I have always dissented from part of this narrative. I think the category of the “immaterial” is meaningless, and modifiers such as “cognitive” and “semio-” don’t really capture what is distinctive about the forces of production and reproduction in our times. I also think it best not to assume in advance some sort of collective or class unity when really one is talking about quite different experiences and implications within the production process. Thus, in A Hacker Manifesto I was careful to see the hacker and worker as different figures that need to find ways of combining their interests through cultural, political and organizational means.

Nevertheless, I think Italian and French writers such as Virno, Boutang, Lazzarato and Berardi are at least asking the right questions and trying to capture in a conceptual net some of the features of this stage of commodification. It would appear that Stengers also accepts part of the shared terrain here. She draws attention to those working in computation who invented a form of resistance to the appropriation of what was common to them, of which Richard Stallman and the Free Software movement might be the most conscious element.14 “It was as ‘commoners’ that they defined what made them programmers, not as nomads of the immaterial” (85).