The Hacker Class Is Dead, Long Live the Hackers!

Some of us age better than others. The twenty years that have elapsed since A Hacker Manifesto was first published have not been kind to those with “frayed nerves,” those who, for Tiqqun, refused to “settle for any sort of comfort.”1 A Hacker Manifesto gestured towards a more consistent theoretical articulation than some of its fashionable contemporary alternatives, such as Michael Hardt and Toni Negri’s “multitude,” while simultaneously escaping the linguistic and philological reductionism of the likes of Giorgio Agamben’s “coming community.” While both terms identified the ways in which the contemporary form of biopolitics repurposes subjective identities and their representations, Hardt and Negri’s “singularities that act in common” and Agamben’s “whatever singularities” paid little attention to the actually existing material conditions for the productive escape of a self-composed community from the oppressing structures that bind it to the prevailing order.2 By locating, in the development of the information vector, the conditions of possibility for this break to happen, Wark’s hackers were given a point of departure.

Wark’s original and provocative manifesto tried to articulate the existence of a new class that emerged from the growing informatization of life and labor—a hacker class, the counterpart of the newly dominant vectorialist class. At the time (the turn of the century), the hacker class needed allies; it also had to develop and densify its class interests and acquire a fully fledged class consciousness. The hacker class was to bring about the final subsumption of the notion of class itself, the virtualization of class politics. Information would be the driving force of this process, and this much proved to be true. However, what we have seen in the last twenty years is that the abstractive potentiality of information, as the new dominant property form in the capitalist mode of production, is not enough. Thoroughly commodified by the vectorialists, it cannot “release the virtuality of classness.”3

As a result, those resisting the vectorial turn of capitalism have, time and again, strengthened the grip of identity and representation on virtuality and abstraction. Though this was very often the only way to secure certain formal rights and the only available form to fight against political erasure, the endless interplay between claims for identity and their state-sanctioned representations ensured that the “crisis of identity” Wark’s hackers were to bring about would not be deep enough to radically unsettle the subject of liberal politics.4 This crisis, originating in the virtuality released by the hack, is not predicated on a purely linguistic, or performative, turn, but is rather absolutely immanent and material. Hackers were to destabilize the self-enclosure of the liberal subject through a politics of expression—instantiated by the hack—that could overcome the limits posed by “the constraint of scarcity and lack” that plagues capitalist subjectification.5

Since then, hackers have taken more than a few blows. The death of capital, in Wark’s phrasing, did not signal the demise of its operational forces.6 Capitalists abound, as we know only too well. The figure of the hacker might still be alive, but it lives an apparently politically powerless existence; it has retained only its criminal associations, with its accompanying imagery becoming increasingly confined to a series of hauntological manifestations, like the dark alleys of William Gibson’s or Philip K. Dick’s cyberpunk. The digital space that was opened by the emergence of information as the dominant force of production in the global economy has been progressively stripped of its radical possibilities. If there is a death, it is the death of the hacker class qua class.

What survives are the potentialities envisioned by Wark when she conceptualized the hack as an event touching the unrepresentable, leading to a politics beyond the entrapment of representation, beyond information, beyond property. And this starts where A Hacker Manifesto did: with abstraction, that double spooking the world, which is still the main driving force behind the current mode of production, whichever epithet one choses to describe it.

“Abstraction is what every hack produces and affirms.”7 This much is still true, but what kind of abstraction is being produced? Which products of abstraction led to the rampant power of the vectorialists and the demise of the hacker class? Wark’s contention was that “the hacker class arises out of the transformation of information into property, in the form of intellectual property,” as the vectorial class “mak[es] patents and copyrights equivalent to factories or fields.”8 Today, however, it is not just intellectual property that is at the origin of the vectorialists’ present and future profits. While information, to be sure, is at the center of this process, the kind of information the vectorial class profits from is far more abstract than conventional intellectual property, patents, and copyrights.

