hack license

As cultural critic and New School University professor McKenzie Wark sees things, today’s battles over copyrights, trademarks, and patents are simply the next phase in the age-old battle between the productive classes and the ruling classes that strive to turn those producers into subjects.
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Wark’s opus A Hacker Manifesto brings together England’s Enclosure Movement, Das Kapital, and the corporate ownership of information—a process that Duke University law professor James Boyle called “the Second Enclosure Movement”—to create a unified theory of domination, struggle, and freedom. Hacking is not a product of the computer age, writes Wark, but an ancient rite in which abstractions are created and information is transformed. The very creation of private property was a hack, he argues—a legal hack—and like many other hacks, once this abstraction was created, it was taken over by the ruling class and used as a tool of subjugation.
—A Hacker Manifesto review at MIT’s TechReview