"in association with nettime.org"
> CYBERSALON @ THE DANA CENTRE > DIGITAL WORK & CREATIVE MAPPING > The Science Museum's Dana Centre, 165 Queen's Gate, South Kensington, > London SW7 5HE > Date: March 07 - to be announced > Cost: Cost and booking details to be announced > Nearest tubes: South Kensington/Gloucester Road > > A one-day conference in association with nettime.org > which explores the geographical and social structures of workers in > the Creative Industries and particularly the New Media sector # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
all that is solid melts into airwaves
All That is Solid Melts into Airwaves Theory and Event Vol. 9 No. 2 2006 Deborah Halbert http://muse.jhu.edu.libproxy.newschool.edu/journ als/tae/v009/9.2halbert.html#top McKenzie Wark. A Hacker Manifesto. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004. pp.196. $21.95 (hc). ISBN 0674015436. 1 Wark begins his reformat of The Communist Manifesto by suggesting that "a double spooks the world, the double of abstraction (1)." Unlike the specter of communism, which powerful forces aligned against to destroy, the double of abstraction is both feared and revered by those in charge (1). It is the hacker, a class that isn't a class so much as an abstraction (6), at the heart of the conflict. However, the class conflict involving the hacker will not be the product of collective action as understood in the past. Instead, mass politics will become a "politics of multiplicity" where "all the productive classes can express their virtuality." (43) If this sounds a bit, well, abstract, that is because A Hacker Manifesto reads like a Baudrillardian simulation of Marx. Wark's manifesto, a manifesto of abstraction, virtuality, and third nature, melts into the (virtual) air. 1 The Hacker Manifesto is a trip intellectually and conceptually. The book is organized by paragraph, not by page number and is fractal in its organization non-linear often spiraling back to points made earlier where meaning can be derived not only from the text as a whole, but from each paragraph and each sentence. This is a much-needed book that recognizes the importance of intellectual property to contemporary capitalism and situates it within the ongoing tension created by the productive class of the information age (the hacker class) and the controlling class (the vectoral class). 1 A Hacker Manifesto enlighteningly describes class struggle in the information age more than it states principles; the primary focus is to make manifest the dimensions of class struggle in the globalized information age. Wark takes the concept of the hacker far beyond computer programming and applies it (writ large) to any individual working in the economy of information and creating under the rubric of modern capitalism. The hacker class is the new productive class (36). 1 It is difficult to know what course of action would work for a 'class' that coalesces under the banner of "workers of the world untied (6)," or what a manifesto would say to this 'class.' Wark doesn't seem concerned with providing answers. "Even this manifesto, which invokes a collective name, does so without claiming or seeking authorization, and offers for agreement only the gift of its own possibility (213)." Wark's gift is to hack the present and open the possibilities for a future where domination and exploitation can be resisted, not, necessarily, to show us the way to that future. 1 While the book is a trip, this review only offers a dull guide I can tell the story of the book, outline its argument and provide an assessment; however, I cannot capture the essence and poetry of the writing. The book does not set out to make a linear point but instead introduces you to a new world a world whirling with the concepts necessary to find meaning in the flows that make up the current global political economy. While Marxists may criticize Wark for postmodernizing Marx and postmodernists may criticize him for recovering categories such as class, and while it is not entirely clear that walking the line between the two always works, reading this book is a trip worth taking, even if you don't like the destination. 1 Here is at least part of the story told by Wark: History is a series of class struggles with each struggle focusing on an increasingly abstract form of property. The most recent permutation of the struggle over property is between the hacker and the vectoral class who seeks to control flows and vectors of information (100110). With each further abstraction of property from land to information ownership needs to rely even more deeply upon the law to enforce what is clearly a 'legal fiction (108).' When the vectoral class controls the economy, culture itself is colonized and sold back to the workers as a commodity (110). Intellectual property becomes the key to a vectoral economy and hackers play a crucial role in the construction of intellectual property and in the resistance to the rapidly growing control of the vecotoral class (197). 1 To the hacker, "information wants to be free but is everywhere in chains (126)." Through previous stages of ownership, information remained socialized as a commons because past controlling classes focused upon monopolizing land and industry. As information becomes a commodity, what was once a commons is forcibly privatized (117). As information becomes intellectual property, the vectoral class creates the chains that further enslave humanity (132). 1 The hacker
