mckenzie wark
intro’d to McKenzie here (as part of twitter convo about this post on gentrification of hacker culture – http://aeon.co/magazine/technology/how-yuppies-hacked-the-original-hacker-ethos/ ):
a hacker manifesto:
http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors0/warktext.html
manifestation (1-3)
abstraction (4-7)
04. 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.
a nother way – social fiction ness
repeat: To abstract is to construct a plane upon which otherwise different and unrelated matters may be brought into many possible relations.
live as if already free ness – leap frog to us..
05. 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.
class?
- a set or category of things having some property or attribute in common and differentiated from others by kind, type, or quality.
- the system of ordering a society in which people are divided into sets based on perceived social or economic status.
we keep modeling that it’s hard to have 1 without 2.. labels et al
repeats:
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..
The class interest of hackers lies in freeing information from its material constraints.
from its representation.. which isn’t it and always changing
06. 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.
why call it property.. would a hacker call it property..? is that not perpetuating the situation.. ie: classes, lines, borders,..
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.
repeats:
the vectoralist class that owns the means of realising the value of these abstractions
the means of realizing…
can it be owned..?
perhaps as a jumpstart.. but perhaps not.. and definitely not w in a year ish…
realizing ness.. can’t be owned..
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.
piecemeal..collectively..as a class… ni ness.. zoom dance.. in sync.. singularity (prob diff defn)
like rep… not just of this/that property. .. but property itself
huge
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.
scarcity
dream.. consciousness…live..it… as the day. everyday. all of us.
07. 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.”
rev of everyday life ness
production (8-11)
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.
09. 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.
10. 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.
?
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.
first sentence. .. indeed.
last part..not getting? does it exist..?
class (12-16)
12. 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.
why a class..? why property
on last sentence… another class, property assumed..?
13. 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.
14. 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.
15. 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.
16. 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.
all good …except.. class ness
rather than hacker class.. awake/alive people
creating relation beyond property form
why call it a class..?
what if lines/defns are never that clear..
all of us ness matters.. all of us as class seems useless as words..
only seems to set up competition ness
Ellen Langer. ness – decrease as discrimination increase – thumbprint as label
property (17-22)
[..]
from 18 – 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.
? – rights.. ugh
19. 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.
repeat: Only out of its liberty will it produce the means of producing a surplus of liberty and liberty as a surplus.
20. 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.
money is means.. to take out relationship/trust.. like bitcoin, blockchain, etherium, et al talk of..leaving us with no need to think.. talk to ourselves..on other end (commodity vs gift).. sounds good – except talk of reciprocal.
ie: eisensteins obligation ness..so vector.. www – like .. infrastructure… for good or bad
let’s use it to connect/see us
21. 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.
how to have a singular producer..?
the whole idea of singular gift… take that as one ness.. but dangerous as not independent..never just me ness.. interdependence/interconnectedness..
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.
nothing need suffer scarcity from commodification.. no..? we have all we need..
on what commodity does to us… ie: helps us not think.. keeps us from talking to self.. checking our gut. makes us all…. of relative value only.
huge.
the artifice of scarcity once freed from commodification...
yet not just info..
22. 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.
?
keep hearing assumed lines.. defns that divide people…
fitting with Seth’s post.. on needing to think for self.
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2015/09/rearranging-our-prejudices.html
commodity.. as toxin… for Ed, politic, health, all the supposed to d sectors..
perpetuating the separations/prejudices
The uneven development of the vector is political and economic, not technical.
change technically possible.. politics/old techs in way..
vector (23-26)
[..]
(from 23) – All are forms of telesthesia, or perception at a distance.
perhaps www ness as vector for good/us
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.
www capability
24. 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.
(from 24) 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.
stock, flow, vector..?
ie: does flow have to be widely and quickly..?
Vectoral power is generally sought through the ownership of all three aspects.
so then from this we assume vector is bound in power and ownership…?
is that not .. fake.. vector ness..?
archive as vector(time), communication as vector(space)..?
vectoral class comes into own once it is in possession of powerful tech..
or… never a class.. coming to its own…never possession..
more .. rev of everyday life..
and commons ness takes care of resources.. shared at time of need.. no obligation.. except to be you.. for the one ness of us..
stock, flow, vector..
j hagel
25. 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.
whoa
not the vector i know.. no comprendo.
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.
part of our problem.. no? partial freedom.. and none of us ness. – clothed in words like collective and democratic..?
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.
part of each of us.
and if shell less…needs set free for us to dance/sync again…. rev of everyday life..