The vectorialist class took this capture to an even more abstracted level. It is no longer just a question of owning the vector and the logistical systems that enable the information produced to be transformed—“the crossroads where information traffics.”9 It is also about the extended possibilities of deriving a surplus from the infinitely recombinant potential of metadata. Wark, writing ten years after A Hacker Manifesto, remarks: “Then we could be datapunks; now we have to be metapunks.”10 Writing fifteen years later, things become more dire: “It is all but inconceivable now that there could be an open-ended, playful approach to making the new appear out of the old in techniques of information that would not be entirely contained with the commodification and control of the information vector.”11

If class oppression is founded on an original dispossession, it is useful to circle back to the foundational moment—as an initially recurring moment—corresponding to the spoliation of the hacker class, the moment of the capture and appropriation of its labor product. For Wark, it is the discovery of “the immaterial virtuality” of the hacker class’s raw matter—information—that initiates the historical break vis-à-vis its class predecessors.12 This was, and remains, a glimpse of a productive escape from the myth of scarcity: unshackled information, the limitless material instantiation of virtuality. But over the last twenty years, what appeared as the result of a quantitative change in the level of abstraction was, in actuality, a shadow lurking behind the dominant commodity form. From data to metadata, from information qua intellectual property to information qua every residual trace of digitally mediated behavior, what then is today’s fundamental spoliation?

As Frédéric Neyrat rightly notes, the primary commodities of today’s dominant capitalism—what might be called the present vectorialism—are digitized dividual elements made of “purchase histories, elections, prophylactics, and pornographic ads assembled by bots and market algorithms,” able to be (re)combined and (re)assembled along transindividual lines.13 Produced and harvested by both human and nonhuman—increasingly the latter—networked elements, this has become the primordial form of information, and the main reason behind the rapid disintegration of the hacker class.

Abstract and abundant, this kind of information is not exactly a product of labor, but it is produced by virtually everyone. In fact, it is more often the result of nonlabor—or rather, nonlabor increasingly turned into a form of labor. Ironically, all of us who produce this data have been turned into hackers—makers of the new out of the old. By dramatically enlarging the conceptual and material perimeter of information and, crucially, by discovering that information’s abstractive power does not stop at the level of representation—that it extends all the way down—the vectorialist class has neutralized the hacking possibilities therein.

The vectorialist class, realizing that the course towards abstraction made possible by the explosion of information introduced an inherent volatility in the process of capturing and managing a whole new kingdom of representations, quickly learned what Wark’s more radical hackers already comprehended: the inherent falseness of all representation.14 But instead of allowing the free-flowing interplay of expression, leading to a field of irreducible differences, the vectorialist class made use of its vectors to reconstruct representations along new infra-subjective lines. The “divide and conquer” strategy was thus taken to a whole new level of abstraction, now applied to the most granular of elements.

Materially accomplishing what poststructuralists had relentlessly theorized in the previous decades—the dissolution of the subject—the posthuman of the vectorial world has been described by N. Katherine Hayles as “an informational pattern that happens to be instantiated in a biological substrate.”15 Not only is the materiality of the subject’s boundaries irrelevant when compared to the disembodied information it produces; so too are its representations.

When the dominant ruling class was capitalist, it had to act like “the authorized police of representation,” closely managing the increasingly unstable link between expression and its representation—in the well-known tradition of mobilizing the state to sanction identities.16 The greatest hack of the vectorialist class was the preemptive dismantling of this nexus—followed by a strategic appropriation of the space that took its place. If vectorialism rests on the ideological and material victory of connectivism, which is “the realization of the techno-affirmationist dream of complete transparency,” then this transparency can only be completely operative when the distance between expression and its representation becomes null.17

The obliteration of this nexus reveals the impossible correspondence between whatever is expressed and its representation. Instead of leading to the affirmation of an infinite and unlimited virtuality—of difference beyond repetition—this nullification is actually the only possible form for controlling the destabilizing effects of sprawling identities. Beneath the surface of one of the latest chapters in the history of digital abstraction we find traces of another step in the longer history of the state as guarantor of the referents of signification.

