Thursday, November 8, 2007
Hacker Manifesto
"Hacking" can be applied to almost any form of information. Language, math, music, shapes, colors, shaped and reshaped to introduce new, if not entirely desirable things to the world. Hackers are everywhere, a new class, programmers, scientists, musicians, artists, writers, all 'hacking' their way into this abstract subculture. They take different and seemingly unrelated material and reconstruct it on a plane where these two things can relate and combine. By the definition of McKenzie Wark, to hack "is to produce or apply the abstract to information and express the possibility of new worlds." Since information cannot exist in unaltered, immaterial form, it is necessary to find the material means to extract and distribute this information. The universal goal of hackers is to free this information from its material constraints. Production, and the production class, or vectoralist class, plays an important role in hacking, simultaneously aiding as well as trying to obstruct the hackers goal. I definitely agree with alot of aspects of this article, information should be readily available, and its availability in several different forms works to expand our minds and knowledge as a culture. Though this 'at your fingertips' information should not discourage you from getting out into the world, experiencing things and gaining knowledge for yourself.
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2 comments:
I agree with you on that hacking can be applied to any form of information, and according to the author this is possible because, if it can be hacked then we can create new meanings for it, and it does not really matter if it is good or bad because people are going to in some way or another incorporated in to their lives. It is interesting what the author says that while these worlds are being created or are created we do not posses them, I though that we did since these worlds are supposedly made for us to see it and use it. However as the author states, "we do not own what we produce-it owns us, I believe that this is true because if one compares it to the last article Gaming by Castronova she talks about how video games are created to fulfill the fantasy that people have with the virtual world and instead of us owning these worlds it owns us. This is because they are a challenge and we dedicate long periods of time to these games, trying to build the worlds, improving them, understanding them, and most important is finding ways to win, to beat this world and at the end some succeed others don't.
Something else that caught my attention was Wark's discussion on how we do not know who we are. I find this to be true because if one stops and thinks about this, there is no such thing as uniqueness, and individuality, we think we know who we are because of the identities that we have built in society, the cultures and subcultures that we have become part of. However this is not enough to really allow us to understand who we are and we do not question this because we have naturalize the idea that the culture or subcultures that we are part of already lets others and ourselves know we are.
This article went into hacking so in depth about things that i never even considered. I didnt realize how complex the world of hacking really is. Wark talks about how the hacker's world (what's being represented as real to them) is always "partial, limited, perhaps even false." Yet hackers are still considered as a class of their own and are constantly producing and abstracting. The hacker hacks to provide free information for everyone. Hackers are interested in hacking because the hack is seen as their own property in a world of false reality. The hack as a property sets them apart from the rest of the world and gives them a sort of independence and credibility. This whole hacker world is one false thing after another. "All representation is false." So now not only is their world more or less false, so is their representation. It's hard to understand something that isn't even "real". After reading this article i'm more aware of the whole hacker thing, but it amazes me how complex it all is and how much is involved.
-Kate Price
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