26. 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.
lots in here (25 & 26)
liberty ness
education (27-32)
27. 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.
whoa.
28. 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.
whoa. ed as indoctrination in obedience.. indeed.
manufactured consent.. science of people.. pluralistic ignorance ness..
29. 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.
whoa.
30. 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.
31. 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.
again – all of us as hackers. no class distinction needed.
32. 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?
yes that. rev of everyday life. ongoingly emerging us..
hacking (33-38)
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.
33. The virtual is the true domain of the hacker. It is from the virtual that the hacker produces ever-new expressions of the actual.
virtual as exposed/shared/outloud imagination. as-if-already..ness.
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.
ie: live as if you’re already free ness – rev in reverse
34. … – not just ‘the’ future, but an infinite possible array of futures, the future itself as virtuality.
antifragile. always changing/emerging. living alive…ness. perpetual beta.
35. 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.
under sanction of law.. property assumed
we can/ must question/ignore that
Like all forms of property, intellectual property enforces a relation of scarcity.
property enforces 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.
rights = red flag
so why not question this..? why acknowledge any class.. any property. under the sanction of what law? the one we learned in Ed..?
36. 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.
or perhaps… allows us to make irrelevant: rights, possessions; property; class…
37. 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.
why..?
embody self in form of property ..? that’s class ness.. no?. why accept that..?
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.
?
so.. need independence from ruling class, ie: let’s do this first ness: free art ists
but let’s not bind art/hacking/life… with property/income
there is a nother way
we have all we need.. if we go deep/ simple/open enough for all of us. in the city. as the day.
why we need to try something different.. no? something where money is irrelevant..
38. The very nature of the hack gives the hacker a crisis of identity.
only when (as it seems so here) we describe life/people in realm of this man made construct of ie: property/class..
aka: science of people.. no crisis of identity if we question construct rather than people/whimsy
The hacker searches for a representation of what it is to be a hacker in the identities of other classes.
so.. who taught/insisted/assumed the hacker(aka: all people) search for representation…?
that.. clothed in words like democracy.. even freedom, ie: land of free… is keeping us from us
the crisis.. is that we believe it’s illegal (and assume manmade legalities never change et al)… to think for ourselves.
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.
non rivalrous is in us.. if we sit in the quiet of our room.. we can here/see/be it
self-talk as data/us
information (39-43)
39. 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.
the medium.. and when bound… none of us free..
www ness
Matt M quote.. open is for all of us.. but need all open
40. Information has nothing to do with communication, or with media. “We do not lack communication. On the contrary, we have too much of it.
depends on defn of communication… gb shaw ness… j Lanier ness
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.
state sees communication as property
Where communication merely requires the repetition of this commodified difference, information is the production of the difference of difference.
41. 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.
Ed getting us primed for this ongoing slavery… to obedience.. to lms ness.. to pkg deals ness
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.
prevents the very concept of its freedom….from 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.
true.. but no need to calculate interests… that’s back to property ness..
we need good bye cycle ness – grab your x-d glasses
from 43 – 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.
huge to remember.. partial freedom is no freedom.. rather – specialized enslavement
partial trust is no trust.. rather specialized judgment
representation (44-51)
44. 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.
so why do we believe in a representative govt..? esp to the extent we do, ie: money/time/people.. et al
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.
again – so why do we spend all our time critiquing/debating/funding/fighting.. about who will represent..
the need to stop flapping and model a nother way.
45. 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.
whoa.
so repeating from 44 – state is not a solution..problem itself: 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.
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.
46. 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.
47. 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.
let’s do this first:free art ists
48. 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.
49. 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.
50. 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, particularlyfor 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.
51. 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 (52-59)
53. 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.
(from 54) – 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.
57. 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.
as the day. a nother way.
inventing relations outside of representation..
58. 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.
? not land, not capital… only info..? – commons ness – let’s just see..
59. 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.
a nother way. along side. as hospice. as the day. but available to all of us.. today.
– – –
feb 2015
Interview on – A Hacker Manifesto
ref negri and hardt
8 min – on private property as enemy of info
12 min – on problem of the archive.. control of the archive
13 min – like any gift – i’m obligated.. i have to do something with it
15 min – on tension between knowledge and ed – always a struggle over the language… hacking was never about making money.. can no longer think of ed as public good
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mar 2015 – capture all play
gamer theory (his book) – & sim city
7 min – on utopia (nowhere) vs atopia (no place – a placelessness perfected)
if we take away the assumption that we’re maxing the planet for humans .. then perhaps..