Today’s dominant abstractions are infinitely recombined traces of something that does not exist as such: the subject’s tightly knit, hermetically sealed interiority. In the reign of metadata, we can no longer talk of the “nonconformity between sign and referent.”18 There is no nonconformity, but rather signs that make up for voids: a Platonic tragedy if ever there was one. All sign, no referent. It is no coincidence that, in the so-called “information age,” the ongoing profusion of highly abstract dividual elements—whose permanent recombination forms the substrate of the subject’s representations and identities—is accompanied by a (supposedly critical) lexicon deriving from privacy (or the lack thereof). More than being robbed of the signs that form a certain subjectivity, the subject is rather made to appear as if composed by these clusters of signs. Crucially, this extends both upwards and downwards. Communities reassemble along the ever changing lines of coincidental data points, of individual life functions indexed to informational patterns. Indeed, “the information vector extends into life itself.”19

This is not a new trick. What Foucault saw in his analysis of neoliberalism in the 1970s was the result of the early development of the vector as a force of production, when it started to take over the old capitalist rule. In the early vectorial moment, we see the first glimpse of a pre-given subject parsed into discrete parcels that could be quantified, and thus optimized and further marketized—Gary Becker’s “human capital.” It would no longer be through the abstract, all-encompassing category of labor that an individual was to be connected to the market.20

Referring to the “fantasy of what Marx called the automatic subject, this fantasy that capital can exist without labor,” Stefano Harney and Fred Moten (after Marina Vishmidt) remark that the automatic subject is emulated by human capital, in the form of a “hollow subject, … a subject dedicated to hollowing itself precisely by expelling the negativity of labor.” For them, “human capital” is the mark of a self-inflicted imposition that the subject performs on its exiled interiors; this subject is transformed into “a porous object that still talks like a subject.”21 Under vectorialist rule, the technical means used to abstract human capital added to that porosity. Lest we forget: “Production produces not only the object as commodity, but also the subject who appears as its consumer.”22

This, incidentally, is precisely what Shoshana Zuboff misses in her critique of “surveillance capitalism.”23 The recombination of dividual elements points to a far deeper problem than that of “privacy”—which is like the “light we see from a dead star,” as Clare Birchall aptly puts it.24 Claims of privacy, reminiscent of idyllic liberal notions of the perfectly bounded spheres of public and private, are increasingly useless given the contemporary form of vectorialist power. Instead, as Neyrat argues, “when capitalism becomes recombinant, when it takes control of the processes of virtualization and actualization, what we are robbed of is our capacity to synthesize as such.”25 In other words, the vectorial colonization of our modes of subjectification confines the subject’s field of experiential possibility to the successive transitional arrangements of data points that the vector puts forth at each moment.

Critique, in the Western (post-)Marxist tradition, as a practice of tearing holes in the veil of ideology and liberating representation from capitalist fetishism, falls short. There is nothing to be recuperated, nothing to be exposed. In this digital matryoshka doll, what exactly is the kernel underneath the various shells? If one reverse engineers the process leading up to the commodification of metadata, what is there to be recuperated, beyond the fallacy of privacy-centered discourse? What was all this noise, before it was made into money?

A few decades ago, a certain mode of affirmation provided hope to emancipatory politics; we were told to escape the negative and choose the positive, as Foucault famously recommended in his preface to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus. Simply put, when Foucault pleaded for “difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems,” there was still a political choice to be made.26 These were perhaps the last years of nomadic romanticism.

The problem today, in the age of fully fledged vectorialism, is not the struggle between the limits of the negative and the emancipatory potential of the positive, but rather the dire reality that flows are the dominating forces, that systems have long been replaced by mobile arrangements, and that it is obviously capital today that is the highest form of nomadism. Vectors have won.

