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[...] contains within itself the seeds of its own overcoming, once the hack frees itself from property's artifice of limits and limits of artifice. This is the endless anxiety of the vectoral class: that the very virtuality they depend on, that uncanny capacity of the hacker class to mint new properties for commodification, threatens to hack into existence new forms of production beyond commodification, beyond class rule.
Production produces not only the object as commodity, but also the subject who appears as its consumer, even though it is actually its producer. Under vectoralist rule, society becomes indeed a "social factory" which makes subjects as much as objects out of the transformation of nature into second nature. "Labouring processes have moved outside the factory walls to invest the entire society." The capitalist class profits from the producing class as producer of objects. The vectoralist class profits from the producing class as consumer of its own subjectivity in commodified form.
great way of understanding audience commodification. from Hardt and Negri's Labour of Dionysus
That hackers as a class have an interest in information as private property can blind the hacker class to the dangers of too strong an insistence on the protection of that property. Any small gain the hacker gets from the privatization of information is compromised by the steady accumulation of the means of realizing its value in the hands of the vectoralist class. Since information is crucial to the hack itself, the privatization of information is not in the interests of the hacker class. To maintain their autonomy, hackers need some means of extracting an income from the hack, and thus from some limited protection of their rights. Since information is an input as well as an output of the hack, this interest has to be balanced against a larger interest in the free distribution of all information. In the short term, some form of intellectual property may secure some autonomy for the hacker class from the vectoralist class, but in the long term, the hacker class realizes its virtuality through the abolition of intellectual property as a fetter on the hack itself. The hacker class frees the hack by hacking class itself, realizing itself by abolishing itself.
The vetoralist class contributes, unwittingly, to the development of the vectoral world within which the gift as the limit to property could return, but soon recognizes its error. As the vectoral economy, develops, less and less of it takes the form of a public 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 public information, as the price it pays to the state 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.
Referring to FLOSS and similar ventures
And always, what escapes effective counter in this imaginary, enlightened state is the power of the ruling classes, which have no need for representation which dominate through owning and controlling production, including the production of representation. What calls to be hacked is not the representations of the state, but the class rule based on an exploitative bifurcation of expression into lack and plenitude.
on identity politics, basically ("the politics of representation"), and how productive classes get caught up in representations other than class interest (nationalism, etc)
New circumstances call for new theories, and new practices, but also for the cultivation of variants, alternatives, mutant strains. The revolts of 1989 may have flourished and withered, but are a seed stock for future movements. So long as there is a past, there is a future; so long as there is memory, there is possibility. Debord: "theories are made only to die in the war of time."
pretty.
quote from Complete Cinematic Works. in the endnotes, he writes: "One of the virtues of Debord's writings is its delicate, even melancholy awareness of the sea swell of time, and how the lived experience of time sets the agenda for critical thought and action, not the other way around."
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. The class relation may be mitigated, but not overcome. The vectoralist class sees in the development of vectoral means of production and distribution the ultimate means to commodify the globe through the commodification of information. But the hacker class can realize from the same historic opportunity that the means are at hand to decommodify information. Information is the gift that may be shared without diminishing anything but its scarcity. Information is that which can escape the commodify form altogether. Information escapes the commodity as history and history as commodification. It frees abstraction from its commodified phase.
The vectoralist class discovers--irony of ironies!--a scarcity of scarcity. It struggles to find new "business models" for information, but ends up settling for its only reliable means of extracting a surplus from its artificial scarcity, through the formation of monopolies over every branch of its production. Stocks, flows and vectors of information are brought together in vast enterprises, with the sole purpose of extracting a surplus through the watertight commodification of all elements of the process. By denying to the producing classes any free means of reproducing their own culture, the vectoralist class hopes to extract a surplus from selling back to the producing classes their own souls. But the very strength of the vectoralist class--its capacity to monopolize the vector, points to its weakness. The only lack is the lack of necessity. The only necessity is the overcoming of necessity. The only scarcity is of scarcity itself.
in 334, he continues this point: eventually the vectoralist class will produce "a means of domination over the world that comes to dominate even its own exertions"
Hackers use their knowledge and their wits to maintain
their autonomy. Some take the money and run. (We must
live with our compromises.) Some refuse to compromise.
(We live as best we can.) All too often those of us who take
one of these paths resent those who take the other. One lot
resents the prosperity it lacks, the other resents the liberty it
lacks to hack away at the world freely. What eludes the
hacker class is a more abstract expression of our interests as
a class, and of how this interest may meet those of others in
the world.
thought: open source devs resenting proprietary devs for being well-paid; the latter (or most of them) unable to work on open source even in their spare time cus their companies prohibit it in some way
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, acquiring as their property a degree which represents the sorry fact that “the candidate can tolerate boredom and knows how to follow rules.”* But most remain workers, even though they grep information rather than pick cotton or bend 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 of their own class who name them differently.
think about this relates to tech workers?