This would be more like the model of a chain letter, for example. Long before the Occupy Wall Street movement, occupation literature circulated, and in the curious form of PDFfiles. They were designed to be transmitted, if not hand to hand, then e-mail to e-mail, to not be too readily searchable and retrievable by just anybody.
Of course, vectoral power is already here. It is called viral marketing. The game is to imagine other uses to which such a strategy can be put—and to go beyond, to invent new kinds of relations. Who knows what a relation can be? We haven't seen anything yet.
Lastly, I want to caution against three of the common modes of self-understanding that we have accepted a little too willingly without thinking it through. The first is the romance of the pirate.7 We are not pirates; we are hackers. And the distinction is this: The pirate is someone who takes another's property. Pirates take what does not belong to them. There is a romantic side to the pirate, but it is the romance of transgression. A transgression that, of course, mostly confirms the very notion of property in the act of coveting the property that belongs to another.
Call it what you like. If not hacking, then something else. But not piracy. The pirate takes another's property. The hacker makes something new out of property that belongs to everyone in the first place. Informationwants to be free but is everywhere in chains. The figure of the pirate draws attention to the chains. The figure of the hacker insists that information is in its very being something that is free, that always escapes the property form. It is where we are and remain social beings. It is where, far from being on the run or in retreat, the game is only just begun.
Not that the persona of the pirate is without its uses. In 2011, the Pirate Party won seats in Berlin's municipal elections on a platform that combined support for a guaranteed minimum income with the legalization of drug use and sophisticated positions on information rights.8 However, the future of progressive politics in the overdeveloped world may lie in a range of experiments in combining the interests of labor and the interests of the hacker class broadly defined—that is, if politics can be said to exist outside ofthe use of the vector for marketing purposes.
Second,I want to caution against the rhetoric of gamification. This could most broadly be conceived of as getting people to do things without paying them by offering them symbolic rewards in exchange. These rewardsappeal by being rare and by being stratified. You can distinguish yourself by winning this symbolic token, which is ranked in relation to a wholehierarchy ofsuch tokens
Superficially, this seems like the logic of the gift economy. You do something for nothing because you want to do it, not as labor grudgingly offered in exchange for wages or other incentives but for fun, as “playbor." The difference is that the gift is not to another, and not via another to the commons in general, and the reward is not recognition by others making the same gifts. Rather, what is offered is a bit of cognitive energy that performs a task some vectoral business requires, and the reward is only à formal and abstract kind of token and ranking. It is not
Considerations on a Hacker Manifesto
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