8 min – how to get rid of homelessness… problem of homeless sims
11 min – on thinking of homelessness as necessary to the algorithm
i’m sort of old fashioned thinking city should house people rather than dishouse people
12 min – what happens to figurative human w/in the algorithm… ie: selfies.. our convos are all about us.. why should pics be any surprise
13 min – on solutions (in sim) – ie: pack up homeless on a bus out of there..
timing ness – w/ katrina et al
14 min – not just homelessness but fabulous homes with no one in them
how weird the game has gotten
16 min – 4 fold scheme
1\money – general equiv 2\data – specific equiv 3\culture – gen non-equiv 4\art – specific non-equiv
18 min – data as map of displacement perhaps the real wrinkle of our time – the sp equiv caught up with gen equiv and moves as quickly as it does.. more info than just the unit price..
22 min – bernal and needham
23 min – on inconvenient data needing to be deleted.. ie: climate
not capitalism.. but something worse
24 min – on reproducing unequiv exchange… on experts no longer being able to report.. because they’d be bias
25 min – data only exists to produce ineq that can be monetized as exchange value – rendering most homeless.. which then becomes sign of success.. eliminating species rapidly.. and will continue to flourish/grow on own terms..
27 min – gov algorithm – capture all work/play turn into commodity/data & subordinate all practice to rule of exchange.. any data undermines this can go on – has to be turned into non data.. ie: we pretend it doesn’t exist/matter
so give self-talk as data a try..
28 min – is there a way in which infrastructure can be doing work of qualitatively building diff infrastructure.. who’s tendency is to produce more and more itself.. in it’s own terms a winning strategy.. but doesn’t include many species.. and we’re one of the species.. ie: the fabulous empty houses..
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find/follow McKenzie:
McKenzie Wark (born 10 September 1961) is an Australian-born writer and scholar. Wark is known for his writings on media theory, critical theory, new media, and the Situationist International. His best known works are A Hacker Manifesto and Gamer Theory. He is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at The New School in New York City.
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nov 2015 – platform coop
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My out of print book Dispositions (2002), a psychogeography for the GSP age, is here: academia.edu/18671226/Dispo…
Dispositions
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@mbauwens
McKenzie Wark review of Karatani’s The Structure of World History https://t.co/z5MMakMcWT
Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/KevinCarson1/status/758891687628247040
Kojin Karatani’s book, The Structure of World History, has a special meaning for me, as it confirmed the intuition at the basis of the p2p approach, which is that the configuration between the different modes of exchange, has a huge importance in driving the logic of a society and its economy. Karatani’s overview of world history, confirmed the importance of a multi-modal theory of social change. It is not about eradicating one mode and replacing it by another (say replacing capitalism by socialism), but about re-organizing how the different modalities are related to each other.
“The technologies for ruling people don’t rely on naked compulsion: instead, they install forms of discipline that make people voluntarily follow rules an work.”
“Reciprocity does not acknowledge any higher authority. The agrarian communities that formed under Asiatic despotism preserved reciprocity in such aspects as mutual aid and equalization. But they lost the other aspect of reciprocity: their autonomy.”Where do administered and administering people come from? After all, “…people do not voluntarily choose to become bureaucrats.” (79) As Max Weber argued, a money economy is a precondition for a bureaucratic system.
Thus, just as the despotic Mode B state depends on a modified form of Mode A, it also requiresthea development of Mode C. But money arises not within but between social formations. “Karl Marx repeatedly stressed that commodity exchange began with exchanges between different communities.” (81) The form of power of Mode C is money, which the state cannot do without. As in David Graeber, Karatani stresses the role of money in sustaining standing armies.Christianity stressed Jesus’ rejection of state, money, community. He speaks of God’s love as an absolute gift that cannot be reciprocated. Universal religions preach a pure love, pointing beyond the particular reciprocity of Mode A: “universal religions do not become universal by negating the particular. Rather, they become universal through an incessant awareness of the contradiction between universality and particularity.”
One of the most interesting discussion in Karatani is on the nation as a (failed) attempt to revive Mode A in modern form. “… the nation is something that appears within the social formation as an attempt to recover, through imagination, mode of exchange A and community, which is disintegrating under the rule of capital-state. The nation is formed by capital-state, but it is at the same time a form of protest and resistance to the conditions brought about by capital-state, as well as an attempt to supplement for what is lacking in capital-state.” (209) As in Benedict Anderson, the nation replaces religion as what gives people a sense of the eternal. Nations formed under the absolute monarchs, who united the people by breaking up community within and by refusal of any empire or church beyond it. For them, national law trumps empire law (natural law).They took it for real. “… even in Hegel’s philosophy, it is forgotten that this knot was produced in a fundamental sense by the imagination, in the form of the nation;he forgets that the nation exists only in imagination.
