For what Marx could have no inkling of, given his times, is the way science itself would become not just a force of production, but in its own right a kind of industrial system, and one which works quite differently to the factory system. The factory system is based on quantified labor time, making standardized products. But what of those (non-)labor processes that make nonstandard things? New things? Or as Asger Jorn understood it: What about those who make not content but forms?15 To what class do they belong?

I was not the first to propose that we think of these people as belonging to another class, although I did attempt to come up with a contemporary-sounding name for them: the hacker class.16 JD Bernal, for example, had already come close in his theory of the scientific worker.17 But I did at least offer a thought about how the relations of production mutated to absorb them into the commodity system: the rise of intellectual property as a mutation in the private property form, that encloses the commons of information and spawns whole new categories of potential commodities.