💾 Archived View for carcosa.net › journal › 20210115-hacker-class-consciousness.gmi captured on 2023-09-28 at 16:00:32. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Hacker class consciousness?

I'm currently reading "Capital Is Dead: Is this something worse?" by McKenzie Wark. It's kind of slow going, because it's written in an academic critical theory style, but it's full of good insights. The main point is that there's a new class that's capable of extracting surplus value from other classes by controlling the "vectors" of information – intellectual property, platforms, and brands. They extract surplus value as information from everyone, but the class they're most dependent on extracting the surplus value from is *hackers*, who produce the novel flows of information that *vectorialists* can take ownership of. The term "hacker class" is IMO not a great choice, because it includes artists, writers, musicians, and all other creators of novelty (i.e. "content"), but it ties back into her earlier work.

And I'm here wondering what hacker class consciousness looks like. We know what worker class consciousness looks like – industrial unionism, which in the US has basically been killed by propaganda/ideology, law, and corrupt management unions. How do we make "content creators" aware of their common interests and common enemy? And does this mean that hackers are now the historical subject, rather than all workers?

I'm sure she'll get to a discussion of these things, but I'm impatient.