Announcing a new book from Harvard University Press...

A Hacker Manifesto
by McKenzie Wark

"[Wark's] ambitious A Hacker Manifesto Googles for signs of hope in this cyber-
global- corporate-brute world of ours, and he fixes on the hackers, macro-savvy
visionaries from all fields who 'hack' the relationships and meanings the rest of us
take for granted. If we hackers--of words, computers, sound, science, etc.--organize
into a working, sociopolitical class, Wark argues, then the world can be ours."
   --Hua Hsu, Village Voice

"Writers, artists, biotechnologists, and software programmers belong to the 'hacker
class' and share a class interest in openness and freedom, while the 'vectoralist' and
'ruling classes' are driven to contain, control, dominate, and own. Wark crafts a new
analysis of the tension between the underdeveloped and 'overdeveloped' worlds,
their relationships to surplus and scarcity, and the drive toward human
actualization."
   --Michael Jensen, Chronicle of Higher Education

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/WARHAC.html

A double is haunting the world--the double of abstraction, the virtual reality of
information, programming or poetry, math or music, curves or colorings upon which
the fortunes of states and armies, companies and communities now depend. The
bold aim of this book is to make manifest the origins, purpose, and interests of the
emerging class responsible for making this new world--for producing the new
concepts, new perceptions, and new sensations out of the stuff of raw data.

A Hacker Manifesto deftly defines the fraught territory between the ever more strident
demands by drug and media companies for protection of their patents and
copyrights and the pervasive popular culture of file sharing and pirating. This vexed
ground, the realm of so-called "intellectual property," gives rise to a whole new kind
of class conflict, one that pits the creators of information--the hacker class of
researchers and authors, artists and biologists, chemists and musicians,
philosophers and programmers--against a possessing class who would monopolize
what the hacker produces.

Drawing in equal measure on Guy Debord and Gilles Deleuze, A Hacker Manifesto
offers a systematic restatement of Marxist thought for the age of cyberspace and
globalization. In the widespread revolt against commodified information, McKenzie
Wark sees a utopian promise, beyond the property form, and a new progressive
class, the hacker class, who voice a shared interest in a new information commons.

McKenzie Wark is Professor of Cultural and Media Studies at Lang College, New
School University. He is the author of several books, most recently Dispositions.

October 2004   Cloth   208 pages   ISBN 0-674-01543-6