Blog 8

In McKenzie Wark’s A Hacker Manifesto, he talks about who is a hacker and what makes them a hacker. Wark begins by talking about the manifestation of hackers. He talks about how when a hacker hacks codes, they bring forth new possibilities to our world. Wark then talks about abstraction and how hackers have their own class in society. They have this class in order to express themselves to the world. Hackers produce their own form of production. However this production is a repetition of they already produced thing. This creates a production surplus. Wark continues to talk about the hacker class and how they create information from their hacks and how intellectual property. Hackers created the need for private property and the creation of things like patents and copyrights. According to Wark, hackers believe in knowledge. However, they do not believe in education. This  is because to them, education requires obedience. This is something that hackers have no desire for. I found it interesting that to McKenzie Wark, being a hacker means obtaining information and displaying it to the world. Whether the information is good or bad does not matter. I thought that hackers always tried to do bad things And mess with peoples computers. To me hackers always had a negative connotation to them but Wark showed the good that comes from hackers. He explained how hackers only want to share information. Even if the information has a copyright, they still want to share it with the world. I believe that people have a right to whatever information they want to have so I am supportive of this claim. Wark’s A Hacker Manifesto shows how hackers are not necessarily bad. They just want to get all the knowledge they can get their hands on and I do not see any problem with this. In fact, I completely agree with this.