Chris McGahan

English Department
Yeshiva University
clm7458@nyu.edu

 

Review of: McKenzie Wark, A Hacker Manifesto. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2004; and Vincent Mosco, The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power, and Cyberspace.Cambridge: MIT P, 2004.

 

Anyone with an interest in political and cultural developments in and around cyberspace would welcome new books by McKenzie Wark and Vincent Mosco. Coming from different angles–Wark from critical theory (with a clearly evident debt to the idiosyncratic work of Paul Virilio) and Mosco from the political economy of media–both writers have already made important contributions to a still-emergent body of literature on new media and the Internet. Though one can point to exemplary Internet scholarship like Slater and Miller’s The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach, too few critical texts address the Internet as the technocultural phenomenon it has become. In 1999, such a problem would have been regrettable, yet understandable, given the relative novelty of the Internet as a medium for political advocacy, mass and micro cultures, and webs of commerce; today, it is nothing short of lamentable.

 

Mosco and Wark thus deserve credit for having done a great deal, in texts like the former’s “Webs of Myth and Power: Connectivity and the New Computer Technopolis” (2000) and the latter’s Virtual Geography: Living with Global Media Events (1994), to throw light on the practical and theoretical dimensions of the network society. In the article noted above and in other recent texts, Mosco has assiduously tracked how the realities of the global division of labor and capital’s movement to radically reconfigure media markets give the lie to utopian claims about the democratization effects supposedly inherent to the ever-wider spread of information technologies. Wark’s pioneering discussion of global media events in Virtual Geography established an early theoretical framework useful for later examinations of some of the key cultural factors bearing on the dissemination of information on the Internet.

 

In Wark’s A Hacker Manifesto and Mosco’s The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power and Cyberspace, the authors attempt to surpass the reach of their previous work. On the one hand, Wark postulates that hackers, understood in a broad sense to include intellectual laborers who use information technologies in their work, constitute a new “class” equipped with a revolutionary capacity to do battle with capital via the “vector,” Wark’s term for the global circulation of information; on the other hand, Mosco provides a broad examination of the discursive bases upon which popular and academic understandings of cyberspace have tended to be uncritically associated with dubious concepts like “the end of history” and “the disappearance of geography.” Wark thus delivers up an argument that is in some measure rooted in political economy, while Mosco departs from the terrain of political economy proper to investigate the ideological underpinnings of cybercultural myth-making. In both cases, these ambitious projects provide valuable insights into Internet culture and politics. Before getting to a discussion of these, however, I want to indicate a general problem with the methodology employed by both projects. In the spirit of Wark’s manifesto, I will call this problem “the filtering out of actually existing cyberspace.”

 

An unfortunate feature of these books is the degree to which they speak about hackers (however broadly categorized) or the mythical “digital sublime” while paying little attention to what actually happens when hackers become involved in or are subjected to Internet social networks, institutional protocols, and cultural genres. One can search almost entirely in vain in these texts for specific instances of cybercultural practice. Now, it is possible to identify certain understandable reasons of method for this omission. In Wark’s case, the form of the manifesto does not permit detailed discussion, and Mosco self-avowedly seeks to analyze the “myths” framing academic and popular understandings of the Internet rather than talk about what netizens are actually getting up to online. That said, this review will show that the cogency of Mosco’s and Wark’s arguments is weakened by the absence of sustained consideration of actually existing cyberspace.

 

Since its release earlier this year, A Hacker Manifesto has attracted a lot of attention, including a review by Terry Eagleton in the 25 October 2004 issue of The Nation. Beyond the author’s stature–Wark is now professor of media and cultural studies at the New School University–a likely reason for the book’s having drawn such interest is its loose focus on hacking; after all, two decades after its emergence as a hot topic in popular culture, the cultural work of hackers is still surrounded by more mystique than understanding. Because, however, Wark has framed his project so as to address a much wider set of issues, his book is unlikely to clear up many common misperceptions regarding the practical or ideological orientation of hacking or hackers. Another reason for the book’s notoriety is that its analysis extends a thesis put forward recently and notably in Hardt and Negri’s widely read Empire: that the global body of technologically literate culture and service industry workers (for Hardt and Negri, “social workers”) has the potential to become, via their privileged role in the production, circulation, and maintenance of the information required for the function of capital on a global scale (“immaterial labor”), a revolutionary, anti-capitalist force of unprecedented potency. This conceptualization of Internet-era intellectual labor as a new basis for revolutionary agency is indeed the heart of Wark’s book.

