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Hackers create the possibility of new things entering the world. Not always great things, or even good things, but new things. In art, in science, in philosophy and culture, in any production of knowledge where data can be gathered, where information can be extracted from it, and where in that information new possibilities for the world produced, there are hackers hacking the new out of the old. While we create these new worlds, we do not possess them. That which we create is mortgaged to others, and to the interests of others, to states and corporations who monopolize the means for making worlds we alone discover. We do not own what we produce—it owns us.
The vectoralist class wages an intensive struggle to dispossess hackers of their intellectual property. Patents and copyrights all end up in the hands, not of their creators, but of a vectoralist class that owns the means of realizing the value of these abstractions. The vectoralist class struggles to monopolize abstraction. For the vectoral class, “politics is about absolute control over intellectual property by means of warlike strategies of communication, control, and command.”*
[...] There really is something qualitatively distinct about the forces of production that eat brains, that produce and instrumentalize and control information. This is because information really does turn out to have strange ontological properties. Making information a force of production produces something of a conundrum within the commodity form. Information wants to be free but is everywhere in chains. Information is no longer scarce, it is infinitely replicable, cheap to store, cheap to transmit, and yet the whole premise of the commodity is its scarcity,
The hacker class experiences extremes of a winner-take-all outcome of its efforts. On the one hand, fantastic careers and the spoils of some simulation of the old bourgeois lifestyle; on the other hand, precarious and part-time work, start-ups that go burst, and the making routine of our jobs by new algorithms - designed by others of our very own class. The hacker class was supposed to be a privileged one, shielded from proletarianization by its creativity and technical skill. But it too can be made casual and precarious.
This new kind of ruling class does not appropriate a quantity of surplus value so much as exploit an asymmetry of information. It gives, sometimes even as a gift, access to the location of a piece of information for which you are searching. Or it lets you assemble your own social network. Or it lets you perform a particular financial transaction. Or it gives you coordinates on the planet and what can be found at that location. Or it will even tell you some things about your own DNA. Or it will provide a logistical infrastructure for your small business. But while you get that little piece of information, this ruling class gets all of that information in the aggregate. It exploits the asymmetry between the little you know and the aggregate it knows - an aggregate it collects based on information you were obligaed to "volunteer."
The California Ideology emerged out of seemingly progressive movements of the counterculture in California in the mid to late twentieth century. Once again, repression played a role. Black militants of this period were systematically murdered or imprisoned. To give just one example, Angela Davis survived a criminal trial and was fired from her teaching job. Shorn of its more radical edge, the counterculture became merely cultural, and its anti-state posture made its peace with free market libertarian enthusiasms. Like the worldviews of capital under feudalism, the California Ideology promised a universal liberation, which turned out on its ascendancy to be just that of a new ruling class.
One has to ask whether the ruling class presiding over this mode of production is still adequately described as capitalist. It seems no longer necessary to directly own the means of production. A remarkable amount of the valuation of the leading companies of our time consists not of tangible assets, but rather of information. A company is its brands, its patents, its trademarks, its reputation, its logistics, and perhaps above all its distinctive practices of evaluating information itself.
[...] perhaps the rise of finance is really just a symptom. Yann Moulier Boutang invites us to see finance as something other than speculative or fictive excess. It has to do with the whole problem of exchange value in an age where the forces of production are extensively and intensively controlled by information: nobody knows what anything is worth. Financialization is a perverse socializing of the problem of the uncertainty of information about value.
[...] three axes: property, authority, expertise. His view of class structure offers class locations at three levels, which do not always neatly overlap. Relations of property generate the class locations of employers, petit-bourgeois, and employees. Relations of authority generate the locations of managers, supervisors, and the supervised and managed. Relations of expertise generate the locations of professionals, the skilled, and the nonskilled.
Piketty does not separate out real estate from capital, yet there might be good reasons to do so. Landlords and capitalists are already different kinds of ruling classes with overlapping but not identical interests. Ground rent and profit are not the same kinds of surplus extraction. Landlords, perversely, may benefit from the rise of the vector in ways Capital does not. As Matteo Pasquinelli says, today's landlords (often with giant global property portfolios) increase their rents by extracting the information value that the presence of the hacker class produces. [...]
I took my son to see it. I wanted him to know something of the origins and motivations of a structure of feeling that was something that I once felt deeply and to which I will remain in solidarity for the rest of my life. Let us admit, comrades, that we are a defeated people. There will be no second coming for us. And to try to remain in fidelity to something whose core myth lies in History is always to betray it anyway. The whole is to be begun again, and from the beginning.
on the young karl marx