Presentation of the Croatian translation of the book "A Hacker Manifesto", McKenzie Wark
McKenzie Wark is the author of A Hacker Manifesto and many other books. He teaches at the New School for Social Research in New York City.
McKenzie Wark came to Novi Sad to present his book "A Hacker Manifesto" in Croatian language published by Multimedia institute from Zagreb. Besides Novi Sad, Wark visited Ljubljana, Zagreb and Belgrade. "A Hacker Manifesto" reconstructs political-economical thought of Marx in the context of information age, with the influence of Guy Debord and Gilles Delueze.
McKenzie Wark about the book:
... Information wants to be free, but is everywhere in chains. The new digital technologies reveal for the first time the real ontological weirdness of information. It can escape from scarcity. My possession of it deprives no other of it. At least, things have developed to the point where there is something than can truly be held in common. And yet information is increasingly subject to extraordinary legal and technical constraints. So called DRMs --"digital rights management" - or more properly "digital restrictions management" threatens to choke off this new world of free information, and restrict it to the property of a few corporations. Meanwhile drug companies and global agribusiness is rapidly turning nature into private property, through the instrument of the patent. And while manufacturing is spreading into the so-called underdeveloped world, the production and distribution cycle is more and more controlled by a limited family of brands, also in the hands of a handful of corporations. But against this enchaining of information to the commodity form, a popular counter movement has arisen which challenges this restriction on the very being of information. This movement gives rise to a new activist figure - the hacker - the one who works with information but does not own or control it. It is time to make manifest the aims and ambitions, the desires and dreams, of this class who would stand on the side of a free information order - the hacker class.