From: "McKenzie Wark" <mckenziewark at hotmail.com> Subject: <nettime> a hacker manifesto 001-006 Date: Fri, 24 Sep 2004 22:26:17 -0400
-- from the uncorrected page proofs. For the book, see: http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/WARHAC.html
A Hacker Manifesto 001-006 McKenzie Wark
001. A double spooks the world, the double of abstraction. The fortunes of states and armies, companies and communities depend on it. All contending classes, be they ruling or ruled, revere it -- yet fear it. Ours is a world that ventures blindly into the new with its fingers crossed.
002. All classes fear this relentless abstraction of the world, on which their fortunes yet depend. All classes but one: the hacker class. We are the hackers of abstraction. We produce new concepts, new perceptions, new sensations, hacked out of raw data. Whatever code we hack, be it programming language, poetic language, math or music, curves or colourings, we are the abstracters of new worlds. Whether we come to represent ourselves as researchers or authors, artists or biologists, chemists or musicians, philosophers or programmers, each of these subjectivities is but a fragment of a class still becoming, bit by bit, aware of itself as such.
003. And yet we don't quite know who we are. That is why this text seeks to make manifest our origins, our purpose and our interests. A hacker manifesto: Not the only manifesto, as it is in the nature of the hacker to differ from others, to differ even from oneself, over time. To hack is to differ. A hacker manifesto cannot claim to represent what refuses representation.
004. Hackers 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 produced, there are hackers hacking the new out of the old. Hackers create these new worlds, yet we do not possess them. That which we create is mortgaged to others, and to the interests of others, to states and corporations who monopolise the means for making worlds we alone discover. We do not own what we produce -- it owns us.
005. Hackers use their knowledge and their wits to maintain their autonomy. Some take the money and run. (But one cannot run far.) We must live with our compromises. (Some refuse to compromise.) We live as best we can. All too often those of us who take one of these paths resent those who take the other. One lot resents the prosperity it lacks, the other resents the liberty it lacks to hack away at the world freely. What eludes the hacker class is a more abstract expression of our interests as a class, and of how this interest may meet those of others in the world.
006. Hackers are not joiners. We're not often willing to submerge our singularity in any collective. What the times call for is a collective hack that realises a class interest based on an alignment of differences rather than a coercive unity. Hackers are a class, but an abstract class. A class that makes abstractions, and a class made abstract. To abstract hackers as a class is to abstract the very concept of class itself. The slogan of the hacker class is not the workers of the world united, but the workings of the world untied.