This also explains why his philosophy was unable to foresee any possibility of superseding this knot.” (Rather, Karatani turns to Proudhon’s pre-Marxist scientific socialism and its rejection of statist schemes. “Because equality is realized through redistribution carried out by the state, equality always leads to a greater or lesser extent to Jacobinism and increased state power.” (235) Drawing on his more extended argument in his book Transcritique (MIT Press, 2005), he picks up Max Stirner as a socialist thinker, for whom a higher form of associationism can only come after people free themselves from community.Karatani wants to revive a quite other tradition. He agrees with the Leninists that labor unions tend to get absorbed into capitalism and raise only partial and particular demands within its framework. He turns instead to cooperative movements. “… labor unions are a form of struggle against capital taking place within a capitalist economy, while cooperatives are a movement that moves away from the capitalist system. In other words, the former is centered on production, the latter on circulation.”Karatani is opposed to the politics of the leap. There’s no shortcuts.
“In trying to master capitalism by means of the state, Marxists fell into a trap laid by the state.” (257) It is also impossible to supersede capital-state through the nation. That way lies fascism. The opening is rather to rethink Mode D, which would be a “return of the repressed” (xi), or a way for reciprocity to comes back under the dominance of Modes B and C.But Mode D does not just restore community. It is possible only after community has been negated. It is regulative idea that restores reciprocity after and without community: “…communism depends less on shared ownership of the means of production than on the return of nomadism.” (xii) Mode D has to be “simultaneously free and mutual.”But Karatani is perhaps correct in seeing in their work a certain nostalgia for what Wallerstein called the counter-systemic movements of “May 68.” Like Marx in the 1840s, they think a kind of revolution as clarifying moment, cutting through state-nation-capital to reveal the ‘real’ workings underneath, now figured as multitude rather than productive labor.These regulative ideas, or rather substitutions, all have something in common: an actual infrastructure that would make them possible.
They presupposed an actually existing vectoral world. So too might attempts to extend Mode A as Mode D. As I argued in A Hacker Manifesto, this abstraction of the world is riven with class tensions. The same vector, the same information infrastructure, makes possible both control and commodification, but also more abstract forms of the gift. The politics of sharing free information then becomes the leading form for thinking new possibilities.link to infrastructure: http://www.publicseminar.org/2014/11/spinoza-on-speed/Their power lies in monopolising intellectual property – patents and brands – and the means of reproducing their value – the vectors of communication.
The vectoral class comes into its own once it is in possession of powerful technologies for vectoralising information
Here Harold Innis might be a better guide than Benedict Anderson, with his stress on the communication vectors within which the nation is realized geographically, or one might follow Raymond Williamsand look at the materiality of the practices of producing a culture.
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on Benjamin‘s the stack
@bratton is thinking geopolitics as a design problem.
https://t.co/WeEwnjWTzu
@mitpress @strelkaschool @e_flux @PublicSeminar https://t.co/FS8Az7Bp4nOriginal Tweet: https://twitter.com/mckenziewark/status/814509636439130112
Bratton: “We experience a crisis of ‘ongoingness’ that is both the cause and effect of our species’ inability to pay its ecological and financial debts.” (303)
[..]
They are hybrids not well suited to sociology or computer science. They support markets, but can or could enable non-market forms as well.
[..]
The stack *could have been the form for the global commons, but instead became an “an invasive machinic species.” (35) “Sovereignty is not just made about infrastructural lines; it is made by infrastructural lines.” (35)
to *Mackenzie’s hacker manifesto
[..]
Address designates a place for things and enables relations between things; deep address designates also the relations, and then the relations among those relations.
[..]
The financialization of addressability may also be a kind of fetishism, mistaking the metadata about a relation for a relation. …. Hence, “not only is the totality of The Stack itself deeply unstable, it’s not clear that its abyssal scope of addressability and its platform for the proliferation of near-infinite signifiers within a mutable finite space are actually correspondent with the current version of Anthropocenic capitalism.” (213)
However, deep address has become an inhuman affair. Not only are most users not subjects, so too most of what is addressed may not even be objects. Deep address generates its own accidents. Maybe it is headed toward heat death, or maybe toward some third nature – deep address may outlive the stack. Bratton: “we have no idea how to govern in this context.” (213)
[..]
