How to Be a 21st Century Marxist With Hacker Theorist McKenzie Wark

“exploiting our emotional and cognitive abilities in an ever-escalating bid for our attention.” ⤴️
“a complex system of surveillance disguises itself within our hyper-fantasy of connection.” ⤴️
“Amazon is a convenient service provider for the private citizen––and ICE uses its technology when tracking and apprehending immigrants.” ⤴️
“our collective work and play produces a world over and against us…collective human labor made a world for a ruling class that keeps making not only itself but us in its image.”” ⤴️
McKenzie Wark, Capital is Dead, 2019
“Expanding upon the terms “Hacker” and “Vectorialist class,” first coined in her 1994’s The Hacker Manifesto, McKenzie” ⤴️
“questions our reluctance to re-define our reality” ⤴️
“quotidian rejection of category” ⤴️
“her ability to forge a new kind of criticism—one that is less about negation and more about possibility—that leans into this uncanniness and contrariety.” ⤴️
“start thinking about the past as a maze, with all these little byways,” McKenzie” ⤴️
""Something that didn’t flourish in the 1920s or 1960s might be the place to start now…especially if you’re being gaslit by exactly the same people over and over again.”” ⤴️
this is how I am looking at prev copying/capturing tech — what are the other avenues we could’ve taken/could still take
“the future as contestable.” ⤴️
“The right not to answer certain questions—like are you or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party, is important,” ⤴️
“living through a series of defeats, and having to deal emotionally with the fact that one always gets defeated, and that there’s a rethinking that comes after that, like a reorientation.” ⤴️
“Dubravka Ugrešić where she says something like, “I’m on the side of the losers,” which actually always felt very hopeful to me. I can’t reproduce the line even in translation, but in Rimbaud it’s: “I’m of that race that sat on the scaffold.”” ⤴️
“I like to not be too caught up in institutional frameworks. I like learning outside of that kind of environment and I always did” ⤴️
“I was in the middle of a rave explaining to a trans woman how to turn her blog posts on being a trans sex worker into a book proposal” ⤴️
“found your work generous and generative—open in that sense.” ⤴️
“what you mean by “low theory.”” ⤴️
““Low theory” is a back formation from what used to be called “high theory,”” ⤴️
“I never had the pedigree or the training to do that, and it seems to have ended up as a sort of set of formal exercises that could never escape the university.” ⤴️
“Stuart Hall who said, “Theory is a detour on the way to somewhere more important.”” ⤴️
“How can a book be a thing that’s got the tools in it” ⤴️
“I also think of “low theory” as connected to practises.” ⤴️
“you said that the utopian is the practical taken to the extreme,” ⤴️
“when reactionary projects seem to be occupying the most space? What utopian projects do you see?” ⤴️
“you have to get out of a sort of cold war liberal discourse where utopia is always bad because it leads to totalitarianism” ⤴️
“could you think of anything more utopian than neoliberalism? It’s like a utopia for the ruling class. What I think people miss about the utopian is that it’s really about who takes out the trash, what do we do with bad feelings; it tries to deal with all of these difficult problems.” ⤴️
“for building in the present––you can have a utopian evening, that seems to me to be a thing worth attempting.” ⤴️
“Capital in its most modern forms seems to be preparing us for a retreat from the public world—the outside world is either abandoned or expensive; pathologized or sterilized” ⤴️
“In my kid’s lifetime, it will probably be under water, so I feel like archiving it in a way, documenting it, as well as just enjoying it while it’s still here. It’s still just marginally inhabitable, but it’s getting harder” ⤴️
“there’s enough junk space out in its peripheries that people can do things in them and inhabit them,” ⤴️
“I occupy many layers of privilege just to be able to walk around the streets. But I love cities.” ⤴️
“Whatever this emerging or emergent mode of production is, it treats everything as reducible to information. So to what extent do bodies become known in detail? And then massively, statistically aggregated and treated probabilistically.” ⤴️
“We tend to think about this in terms of individual privacy, but the other side of it: Who gets to own all of that information in the aggregate? Who owns the information about us as a population?” ⤴️
“a danger in the way we are assuming millennials as inherently progressive—of course, being downwardly mobile, we’re inherently radicalized, but how might we build real or lasting solidarities?” ⤴️
“It’s now pretty naked—the war to find division, you see an entire media apparatus just devoted to nothing but looking for scapegoats.” ⤴️
“To scapegoat trans people, particularly trans women, is just a whole industry at the moment. And that’s sort of strategically smart in the sense that we’re a very small population, mostly fairly poor and mostly isolated and politically unorganized—so attack us and sort of split us off, and get us all fighting.” ⤴️
“We were doing this critique in the 90s—there was this relentless truism that the whole discourse about technology was positive and it’s like, you’re just not reading widely honey. Not just me, but a whole community of people, who were critical practitioners of a kind of punk approach to tech. It’s sort of bittersweet to see people stumble into this out of nowhere.” ⤴️
“is there a new layer to what exploitation is? Is there a new mode of production growing out of capitalism?” ⤴️
“Is there a new kind of ruling class, and could we view it as one that mostly controls information?” ⤴️
“I think that needs a new critical language—so I called it the “vectorialist class,” who controls the vector of information.” ⤴️
“new subordinate classes” ⤴️
“that makes information but doesn’t get to own it.” ⤴️
“It’s like labor but it’s not quite the same thing as labor because it’s very, very hard to quantify.” ⤴️
“Your relation to whether what you do will have value is very different. I think that needed some specificity.” ⤴️
“it’s even just called “the tech industry,” or “Silicon Valley”—no-one calls it the “new ruling class”” ⤴️
“There’s a tendency to shy away from linguistic innovation. I think we need our own linguistic innovation,” ⤴️
“How do we be 21st century Marxists? It is a question I think is not asked often enough.” ⤴️