A Hacket Manifesto is a critical manifesto written by McKenzie Wark, where he criticizes the commodification of information in the age of digital culture and globalization.
Wark, hacking begins with what he defines as an “abstraction”, the construction of different and unrelated matters into previously unrealized relations. Hackers produce new conceptions, perceptions and sensations hacked out of raw data. Everything and anything is a code for the hacker to hack, be it “programming, language, poetic language, math, or music, curves or colourings” and once hacked, they create the possibility for new things to enter the world. I found that really interesting and it shows how hacking creates a new world that people has yet to see. However it is usually misunderstood by most people in society as hackers tend to bend the rules that were set and it shows a sign rebellion.
What they create is not necessarily “great”, or “even good”, but new, in the areas of culture, art, science, and philosophy or “in any production of knowledge where data can be extracted from it.” A new culture would be created due to the exploration of hackers in the media world and they are able to discover what normal people wouldn’t see or experience.
Wark argues that “new” information comes from the hack. It doesn’t matter if you are a computer programmer, a philosopher, a teacher, a musician, a physicist, if you essentially produce new information – it’s a hack . In that sense, anything that is original and out of the ordinary would be consider a hack. In this sense, hackers are creators and they bring new ideas into the world. The aim of the book is to highlight the origins, purpose and efforts by this emerging hacker class, who produce new; concepts, perceptions, and sensations out of the stuff of raw data.
After reading this article, I realized that the idea of hack was very different from what i thought of in the beginning. Hacking can be a really good thing as hackers discover a world that people hasn’t seen yet and it brings new things that are unseen. Society is constantly changing and i believe people should appreciate change because sometimes change leads to inventions and improvements in the world.