Today, the real political tragedy is interactivity.27 Indeed, as Wark remarked, “capitalism is a communicable disease in the form of a disease of communication. It puts everything into communication with everything else.”28 Vectorialism is a technologically enhanced form of capitalism qua absolute communicability. Something like metadata, from the vantage point of vectorialism, is a refined form of further abstracting representations, the interplay of which generates a surplus for the vectorialist class.29

This is why the hacker class cannot reclaim anything back from the vectorialists, why it cannot perform the restitution that would lead to its emancipation: the abstractions it produces, the information it generates—willingly or, more often than not, unwittingly—is not redeemable. Most of what is being capitalized on by the vectorialists does not correspond exactly to a dispossession of the fruits of labor of a certain class (even if it is also this). It can perhaps be more accurately described as the forced circulation of evermore abstract representations.

Sure, the latter are produced from indexing the traces of everything we do; they extend virtually everywhere, forming a vast network of worldwide “smartness.”30 But they are also often useless when disconnected from the vectors (or stacks) that exploit their economic potential.31 The information asymmetries that the vector produces are continuously remodeled, as vectorialists dismantle old markets and create new ones, capitalizing on any bit of information that can be abstracted further.

A few years ago, an enthusiastic cybernetician remarked that “information, unlike matter or energy, is not a conserved quantity: it can in principle be replicated without limit.” He further added that the internet, “because of its digital character … can be viewed as a virtually frictionless medium, [making] the unlimited replication [of information] possible in practice.” This, hoped the eminent cybernetician, would lead to a “metasystem … that would integrate the whole of humanity together with all its supporting technologies and most of its surrounding ecosystems, and that would function at a level of intelligence, awareness and complexity that we at present simply cannot imagine.” A “global superorganism” directed by a “Global Brain” would then be able to authenticate, select, and hierarchize the interactions between agents—which, in the author’s matrix, “can be people, organizations, cells, robots, or any living organisms”—in a given system. This “intelligent web” would “[draw] on the experience and knowledge of its users collectively, as externalized in the ‘trace’ of preferences that they leave on the paths they have traveled.”32 Is there a better theoretical instantiation of vectorialism?

Have our hacks been abstracting towards global digital integration, participating in the coming into being of the infrastructure that subtends the vector? And the vexata quaestio: Was this the unfortunate destiny of our rhizomatic hopes? In the present conditions, we can no longer depart from the Proudhonian refrain that “property is theft”; the scandal is elsewhere, in the forcing into presence, and therefore into representation and communication, of what can never become property, non-property as such. Even the most abstract of things can take the property form—and indeed they do—but not that which exists on a plane that prohibits appropriation.

As has been demonstrated during the last twenty years, the qualitative differences introduced by information as it became the dominant form of property were not enough to threaten its existence. Its abstractive power, in and of itself, was unable to subsume the property form. If the hacker class failed to socialize the fruits of its labor, it was because information is always-already an expression of property; it is property in potentia. As Wark knew too well, “property produces, piece by piece, the armor of subjectivity.”33 The holes we find in today’s armors of subjectivity are a testament to the vectorialists’ success in taking control of the portal connecting information and representation.

Where to start—again—for the hackers, now that the tragedy of the last twenty years is starting to manifest everywhere as farce? Today’s hackers need not be the new subject of history—another iteration in the left’s endless game of tag, exchanging one collective subject for another. From the Zapatistas to Occupy and beyond, each time a new collective subject loses its political momentum, the left’s revolutionary hopes are transferred to the next collective subject. The “coming community” keeps coming forever.

Beyond the calcified history of class relations, the hack can perhaps renew its vitality as a material instantiation of expression—as the insinuation of a plane of asubjectivity. In reality, vectorialists have been doing the first part of the job. Their ever more abstract representations have done more to hollow out the subject than hackers could ever dream of. Let us then acknowledge our losses; we do so not to report a theft but to plan what we can do in exile.

