Currently reading A Hacker Manifesto by McKenzie Wark. Not to be (or to be?) confused with The Hacker’s Manifesto/”The Conscious of a Hacker” by The Mentor, which appeared in a zine in 1986 and is also worth reading. Anyway, here’s a few excerpts from Wark’s book:
[135] Information may want to be free, but it is not possible to know the limits or potentials of its freedom when the virtual is subordinated to this actual state of ownership and scarcity. Privatizing information and knowledge as commodified “content” distorts and deforms its free development, and prevents the very concept of its freedom from its own free development. “As our economy becomes increasingly dependent on information, our traditional system of property rights applied to information becomes a costly fetter on our development.”* The subordination of hackers to the vectoralist interest means the enslavement not only of the whole of human potential, but also natural potential. While information is chained to the interests of its owners, it is not just hackers who may not know their interests, no class may know what it may become.
[176] Property is theft!” as Proudhon says.* It is theft abstracted, the theft of nature from itself, by collective social labor, constrained within the property form. Property is not naturally occurring. It is not a natural right but an historical product, product of a powerful hack of ambivalent consequences. To make something property is to separate it from a continuum, to mark it or bound it, to represent it as something finite. At the same time, making something as property connects it, via a representation of it as a separate and finite object, to the subject who owns it. What is cut from one process joins another process, what was nature becomes second nature.