In the city layer absorbed into the stack, mobilization is prior to settlement, and the city is a platform for sorting users in transit. As Virilio noted some time ago, the airport is not only the interface but also the model of the overexposed city.
[..]
Here one might add that the oldest form of ruling class – the rentier class – has found a future not (or not just) in monopolizing that land which yields energy (from farms and mines) but also that which yields information – the city.
[..]
Cities are to be accessed via mobile phone, which afford parameters of access, improvisation, syncopation
[..]
The real design problem then is ..the redesign of the program that reorganizes the total apparatus of the built interior into which we are already thrown together.” (182)
a nother way – facil the chaos of right now ness..
Ironically, today’s pharaohs are building headquarters that simulate old forms, be it Google’s campus, Amazon’s downtown or Apple’s weird spaceship. They all deny their spatial doubles, whether its Foxconn where Apple’s phones are made or Amazon’s “logistics plantations.” (185) But it is hard to know *what a critical practice might be that can intervene now that cities are layers of stacks platforms, where each layer has its own architectural form. “Is Situationist cut-and-paste psychogeography reborn or smashed to bits by Minecraft?” (180) Bratton doesn’t say, but it at least nicely frame the kind of question one might now need to ask.
rev of everyday life + hosted-life-bits..
[..]
Despite their variety, to me these clouds are all shaped by the desires of what I call the vectorialist class, which is to extract what Bratton calls “platform surplus value.” (137) But perhaps they are built less on extracting rent or profit so much as asymmetries of information. They attempt in different ways to control the whole value chain through control of information
[..]
Maybe this is “algorithmic capitalism” – or maybe (as I argue) it’s not capitalism any more, but something worse. (81)
[..]
The answer may depend on how well we can collaborate with synthetic algorithmic intelligence to model the world differently…” (83)
host life bits.. a nother way
[..]
“Computation is training governance to see the world like it does and to be blind like it is.” (90)
of math and men ness..
we’ve got to stop measuring us/transactions..
[..]
*the stack lacks a bio-informational skin that might connect ecological observation to the questioning of resource management. Running the stack now puts more carbon into the atmosphere that the airline industry. If it as a state it would be the fifth largest energy suck on the planet. “Even if all goes well, the emergent mega-infrastructure of The Stack is, as a whole, perhaps the hungriest thing in the world, and the consequences of its realization may destroy its own foundation.” (94)
i’d call that *self-talk as data
and if what i hear is right.. about server farms ness.. blockchain to host that data..
[..]
Hence the big question for Bratton becomes: *“Can The Stack be built fast enough to save us from the costs of building The Stack?” (96)
perhaps only if we leap.. for (blank)’s sake…
Can it host computational governance of ecologies? “Sensing begets sovereignty,” as I showed in Molecular Red in the case of weather and climate. (97) But could it result in new jurisdictions for action? Hence, “we must be honest in seeing that accommodating emergency is also how a perhaps illegitimate state of exception is stabilized and over time normalized.” (103) Because so far “there is no one governance format for climates and electrons that the space for design is *open at all.” (104)
exactly.. we haven’t yet.. because we haven’t yet let go of partial.. we keep controlling and not believing.. that we could build fast enough to save us from costs.. actually to make cost ness irrelevant..
[..]
“The more difficult assignment for design is to compose relations within a framework that exceeds both the conventional appearance of forms and the provisional human context at hand, and so pursuing instead less the materialization of abstract ideas into real things than the redirection of real relations through a new diagram.” (210)
[..]
This is not a program of cybernetic closure, but rather of *“enabling the world to declare itself as data tectonics…. Can the ‘second planetary computer’ create worlds and images of worlds that take on the force of law (if not its formality) and effectively exclude worse alternatives?” (302) It might start with “a smearing of the planet’s surface with an **objective computational film that would construct a stream of information about the performance of our shared socio-natural spaces…” (301)
*self-talk as data
rather a ginorm/small amount of **subjective film.. as stream of info
[..]
for Bratton there is no local, only the global.
is that true..? how can that even be..? global is made up of local..
the design prospect is not to perfect or complete it, but to refashion it to endure its own accidents and support a range of experiments in rebuilding: “the geo-design I would endorse doesn’t see dissensus as an exception.” (306)
dissensus ness
[..]