Racism and Sexism at Citizendium
A month or two ago I was invited to join in building a new repository of knowledge on the Internet, a spin-off from Wikipedia called Citizendium. The chief attraction of Citizendium (also called CZ) was that articles would be authored by laypersons and experts alike, but editorially approved by experts -- thus creating an environment of authority and reliability that Wikipedia, with its lack of quality control, could not match. I strongly support public intellectual work and I am all for making reliable information and analysis widely available to all who seek it. I joined CZ with high hopes, and with the goal of recruiting others to participate in a project I felt could be very useful and rewarding. My initial contributions impressed Larry Sanger enough that he invited me to join the Executive Board of Citizendium, and I accepted. I wrote to colleagues and friends about CZ and invited them to participate -- and especially appealed to African Americanist and feminist scholars, since that is my own area of expertise. I asked, in my announcements, what Wikipedia might have looked like if there were significant participation from black or women scholars from its inception. I assumed -- wrongly -- that Ethnic studies and Women's studies scholars would be welcome at CZ. I was gravely disappointed. We are not welcome, and our disciplines are not welcome. We may participate only if we are willing to subsume our work under the headings of other, "more traditional" disciplines. CZ as conceived of and enforced by Sanger is a strongly conservative endeavor, and adamantly opposed to progressive scholarship. I am withdrawing from Citizendium because of the racist and sexist policy put in place by Larry Sanger, who claims that the disciplines of Ethnic Studies and Gender Studies do not belong in the list of top level categories in Citizendium, or as individual categories at all. Sanger has unilaterally decided that all race and gender topics should be split up under traditional disciplinary headings, so that there will be, for example, a sub-group of "African American Literature," and "African American History," but no category -- at any level -- in African American studies, and he embraces the same tactic of fragmenting other Ethnic Studies and Gender Studies. The fact that his broad strokes of exclusion primarily effect women and minority scholars does not seem to matter to him. Here is what Sanger has to say about gender and race studies: "I take the view that most of these university departments are inherently cross-disciplinary and--here I know I am treading on thin ice and saying what few dare to say--highly politicized themselves. Well, I do not want to make CZ "politically correct," i.e., appealing especially to one (largely American/Western/Left) ideology. I really do want to make it neutral, and that means **not** creating special groups for ideologically-motivated groups." [posted November 16, 2006 10:29:59 AM MST to the Citizendium Editors listserv] The notion that traditional disciplines are race and gender "neutral" is at the heart of Sanger's rationalization for exclusion. The credibility of this argument has been (for anyone knowledgeable in the those areas) thoroughly destroyed over the last thirty or forty years, as accumulated quantitative and qualitative evidence has shown that despite many white male scholars' protestations to the contrary, power and authority have remained firmly gripped in their hands. The claim that clearly biased disciplines are "neutral" is a plain and simple power play, and an excuse to perpetuate the patterns of exclusion that have been in place for hundreds of years. The tactic of fragmenting ethnic and gender studies into small, minority sub- categories under the control of larger white and male dominated groups is also well understood, both by the white men who employ the tactic to their advantage and by the minorities and women who are disadvantaged by it. The idea that Gender and Ethnic Studies are "political" and enforce "political correctness," while somehow traditional disciplines are above politics and do not enforce an inequitable Status Quo would be laughable if it were not so pernicious and injurious to the people who are oppressed by sexism and racism -- women and minorities. Once again, this is a case of a white male scholar with no experience in either race or gender studies legislating, with broad strokes, how those disciplines will be represented in an academic endeavor he hopes will be of major importance. He does it with no regard for the current state of scholarship in those fields, or the expertise of their practitioners -- an irony in an academic endeavor that claims to rely on expertise for its authority. Expertise apparently only counts if it agrees with the naive opinions of the untutored white man in c
