple caused by the wake of these
-signal events, but a ripple that did not know the current to which it truly belonged. This
-movement of revolt in the overdeveloped world identifies the rising vectoral power as a class
-enemy, but all too often it allowed itself to be captured by the partial and temporary interests of
-local capitalist and pastoralist classes. It was a revolt is in its infancy that has yet to discover
-the connection between its engine of limitless desire and free statement, and the art of making
-tactical demands.
-. The class struggle within nations and the imperial struggle between nations has taken
-shape as two forms of politics. One kind of politics is regressive. It seeks to return to an
-imagined past. It seeks to use national borders as a new wall, a neon screen behind which
-unlikely alliances might protect their existing interests in the name of a glorious past. The other
-form is the progressive politics of movement. The politics of movement seeks to accelerate
-toward an unknown future. It seeks to use international flows of information, trade or activism
-as the eclectic means for struggling for new sources of wealth or liberty that overcomes the
-limitations imposed by national coalitions.
-. Neither of these politics corresponds to the old notion of a left or right, which the
-revolutions of 1989 have definitively overcome. Regressive politics brings together luddite
-impulses from the left with racist and reactionary impulses from the right in an unholy alliance
-against new sources of power. Progressive politics rarely takes the form of an alliance, but
-constitutes two parallel processes locked in a dialogue of mutual suspicion, in which the
-liberalising forces of the right and the social justice and human rights forces of the left both
-seek non-national and transnational solutions to unblocking the system of power which still
-accumulates at the national level.
-. There is a third politics, which stands outside the alliances and compromises of the post-89
-world. Where both progressive and regressive politics are representative politics, which deal
-with aggregate party alliances and interests, this third politics is a stateless politics, which
-seeks escape from politics as such. A politics of the hack, inventing relations outside of
-representation.
-. Expressive politics is a struggle against commodity property itself. Expressive politics is not
-the struggle to collectivise property, for that is still a form of property. Expressive politics is the
-struggle to free what can be free from both versions of the commodity form - its totalising
-market form, and its bureaucratic state form. What may be free from the commodity form
-altogether is not land, not capital, but information. All other forms of property are exclusive.
-The ownership by one excludes, by definition, the ownership by another. But information as
-property may be shared without diminishing anything but its scarcity. Information is that
-which can escape the commodity form.
-. Politics can become expressive only when it is a politics of freeing the virtuality of
-information. In liberating information from its objectification as a commodity, it liberates also
-the subjective force of statement. Subject and object meet each other outside of their mere
-lack of each other, by their desire merely for each other. Expressive politics does not seek to
-overthrow the existing society, or to reform its larger structures, or to preserve its structure so
-as to maintain an existing coalition of interests. It seeks to permeate existing states with a new
-state of existence, spreading the seeds of an alternative practice of everyday life.
-'''Version 4.0 edited by Joanne Richardson for subsol.'''
-== <small>'''File'''</small> ==
-[[File:HK -= -Hacker Kulture- =- Manifest-H -= -Hacker Manifesto 2.0.pdf|thumbnail]]
-[[File:A Hacker Manifesto.pdf|thumbnail]]
-[[File:Wark A-Hacker-Manifesto 4.0.pdf|thumbnail]]
-[[File:A hacker manifesto 5.1 mckenziewark.pdf|thumbnail]]
-== <small>'''Links'''</small> ==
-'''URL:''' http://virus.meetopia.net/pdf-ps_db/Wark_A-Hacker-Manifesto.pdf (4.0), http://cmsw.mit.edu/mit2/Abstracts/mckenziewark.pdf (5.1), http://www.dvara.net/HK/wark2.asp (2.0)
-'''Wayback Machine:''' https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://virus.meetopia.net/pdf-ps_db/Wark_A-Hacker-Manifesto.pdf (4.0) , https://archive.org/details/pdfy-RtCf3CYEbjKrXgFe (2004), https://web.archive.org/web/20170419201012/http://cmsw.mit.edu/mit2/Abstracts/mckenziewark.pdf (5.1), https://web.archive.org/web/20170419201058/http://www.dvara.net/HK/wark2.asp (2.0)
-[[Category: Manifestos]]
-[[Category: McKenzie Wark]]
-[[Category: USA]]
-[[Category: English]]
-[[Category: 2004]]

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