At least one novel observation here however is that the stack can have different governance forms at each level. The stack is not one infrastructure, but a laminating of relatively autonomous layers.
# of levels/govt = approaching limit of infinity/zero
[..]
Perhaps, as some Marxists once held, the capitalist ruling class (and then the vectoralist ruling class), perfected the forces of production that make them obsolete. Perhaps in the liminal space of the stack to come one can perceive technical-social forms that get past both the socialist and capitalist *pricing problems.
by making pricing (measuring transactions) irrelevant
[..]
Bratton: “We allow, to the pronounced consternation of both socialist and capitalist realists, that some polypaternal supercomputational descendant of Google Gosplan might provide a mechanism of projection, response, optimization, automation, not to mention valuation and accounting beholden neither to market idiocracy nor dim bureaucratic inertia, but to the appetite and expression of a curated algorithmic phyla and its motivated Users.” (333)
ah yes.. love
[..]
This might mean however an exit from a certain residual humanism: “the world may become an increasingly alien environment in which the privileged position of everyday human intelligence is shifted off-center.” (338) perhaps it’s not relevant whether artificial cognition could pass a Turing test, and is more interesting when it doesn’t. ….“The Anthropocene should represent a shift in our worldview, one fatal to many of the *humanities’ internal monologues.” (353)
*ie’d in things like the seemingly non-turing/non-intelligent ness.. of idiosyncratic jargon.. which then however turns out to be our means to ps in the open ness..
unless we have **those wrong
[..]
Bratton: “Could this aggregate ‘city’ wrapping the planet serve as the condition, the grounded legitimate referent, form which another, more plasmic, universal suffrage can be derived and designed?” (10)
in the city.. as the day [aka: not part\ial.. for (blank)’s sake…]
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Making this clearer / better is on my list of projects. https://t.co/qoBMm2aChX
Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/mckenziewark/status/839957984893624321
referencing talk from 2015: McKenzie Wark presents on his new book Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene on 31 May 2015.
haven’t yet listened to
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McKenzie Wark (@mckenziewark) tweeted at 7:24 AM on Sat, Apr 08, 2017:
Alex Galloway interviews me about 20 years worth of work:interview from nov 9 2016
https://t.co/4zaZH2Nevq
@Boundary2 @VersoBooks https://t.co/wa84z7eIAA
(https://twitter.com/mckenziewark/status/850700827534790657?s=03)On the other hand, my other commitment is not to the community of labor but the community of non-labor, or bohemia. Its expression is not the organized labor movement but the disorganized avant-garde.
free art ists ness
It’s not uncommon to combine these things, of course. But most often they are combined in the form of (sometimes rather dreary) Marxist theories about the avant-garde, which nevertheless remain very conventional in form. It seemed to me self-evident that one should also reverse the procedure, and apply avant-garde techniques to the writing of theory itself. Hence A Hacker Manifesto uses Situationist détournement and Gamer Theory uses Oulipo-style constraints.
[..]
Concepts get formed differently and are meant to do different things when you are trying to think through your own action in the world rather that when you are a scholar of action in the world.
[..]
The concept is only going to be slightly true, but about a lot of situations. As opposed to a fact, which is mostly true, but about a particular. Concepts are handles for grabbing a lot of facts. The thing to avoid however is the temptation to think the concept is more true than the practice.
[..]
I’m reluctant to concede that whatever this mode of production is would then supplant the avant-garde, even if it has now fully ingested the historical avant-gardes. Social formations change through conflict. Struggles over information shape the new mode of production, not the “genius” of the ruling class or some intrinsic elan vitale of capital.
[..]
What intellectual property obscures (conceals) is the difference between being the class that makes information and the class that owns it.
[..]
The vectoralist class built vectors for precisely that free information, while retaining the keys for themselves. They said, in essence: You can have the data, but not the meta-data. You can have the information of your most personal desires, but in exchange we will retain the totality of those desires. So one must shift from being data punks to meta-data punks in order to continue the struggle in and against a mode of production based not in the first instance on surplus value, but on asymmetries of information.
[..]
If a technology is technically feasible, one should assume the security state has the technology at their disposal.
[..]
I called them the hacker class, but it involves anyone whose efforts produce intellectual property
[..]
And regarding the openness of a given vector, one can ask: what shuts down any particular affordances that may exist? The information vector, product of a particular historical moment in the development of the forces of production, reveals an ontological property of information: that it can exist without scarcity.