Like Wark did twenty years ago, we too will “not offer the virtual up as semantic hostage to the enemy.”34 Virtuality is all we have. We already know that the representations turned identities circulating with increasing velocity within the vector are not only false, but that their transitory configurations are cyclically revoked and replaced by others that turn out to be circumstantially better suited to extinguish any spark of revolt—and make some money. We “dance the war of apposition” and escape the Heideggerian angst over the “techno-erasure of metaphysical truth.”35 Now that vectorialists have definitely reverted Platonism—now that, as Alexander Galloway notes, “becoming has become superior to being”—our point of departure is perhaps clearer.36

Is it still a battle between our virtualization and their actualization, our use value and their exchange value, our expression and their information? The development of the means of production—their successive abstraction, intensified in the era of global digital integration—turned out to be insufficient for the new, for whatever expression expresses, to touch the unrepresentable. If the hack, as a conceptual tool, is to survive, it needs to lead to a form of commonality beyond liberal universalism.

Wark had already pointed the way, but much has changed. Then, it was perhaps possible to extract some concessions in the class conflict by momentarily “acquiesce[ing] to representation.”37 But this space has already been hacked by vectorialists. Now, the hack cannot but deal in imperceptibility, and again reinvent expression in the dark. In the “quest for nonexistence,” the hack is both concept and strategy.38 The failure of the hacker class, in this light, is no failure at all. In other words, the hacker is not an identity, a position in an updated scheme of class relations, but merely a point, somewhere along a line of flight casting towards genericity and commonality.

Commonality—one of the insinuations of communism—has always been incompatible with the subject of liberal politics, as Deleuze knew very well. Today, the permanently recombinant forms of subjectification that the reigning vector authorizes have already put an end to any recuperation of that idealized subject. “Logistics wants to dispense with the subject altogether,” Harney and Moten contend.39 Vectorialism, the most sophisticated form of logistical governance, accomplished just that. In the process, it has introduced many of us to the feeling of being “a problem in someone else’s supply chain.”40

Seb Franklin, discussing Eduardo Williams’s film El auge del humano (The Human Surge, 2016), addresses this specific predicament: subjects are “marked as unreliable components,” and certain bodies are “life-to-be-computed” while others are “life-to-be-congealed.” Franklin wonders about the possibility of living in a “relationship of indifference to value-informatic demands.”41 Thus, the hack can be thought of as a form of densifying indifference, of offering a material substrate for the strategic subtraction that Deleuze and Guattari posit as the privileged gesture of liberation.42

For Wark, the hacker class was to “hack through, and dispense with, all properties of the object and subject.”43 Now that the vector has definitely abstracted all of those properties—all of them but the property form—hackers find new accomplices to finish the task. Having installed a kingdom of hyper-communication oversaturated with claims of identity that they nullify politically, the vectorialists are less and less interested in working to maintain the fiction of a stable correspondence between beings and their projected images. After Tiananmen, the tanks have been busy with other things.

If, as Andrew Culp maintains, “subtraction is the political science of the underground,” then this subtractive plane is where new, unexpected hacks can help dismantle the vectorial ruling class.44 The places where the undercommons comes to life are full of unnatural accomplices, human but also more-than-human. Butterflies and mycelia can hack too, but their hacks have too often been framed as part of a perfectly communicative mesh of vital energies and circulating fluxes, sharing with capitalism an ethos of absolute commensurability. Instead, can the hack be a tool of xenocommunication?45

Is there a way to cast lines to an outside that knows no difference between presence and appearance? Beyond the reenactment of tiresome debates about which conceptual tools are better aligned with the present predicament, there’s obviously much to draw upon, if we excavate the accumulated sediment of the post-situationist apparatus and its heirs.

There are intensities at work, leading to new complicities. There are other hacks laboring in this world, cutting through matter, forming vast zones of opacity that refuse representation. Siding with the imperceptible, the opaque, the alien, can hackers find new ways to virtualize the space of indeterminacy that installs itself in every encounter? Harney and Moten are right: “We owe each other the indeterminate.”46

Everything has already melted into air, the air into airwaves. The distance between holiness and profanity collapsed a long time ago and there is nothing profound behind the veil of appearances. Finally, some hope.