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[...] the big companies no longer actually make their products. That can be contracted out to a competing mass of capitalist suppliers. What the vectoralist firm owns and controls is brands, patents, copyrights, and trademarks, or it controls the networks, clouds, and infrastructures, along which such information might move.
The rise of the so-called sharing economy is really just a logical extension of this contracting out of actual material services and labor by firms that control unequal flow of information. [...]
Vectoral power can thus dispense with much of the machinery of the old capitalist ruling class. It is a matter of indifference who actually owns a furnace or an assembly line. The vectoral class contracts out such functions. The rise of the manufacturing industry in China and of the service industry in India is not the sign, then, that these underdeveloped states are joining the capitalist developed world. Rather, they now confront an overdeveloped world ruled by vectoral power.
The vectoral class has few fixed assets. It tries to avoid actually owning factories. It avoids paying wages directly. It has less and less interest in the viability of national spaces of production and consumption. Fordism is dead. [...]
[...] Facebook, where the proposition is that we should all entertain each other and put up with advertising merely for this privilege. Far from being a step forward, such media are a decadent form of the “society of the spectacle.” Not only are we to passively consume these images, we have to make them ourselves.
Parts of the vectoral class are heading in quite the opposite direction—to completely closed, proprietary worlds. Online gaming is usually like this. In a game like the popular World of Warcraft, you pay for the privilege of laboring to acquire objects and status that are only artificially scarce. And you never get to own them. They remain private property. You rent back the product of your own labor. World of Warcraft is the nullity of the commodity economy perfected. World of Warcraft is the fantasy version of the power of the vectoral class perfected. You pay to rent everything, and they can deport you at any time.
relevant for my (perpetually in progress) ruminations on Runescape
It’s a question of pushing the often local or issue-based approach to hacker class consciousness into an entire worldview, or rather, worldviews. The challenge is to think the whole social totality from our point of view—to imagine worlds in which our own interests and the interests of the people are aligned. The way to do this, I think, is to push beyond the compromise formations of things like creative commons. What would it mean not to liberalize intellectual property but to conceive of the world without it altogether? What would it mean to really think and practice the politics of information as something that is not scarce and has no owners?
fucking hell
[...] 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.