1
Abstraction
0
terms
4
notes
5
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
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
7
Everywhere abstraction reigns, abstraction made concrete. Everywhere abstraction's straight lines and pure curves order matters along complex but efficient vectors. But where education teaches what one may produce with an abstraction, the knowledge most useful for the hacker class is of how abstractions are themselves produced. Deleuze: "Abstractions explain nothing, they themselves have to be explained."
Everywhere abstraction reigns, abstraction made concrete. Everywhere abstraction's straight lines and pure curves order matters along complex but efficient vectors. But where education teaches what one may produce with an abstraction, the knowledge most useful for the hacker class is of how abstractions are themselves produced. Deleuze: "Abstractions explain nothing, they themselves have to be explained."
16
Abstraction is always an abstraction of nature, a process that creates nature's double, a second nature, a space of human existence in which collective life dwells among its own products and comes to take the environment it produces to be natural.
Abstraction is always an abstraction of nature, a process that creates nature's double, a second nature, a space of human existence in which collective life dwells among its own products and comes to take the environment it produces to be natural.
23
The time is past due when hackers must come together with workers and farmers--with all of the producers of the world--to liberate productive and inventive resources from the myth of scarcity. The time is past due for new form of association to be created that can steer the world away from its destruction through commodified exploitation. The greatest hacks of our time may turn out to be organizing free collective expression, so that from this time on, abstraction serves the people, rather than the people serving the ruling class.
The time is past due when hackers must come together with workers and farmers--with all of the producers of the world--to liberate productive and inventive resources from the myth of scarcity. The time is past due for new form of association to be created that can steer the world away from its destruction through commodified exploitation. The greatest hacks of our time may turn out to be organizing free collective expression, so that from this time on, abstraction serves the people, rather than the people serving the ruling class.