The Hacker Class Is Dead, Long Live the Hackers!

The article revisits McKenzie Wark's A Hacker Manifesto twenty years after its publication, arguing that the hacker class it envisioned has been defeated by the vectorialist class that captures information. It argues that information has been turned into abstract, digitized dividual elements, such as metadata and traces of online behavior, which now generate the vectorialists' profits. Drawing on Frédéric Neyrat and N. Katherine Hayles, it contends that the vectorialist class has neutralized hacking's possibilities by reconstructing representations along infra-subjective lines.