Kate Milberry

So two days ago I attended [CRTL], which was a symposium about art, technology and society. The keynote was McKenzie Wark, whom I’d vaguely heard of in the context of his 2004 book, A Hacker Manifesto. I haven’t read it, but anyone who knows me would know I would like anything with “manifesto” in the title. I’m just that kinda girl…

Wark framed his talk with the notion of contemporary personas – two in particular: the hacker and the gamer. These personas offer a way of negotiating between abstract concepts/principles and the particulars of everyday experience. They help us get from everyday to abstract concepts, with the latter more closely approximating “how the world is run” (that is to say, everyday particulars are the result, not cause, of abstract concepts on which society is based, organized)

Wark’s goal with A Hacker Manifesto was to resurrect it as a category, reclaiming it from the realm of criminality, and reinstate it as a critical concept. He defines hacker quite loosely: it refers to the creative use of information (that may or may not use technology). So a hacker is one who cuts, edits, remixes information.

This provided a segue into Wark’s next topic, intellectual property, on which information creation historically has been dependent. IP’s advancement was accelerated by the invention of the machine layer that makes information’s relation to materiality completely contingent: the relation between information and its material form is arbitrary.
The evolution of digital technology enabled the separation of layers, thus digital information can become tangible, can be embedded in other, forms.

Technology, therefore, increasingly facilitates the separation of information from ownership altogether; info escapes from scarcity, necessity. Walter Benjamin anticipates this possibility, regarding it as an enabling stage for collective repossession of info as something through which we can manage our own world. The property system prevents this, Wark contended, because “owned” information creates a conflict b/w info as creation vs. info as property.

Shifting to game theory, Wark invoked Plato’s Cave, positioning the gamer in a prison of a shadowy game world, who emerges into the “real world” to find everyone hunched over their computers. In Wark’s inversion, the whole world has turned into a computer game; everyday life is an impoverished version of life, where things never seem fair, where the rules are unclear, and the umpire is unknown. In games, there is a level playing field, where the rules are known and achieving success is possible.

It is not the content of the game (against modernist aesthetics) that is important; rather, said Wark, the underlying algorithm of the game; this algorithmic gamer culture becomes a way of grasping the world. The algorithm, he argued, is a way of thinking allegorically about time, for example, in everyday life. With politics a horse race, the economy a casino and work a rat race, life more and more approximates the culture of the game, with the objective to turn whole of culture into algorithm. It is an attempt to manage life as one entire algorithmic game experience.

This raises some obvious questions. Is there a limit to algorithmic thinking? What does it exclude to its detriment, that has to do w/quality of digital (in that the digital necessarily excludes ambiguity)? We can divide all of what’s to be experienced into code, into 1s and 0s. But is something lost in this translation?

All of this to get around to this question: How can you democratize knowledge? Wark invoked critical theory as one way. He talked closed by imagining practices of making knowledge democratic that does not fetishize; a process to which we can attach an ethics, maybe even a politics.