The hacker class is producing something that for the first time can really be common, while the vectoralist class has to stuff it back into the property form to survive, by means of legal and technical coercion..
..That’s about where we are now: the commodification of the information produced by non-labor as free shared activity. Just as capitalism is an affordance of socialism; vectoral commodified information is an affordance of the abstracted gift practices of the information commons.
[..]
Even if it is admitted to the contemporary lexicon, it is treated as something exceptional. Maybe we should treat it not as the exception but the norm. What needs explaining is not fascism but its absence. What kinds of popular front movements can restrain it, and for how long? Or, we could see it as a “first world” variant of the normal colonial state, and even of many variants of what Achille Mbembe calls the “postcolony.”
Further along those lines: maybe fascism is what happens when the ruling class really wins. When it no longer faces an opponent in whose struggle against it the ruling class can at least recognize itself. And when it no longer knows itself, it can only discover itself again through excess, opulence, vanity, self-regard. Our ruling class of today is like that. They not only want us to recognize their business acumen, but also that they are thought leaders and taste makers and moral exemplars. They want to occupy the whole field of mythic-avatars. But our recognition doesn’t quite do the trick because we’re just nobodies. So they heap more glory on themselves and more violence on someone else.
Maybe any regime of power is necessarily one of misrecognition.
All it can perceive is shaped by its own struggles. But the fascist regime, the default setting of modernity and its successors, is doubly so. It can recognize neither its real enemies or itself. There is some small irony in an election being won because Florida voted Republican, when the Republican plan to accelerate the shit out of climate disruption may start putting Florida under water in our life time. I’m reminded of a line from Cool Hand Luke: “What we have here is a failure to communicate.” Fascism keeps punching away at the other but never finds even its own interests in the process. Hence its obsession with poll numbers and data surveillance. The ruling class keep heaping up data about us, but because it has expunged our negativity from its perceptual field, it cannot find itself mediated by any resistance.
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Des Fitzgerald (@Des_Fitzgerald) tweeted at 3:26 PM on Tue, Jun 13, 2017:
McKenzie Wark, in the introduction to his new ‘general intellects,’ on thinking politics/culture/science/technology together. https://t.co/0tillEr88q
(https://twitter.com/Des_Fitzgerald/status/874739736862240769?s=03)
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Jonathan Pugh (@jonnypugh1974) tweeted at 4:28 AM – 16 Jun 2017 :
@mckenziewark on Molecular Red. Very good. https://t.co/Ng6M2HHWvF (http://twitter.com/jonnypugh1974/status/875661371081453568?s=17)
32 min – to some extent we’re on our own.. have to build..
34 min – multi utopia’s.. negotiate between diff types
35 min – i see utopia’s as the intensely practical.. practical taken to extremes..
instigate utopia everyday ness – a ginorm small way
36 min – use uni as space to experiment in collab world making
39 min – it might be timely to work on plan b for the 99%
rather.. plan b for all of us.. or it won’t work
1:07 – what if this is not capitalism anymore but something worse
1:09 – we confront something for which we don’t yet have a language.. we need a new language that works in a diff way..
new language: idio jargon et al
1:12 – let’s start looking at other models..
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McKenzie Wark (@mckenziewark) tweeted at 7:11 AM on Fri, Jan 26, 2018:
What conditions made neoliberalism finally realizable 50 years after it was thought? *Cheap computation and communication. But historians of ideas don’t much think about such vulgar things. https://t.co/89IoSU08CC
(https://twitter.com/mckenziewark/status/956892449519042560?ref_src=twcamp%5Eshare%7Ctwsrc%5Eandroid%7Ctwgr%5Egmail%7Ctwcon%5E7090%7Ctwterm%5E0)
thinking ..designing reality‘s first two revs..
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We remember only *historic* revolutions.
What would a *geologic* revolution look like?
Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/mckenziewark/status/968594263075381249
revolution of everyday life.. played by indigenous/awake us
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The Sino-Futurism of Joseph Needham (2015)
李约瑟的中国未来论 (2015)
Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/mckenziewark/status/968903339428728834
Our attempts to make history are fractured by the residues of past attempts to make history, which force us back into passive and solitary forms of action, or what Sartre calls serialism.
