point by extracting intertextual lines from Marx’ writings, explaining and continu-
ing the struggles between classes into our present time. He traces the same mecha-
nisms of suppression and control through history that manifests today in the “in-
formation” or “knowledge” society.
According to Wark this process follows a certain logic, very similar to the one de-
scribed by Marx. Historically the pastoral class was being driven from their liveli-
hood of surplus on the countryside by the raising of the rent for the land from the
landowners. Following this the peasants sought work in the cities where capital
puts them to work in factories. Like the farmers before them these new workers
were not only dispossessed of the material surplus they produced, but also of their
culture. The farmers were dispossessed of their agriculture and the workers their
human culture. They were ruled by the feudal and bourgeois classes who took the
surplus as rent for land or profit as the return on capital. This is the development
of Marx’ pastoral and capitalist classes.
In today’s information society we have a new working class that Wark calls a hack-
er class. It is a class of workers that creates and handles information and is becom-
ing, just like its precursors, dispossessed of its production and culture, for example
the culture of sharing. This happens through various forms of private property
management forms, such as copyrights, trademarks and patents.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 lan-
guage, poetic language, math or music, curves or colorings, we are the abstracters of
new worlds. (Wark 2004: 002)For Wark the hackers are thus the proletarians of the information society, or fac-
tory workers in the “creative industries”. Over this hacker class rules a vectorialist
class. It controls the vectors along which information is abstracted, and appropri-
ates what was once common property. The vector is a route of realization or of
“infection”, as in epidemiology where a vector is an organism that does not cause
disease itself but which transmits it from one host to another. This vectorialist class
own the means of reproducing the value of information; the vectors of communi-
cation.Unlike farmers and workers, hackers have not – yet – been dispossessed of their prop-
erty rights entirely, but still must sell their capacity for abstraction to a class that owns
the means of production, the vectorialist class - the emergent ruling class of our time.
(Wark 2004: 020)The producers of information are in the grip of the vectorialists to get their work
and creativity channelled out into the world. But as they use these vectors their
work is transformed into intellectual property. The production of abstraction is a
property producing process, and thus a class producing process (Wark 2004: 036).
As private property moves first from land to capital and then to information, the
concept of property becomes more abstract. Where capital produces a surplus
larger than the farming field it stood on, information is free from any particular
object and its production limitless. It is produced in endless copies but lawyers
protect its unique value. Or as Wark puts it: “The ruling class seeks always to con-
trol innovation and turn it into its own ends, depriving the hacker of control of her
or his creation, and thereby denying the world as a whole the right to manage its
own development.” (Wark 2004: 012)The Ethno Mods are Lap-style add-on-
kits. Many political movements have, in the
name of an ethnic group, turned everyday
clothing into political statements. The lap
boots of the Swedish -68 movement is but
one example. What once was anonymous
and silent clothing detail suddenly became a
political expression. Now you can combine
shoe surgery with activism and do it yourself.
With these small attachable “trunks” you
can apply your political ethno-token onto your
everyday boots to make them into lap-style
countercultural statements. Not only a form
of everyday updating, but also an ethnocen-
tric plastic surgery, turning any shoes into a
-68ish revolt.