 

Wark lays out various proposals concerning his understanding of hacking as a form of class struggle in brief and rather oracular chapters with titles like “Revolt,” “Subject,” and “World.” The thrust of his argument is that cultural workers are becoming constituted as a class via the emergence of an objective conflict between their need for a free flow of information with which to do their work and the full-scale commodification of information following the establishment of the so-called new economy and a corresponding regime of restrictive intellectual property law. The form of politics proper to this new class, Wark maintains, consists of demands not for the redistribution of wealth or collective ownership of the means of production but rather for universal access to information as a means for conceiving and realizing new desires and new forms of life. Rather than working to reform or overthrow the state, he writes, this form of politics is radical to the extent that it “seeks to permeate existing states with a new state of existence . . . spread[ing] the seeds of an alternative practice of everyday life” (256). Wark calls this “expressive politics.”

 

In terms of what he has to say about hackers as agents of class struggle, Wark is at his most persuasive when he suggests that one of the key struggles lying ahead for the productive classes of the underdeveloped world and their hacker allies is to combat not only the exploitation characteristic of neo-colonialism but also the ever-wider control exercised by finance capital and its institutional agents over the organization of nearly every feature of political and social life. The latter struggle, he makes clear, will require both the establishment of networks of resistance and a fundamental refashioning of modernity’s objects. Hackers can support both aims, Wark contends, through their knowledge and their collective inclination to wrest information from its “bondage” to the commodity form.

 

This looks like sound, provocative analysis. But the point would have been more convincing had Wark acknowledged that there is already a massive activist network organized to do (at least in part) what he is describing: the anti-globalization movement (or as Naomi Klein refers to it, the “movement of many movements”). Because he evidently views anti-globalization activists as having come together in defense of local or national interests rather than in tune with the kind of free-ranging anarchist politics he favors, Wark objects to the anti-globalization movement and has no interest in exploring any of its immediate or long-term promises for social transformation. In fact, Wark goes much further than to take issue with some of the aims or strategies of the anti-globalization movement; indeed, he disparages the movement so roundly for its “representational” (in other words, primarily redistributive) politics that he appears to find no value in it whatsoever. Can it really be the case that Wark sees no potential for theorizing or developing a future left politics in the anti-globalization movement? In any event, one gets little specific sense from Wark’s text of how hackers’ technical knowledge and creative energies have been or could be mobilized in support of such a movement or any of its aims, though there is abundant evidence on the Internet that protests against the World Trade Organization (WTO) or the General Agreement on Trades and Tariffs (GATT) have been abetted by such efforts. Here is one of those instances where it would have been helpful for Wark to refer to actually existing cyberspace in his research.

 

Ultimately, Wark most runs into trouble in his tendency to forego dialectical thinking in his account of the hackers’ historical role in relation to global capital. Looking back to another manifesto that twenty years ago proved key to creating an ethos of technologically engaged opposition to the prerogatives of capital, we can recognize that in her text on cyborg politics Donna Haraway was concerned to avoid segregating the kind of postmodern subjectivity she chose to identify with the term “cyborg” from what Wark would now call “the military entertainment complex”: “From one perspective, a cyborg world is about the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet” while from another “a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints” (154). Indeed, what was most compelling and most radical in Haraway’s way of conceiving the cyborg was that she recognized that any politically progressive course that might be forged on the basis of or in conjunction with cyborg identity and agency would have to be taken in full cognizance of the historical and ongoing imbrication of information technology with the maintenance of what Deleuze called “societies of control.” The creation of the Internet by the U.S. Defense Department is perhaps the example par excellence of how this has worked in practice, though obviously the Internet has morphed into something tremendously different from what Arpanet, the prototype for a global, packet-switching information network established in the late 1960s, was designed to be.

 

In his reading of hackers’ general political orientation, Wark does allow for the danger that they will confuse their interests with those of the vectoralist class, the owners of the means of information production. But to do only that is to do too little. A realistic account of the historical conjuncture would include the full (and not just passing) recognition, à la Haraway, that the work of hackers is in some measure responsible for what Wark now tasks them with dismantling: the widely pervasive social surveillance and military domination enabled by information technology. One should not rhapsodize over hackers’ capacity for creating the “new” without fully taking this problem into account.

 

Though Mosco’s The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power, and Cyberspace moves forward from a different starting point, the two studies do seem at moments to converge (as when, for instance, Mosco speaks of hackers as trickster figures who work to reveal a “mythic utopia locked up by our stagnating tendencies to freeze revolutionary technologies in the ice of outdated social patterns” [48]). Otherwise, he focuses on narratives connected to postmodernism and the “technological sublime,” a notion he borrows from the historian David Nye to help him account both for the general tendency to glorify new technologies and for the various ways in which cyberspace has been subjected to hyperbole.

