The document is a summary of McKenzie Wark's "A Hacker Manifesto" which argues that intellectual property laws have created a new class system and form of class conflict. It discusses how Wark uses Marxist ideas of class conflict to analyze the current information age and the power of the "Vectoralist class" that controls information. The "Hacker class" produces knowledge but the Vectoralists profit from controlling information. The document examines how each era produces a new class of knowledge producers from farmers to workers to hackers, but power imbalances around property persist and class conflict continues.

1. A Hacker Manifesto
McKenzie Wark
Presented by Emily White

2. A Hacker Manifesto
 A Hacker Manifesto is centred
primarily around this notion of
‘intellectual property’ and has since
become a pinnacle question within
the information age.
 World of “abstraction” – arises due to
our restricted world dictated by
increasingly strong demands of drug
and media corporations for the
protection of their trademarks,
copyrights and patents.
 Intellectual property supersedes
legal/technical matters initiates the
catalyst for a whole new era of class
conflict.
 New class relation that controls power
of information and sparks the creation
of a new class The Hacker class.

3. A Hacker Manifesto
 Marxist Influence
- Wark manipulates Marx’s original concept of class conflict to relate
to our current age if digitisation and intellectual property.
- Primary focus ownership of property, this gives them power,
power that “depends on forms of abstraction that they may
buy and own but not produce.”
 Wark’s new concept
- “Vectoralist Class” Control the vectors along which
“and like
information is abstracted. They take hold of information and
land or capital, becomes a form of property.”
 There will always be conflicting needs between those who produce
value and those who make profit from it for “the end and aim of
capitalist production” is “to exploit labour power to the
greatest possible extent.”

4. A Hacker Manifesto
 The Hacker derived from the evolution of the producing
classes.
- Farmer within the agricultural period
- Worker within the industrial Revolution
- Hacker within the information age
 Individuals who hack into to knowledge production networks and
then liberate that knowledge from an economy of scarcity for
“information wants to be free but is everywhere in chians.”
 Ascertains the rational for revolutionary change for “to hack is
to differ,” to produce “new perceptions, 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 abstractors of two
worlds.”

5. A Hacker Manifesto
 Wark illustrates the continuation of reoccurring power
relations across time.
- Property Hack divides society into feudal lord and
farmer.
- Wage Hack creates capitalist and worker.
- Continuation of class conflict is stimulated when information
formulates the dialectic of Vectoralist and Hacker which only
exacerbates the perpetuating problem involving power and
property.

6. A Hacker Manifesto
 Reveals elitists have always sought
to monopolise property
Information is no exception.
- Throughout history, those in
authoritative positions successfully
used the information and
communication of their time as
methods of control.
- Reinforces the inevitable effects
of media developments at the dawn
of the information age.

7. A Hacker Manifesto
 We live in a world that is abundant with knowledge yet we are
“The privileged realm of
confined to live in scarcity
electronic space controls the physical logistics of
manufacture… [and] requires electronic consent and
direction.” Example copyrights, trademarks or patents.
 Our society based on private property relations and class
conflict, scarcity is apart of our culture.
 Dominant property form within contemporary context is
intellectual property concept of scarcity is artificial.
 The property form has become so abstract that its ambition is to
become the very thing that escapes it – scarcity.

8. A Hacker Manifesto
 Wark’s formulation provides a fascinating starting point for
calculating the transformation of transnational capital
within the growing arena of intellectual property.
- Do you think the hacker class are in an exploitative
position in regards to the traditional proletariat, or do they
have a more dominant stance in society?