marxism

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.

Source: amazon.com

The act of creation requires us to remix existing cultural content and yet recent sweeping changes to copyright laws have criminalized the creative act as a violation of corporate rights in a commodified world. Copyright was originally designed to protect publishers, not authors, and has now gained a stranglehold on our ability to transport, read, write, teach and publish digital materials.

Contrasting Western models with issues of piracy as practiced in Asia, Digital Prohibition explores the concept of authorship as a capitalist institution and posits the Marxist idea of the multitude (à la Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, and Paulo Virno) as a new collaborative model for creation in the digital age. Looking at how digital culture has transformed unitary authorship from its book-bound parameters into a collective and dispersed endeavor, Dr. Guertin examines process-based forms as diverse as blogs, Facebook, Twitter, performance art, immersive environments, smart mobs, hacktivism, tactical media, machinima, generative computer games (like Spore and The Sims) and augmented reality.

(Source: Continuum online catalog)