<nettime> a hacker manifesto

[McKenzie Wark <mw35@nyu.edu>]

dear nettimers,

I'm writing to invite your thoughts and comments on a new text I am
working on, called A HACKER MANIFESTO. The text is at:

http://www.feelergauge.net/projects/hackermanifesto/version_2.0/

There is a guestbook for comments, (click the 'discussion' button) and I
would greatly value your thoughts on this still-tentative attempt at
'thinking through the present'.

We all saw it on TV, and in the papers and on our favourite web sites.
Hundreds of thousands of people taking to the streets, again and again,
in a wave of resistance to that highly emotive, if not always terribly
clear adversary, 'globalisation'.

The Genoa demonstrations against the G8 in particular prompted me to sit
down and try to clarify my rather mixed feeling about the
anti-globalisation movement. After the Genoa police shot Carlo Giuliani
in the face, it seemed especially urgent to me to respond to this
violence by trying to advance some concepts with which to grasp what is
going on all around us.

I leave it to others of more robust constitution and far more brave than
I to decide what is to be done on the streets. It is at the conceptual
level that it seems to me that there are difficulties to which I could
better apply myself. And those conceptual difficulties are formidable.
It is not at all clear to me that anyone has yet worked out a
consistently progressive concept of a politics that might emerge out of
the antiglobalisation movement.

This movement clearly contains both progressive and regressive elements,
but might also contain the seeds of a politics that escapes some of the
old antimonies, as I argue in A HACKER MANIFESTO. I look forward to your
thoughts on it.

http://www.feelergauge.net/projects/hackermanifesto/version_2.0/

McKenzie Wark
Brooklyn NY
8th August 2000


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