Needham realized that mechanical models would no longer suffice to explain the biochemistry of life, but he was strongly opposed to vitalist theories of life as having some magical added property beyond scientific investigation. (1930s)
This is why Needham turned to what he called organicism. .. In this worldview, the world is not defined by a hidden idea or random atoms, but rather nested levels of organization, each with discrete material constraints and possibilities. The organizational affordances of physics give rise to chemistry, chemistry to biology, biology to social forms. Each is constrained by the level below it, but is not otherwise determined by it or reducible to it.
a nother way (bio chem physics)
We need a speculative theory and art of possible forms for a human history that is nested within natural history. We need a way to think of organization that is not reductive, and certainly not one that projects social ideologies onto nature, as if nature were already a business model..t
The great collaborative project, as Needham well knew, is to design and build a higher level of organization, where the futures of the natural and social worlds affirm rather than negate each other..t
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PlayGround Do (@PlayGroundDO) tweeted at 2:36 AM – 2 Mar 2018 :
“Esta civilización ha terminado y todo el mundo lo sabe”
#DoTalks con McKenzie Wark y @CCCBDebats
Vídeo completo >>> https://t.co/TAnJCPLSGBhttps://t.co/YZrjPiQRJW (http://twitter.com/PlayGroundDO/status/969506634115534848?s=17)we know.. but that knowledge is not fed back into decision making.. so we have climate science and we have financial markets.. but they don’t have any connection to each other
those of us in relatively comfortable situations are not feeling the outside environment (like locked in a driverless car w air conditioning and fav tunes.. but headed for doom)
we have a ruling class that’s just too invested in extractive modes.. very reluctant to make any changes that it will not also then profit from..
so transformation is being held up by the need to sort of perpetuate a sort of vast system of inequality
perpetuating broken feedback loop
get together w people and figure it out
via 2 convos
ie: hlb via 2 convos that io dance.. as the day..[aka: not part\ial.. for (blank)’s sake…].. a nother way
what would be a way to have a good life that doesn’t involve massive amounts of consumption.. that turns out.. doesn’t make us all that happy anyway.. moving products all around the planet for no other reason than to keep us unhappy
affluence w/o abundance via eagle and condor ness
maybe it’s time to build a new one in the ruins of the old.. maybe that’s our task.. starting over.. figure out all over again..t
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@malaise69_dares @bognamk There’s a planetary information infrastructure. I call it the third nature, @bratton calls it the stack. Its a novel geopolitical reality as well as political economic reality.
Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/mckenziewark/status/976580850455318529
@malaise69_dares @bognamk @bratton So you can boycott Facebook if you like. Valid tactic. But you’re still resonant as an address in the stack, a point in third nature, on dozens of other information infrastructures. Most of which you have no control over at all.
Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/mckenziewark/status/976581611771842560
@malaise69_dares @bognamk @bratton I’m in favor of autonomous information memory and community projects, but there’s limits to what one can do with an artisanal approach to the politics of design. The other short-term fight is over standards and regulation of the existing ones.
Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/mckenziewark/status/976582136508698628
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McKenzie Wark (@mckenziewark) tweeted at 1:31 PM on Wed, Jan 23, 2019:
Gave my first lecture as an *obviously* gender non-conforming human. I mean it was clockable to those with eyes to see for many years, but nobody could miss it today. Whether its HRT or presentation that made me feel more emotionally vulnerable to the class (of 70) i don’t know.
(https://twitter.com/mckenziewark/status/1088172361155788800?s=03)
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McKenzie Wark (@mckenziewark) tweeted at 6:29 AM on Wed, Apr 17, 2019:
This Jasbir Puar text i’m teaching this morning is helping me think about trans as deterritorialization of gender, that provokes paranoid reterritorializations, *both* by transphobes & truscum. Desire for interiority, identity, essence — against an other. https://t.co/BKhsrWIQto
(https://twitter.com/mckenziewark/status/1118491730137972737?s=03)
identity ness.. marsh label law.. binary ness
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Kitschita (@kitschita) tweeted at 1:56 AM on Tue, May 07, 2019:
“All power to the imagination!” Or so they said in the sixties. Now, the slogan might be: “All imagination to the power!” For imagination is everywhere these days but nobody knows how we might get any power. @mckenziewark
(https://twitter.com/kitschita/status/1125670741758836736?s=03)
perhaps by listening to every voice/imagination/curiosity.. everyday..
ie: tech as it could be..
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Some ppl are just a delight to be around on the dance floor. Just weaving their bodies into the flow and letting the situation express itself through them. They won’t stomp on you because the movements of your body are part of the situation into which they’re woven.
Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/mckenziewark/status/1420740192051372033
thurman interconnectedness law: when you understand interconnectedness it makes you more afraid of hating than of dying – Robert Thurman
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be you. 