It is the digital information age we live in. We live with the general ability to access more information than ever before and express ourselves more freely with greater reach than any generation to ever have come before. We surround ourselves with technologies that are obsolete almost as nearly as they develop in the common place, that is if it isn’t outdated by the time it has even reached the consumer market. The information and development of the past decade or so has moved at such incredible pace that it is often to difficult to keep up. What might the future hold? Should we ever be so interconnected that we ourselves begin adapting hardware for our own physical attributes (the hacked man)? It may sound far fetched but something that Vannevar Bush began predicting over half a century ago, and in modern medicine is becoming a more prominent means to help one live and is pushing more and more experimental developments. That said, in as rough broad terms as it may describe, we are able to access information pertinent to our requests like none before us and yet there is more information than there has ever been before and we continue adding to it at a nearly exponential rate.
Who controls the access to the information though? And does someone own the rights to it? Insert the world controlled by the vector, controlling the whole of information and ultimately development by controlling the amount of access. The lives we lead allow the larger machine to make progress as the vector oversees to be fitting. Brought into a slave system through our education to fit into the positions needed and held down through the wage system ultimately embodying some type of nuclear family or wasting away struggling to achieve a goal of ‘success’ much like the joke of a donkey chasing a carrot. How many people do you know who have gone to college so that they may walk out with a high paying job, more concerned with the money they will make later than the knowledge they could gain at the time? This is not to say that a life struggling to stay afloat in the demands of modern society is anything glamourous but maybe rather suicidal… Here arrives Mckenzie Wark’s Hacker class. A class of citizens working under the vertoral class but with independent thoughts and desires for knowledge. A class that is fighting internally to liberate the information withheld and share its possibilities, to innovate and find new relationships, ultimately developing through free thought what the vectoralists and their machine could never achieve. This is a world where everything that is physical is owned and thus the next thing to acquire is intellectual property and use it to control the others. It is a relationship thousands of years old, those who own the most control those around them and ultimately the direction of society as is fitting to their own needs. Now, this isn’t some robin hood kind of shit, or Val Kilmer acting as some sort of saint saving thousands, or the matrix if you’re willing to go that far. There isn’t one savior-esque person who is going to save/free us from the evil world clouded around us. This is a dynamic relationship and maybe many aren’t meant to be anything more than slaves/sheep overseen by a ruling class… I couldn’t say one or the other – ultimately I’m writing this to pass my class and am just acting out the act of the slave within the system – but it is the Hacker who stands out keeping the ruling vectoralists from abusing its serfs by providing the possibility of large scale free thought resulting in the toppling of the hierarchy – the ultimate flaw is a new one always follows. These Hackers may be at points in history revolutionaries, philosophers, scientists, artists, and never limited to the common man inspired by greater desires for knowledge with such motivation that they will use all their capabilities. The modern Hacker is one of the intermedia realm who is not bound by code or held back by borders, whose quest for knowledge strides past the capitalist/communist/socialist state of mind/machine achieving what others did not think possible.
I don’t even want to relate this to open source culture because although they are obvious proponents of the Hacker class they are only an acting tool for its struggle to free information. They are a rare inter-society keeping the information they have created free – as all information ultimately desires to be.
mid riff note 