 

Mosco’s readings of texts by people like Fukuyama, Negroponte, and Ohmae are illuminating. Mosco effectively shows how Fukuyama’s “end of history/ideology” thesis is applied in a boilerplate fashion to his explanation of the significance of the Internet, with the “digital divide” being swept aside as an ultimately immaterial impediment to the otherwise “frictionless” operation of free markets in the post-Cold War era. Negroponte is deservedly taken to task for his brand of digital boosterism, which, as Mosco explains, consists of pretending to treat info-tech innovation as something that is in little need of hype, while at the same time making overstated, technologically determinist claims for the absolute–and absolutely wonderful–transformation of life that is sure to arrive as a result of such innovation. Finally, Ohmae’s contention that we are in the process of achieving a “borderless world” is revealed as, at worst, manifestly distorted and, at best, true in only a very limited sense.

 

Mosco does not, however, offer any counterexamples from actually existing cyberspace, examples that might have worked well to refute these writers’ untenable claims. In his response to Ohmae, for instance, Mosco might have mentioned the “virtual Confederacy” that Internet scholar Tara McPherson has addressed as a case of the importance of place to cybercultures. McPherson’s work on the expression of Southern white identity in the U.S. via the Internet suggests that rather than in every case bringing about “the end of geography,” participation in cybercultures can instead encourage participants to re-consolidate their affective and political attachments to geographic regions.

 

The last quarter of Mosco’s book returns to political economy to examine the history of the World Trade Center site. The chapter posits the story of the WTC’s construction and destruction as both symbolic (or in his terms “mythical”) and decidedly material in its effects: symbolic in that the construction represented a foundational moment in the transition toward a service economy in the U.S. and the destruction a similarly loaded denouement to the dot-com era, and material in that both the erection and the collapse of the towers occasioned a largely undemocratic restructuring of the space of downtown Manhattan. Mosco turns to this historical narrative to demonstrate the pertinence of political economy–applied in this case to a critical investigation of infrastructure development in one especially significant “informational city”–to the study of cyberspace, while keeping in view the fact that the Internet is liable properly and comprehensively to be understood as a postmodern phenomenon of special significance only if one is also able to take account of the key symbolic economies accruing within and around it. Indeed, Mosco does bring certain features of actually existing cyberspace into his discussion at this point to demonstrate that the anti-democratic decision-making regarding the WTC can find a profitable analogy in the similarly iniquitous administration of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), an entity with no real accountability for its administrative role in Internet governance, and that the boondoggle of the new economy is in a certain sense akin to what was widely regarded as a monumental failure of architecture and urban planning.

 

As suggestive as these notions are, I was somewhat disappointed to see that Mosco has very little to say, after bringing it up in a digression about branding as a feature of contemporary marketing, about the anti-globalization movement. It is clear that he quite accurately sees the movement as something like an “anti-(free) World Trade Center” and that he recognizes the importance of the Internet to the organization and conduct of the various elements in this movement. But he doesn’t take the opportunity to examine how anti-globalization activists have struggled to counter the very same myths about the Internet and globalization that he takes apart in the first part of his book. As with Wark’s take on hacker politics, Mosco’s book regrettably leaves aside consideration of the crucial cybercultural work taking shape within anti-globalization networks. Against this tendency, I would like to suggest that when dealing with the propagation of myths about the Internet, we should make certain not to forget one of the most important to have so far emerged: that “another world is possible.”

 

Works Cited

 

• Eagleton, Terry. “Office Politics.” The Nation. 25 October 2004: 40-42.
• Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991. 149-81.
• Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000.
• McPherson, Tara. “‘I’ll Take My Stand in Dixie-Net’: White Guys, the South and Cyberspace.” Race in Cyberspace. Eds. Beth Kolko, Lisa Nakamura and Gilbert Rodman. New York: Routledge, 2000. 117-32.
• Mosco, Vincent. “Webs of Myth and Power: Connectivity and the New Computer Technopolis.” The World Wide Web and Contemporary Cultural Theory. Eds. Andrew Herman and Thomas Swiss. New York: Routledge, 2000. 37-60.
• Slater, Don, and Daniel Miller. The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach. Oxford: Berg, 2000.
• Wark, McKenzie. Virtual Geography: Living with Global Media Events. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994.