Production meshes objects and subjects, breaking their envelopes, blurring their identities, blending each into new formation. Representation struggles to keep up, to reassign objective and subjective status to the products of production. Production is the repetition of the construction and deconstruction of objectivity and subjectivity in the world.

Hacking is the production of production. The hack produces a production of a new kind, which has as its result a singular and unique product, and a singular and unique producer. Every hacker is at one and the same time producer and product of the hack, and emerges as a singularity that is the memory of the hack as process.

The hack as pure hack, as pure production of production, expresses as a singular instance the multiplicity of the nature out of which and within which it moves as an event. Out of the singular event of the hack comes the possibility of its representation, and out of its representation comes the possibility of its repetition as production and its production as repetition.

The representation and repetition of the singular hack as a typical form of production takes place via its appropriation by and as property. The recuperation of the hack for production takes the form of its representation to and within the social as property. But the hack, in and of itself, is always distinct from its appropriation for commodity production. Production takes place on the basis of a prior hack that gives to production its formal, social, repeatable and reproducible form. Every production is a hack formalized and repeated on the basis of its representation as property. To produce is to repeat; to hack, to differentiate. If production is the hack captured by property and repeated, the hack is production produced as something other than itself.

Production transforms nature into objective and subjective elements that form an ensemble, in which a second nature emerges. This second nature consists of a sociality of objects and subjects that may enter into relations of production for the further, quantitative, development as second nature. The appearance of a distinction between the natural and the social, the objective and the subjective, is what production based on property produces and reproduces as abstraction.

The qualitative transformation of second nature requires the production of production, or the intervention of the hack. The degree of dynamism or openness of a state is directly proportional to its capacity to hack. The hack overcomes the distinction between object and subject, the natural and the social, opening a space for free production that is not marked in advance by the properties of commodification. The hack is at one and the same time the force that opens toward increasing the surplus, and something deeply threatening to any fixed, fast-frozen relations. Not many states can maintain conditions in which the hack thrives, even as they come to recognize its power. The hack always appears to policy makers as a problem, even for the most abstract of states.

A state that develops the hack as a form of intellectual property will at one and the same time experience rapid growth in its productive capacity, but also in its qualitative capacity for transformation and differentiation. Such a state develops second nature to its limit, but contains within itself the seeds of its own overcoming, once the hack frees itself from property’s artifice of limits and limits of artifice. This is the endless anxiety of the vectoral class: that the very vir- tuality they depend on, that uncanny capacity of the hacker class to mint new properties for commodification, threatens to hack into existence new forms of production beyond commodification, beyond class rule.

The hack produces both a useful and a useless surplus. The useful surplus goes into expanding the realm of freedom wrested from necessity. The useless surplus is the surplus of freedom itself, the margin of free production unconstrained by production for necessity As the surplus in general expands, so too does the possibility of expanding its useless portion, out of which the possibility of hacking beyond the existing forms of property will arise.

The production of a surplus creates the possibility of the expansion of freedom from necessity Marx: “The true realm of freedom, the development of human powers as an end in itself, begins beyond it, though it can only flourish with this realm of necessity as its basis.”¹Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993), pp. 958-959. Here is the essential tension in Marx’s thought to which crypto-Marxist thinking might offer modulated refrains but does not … Continue reading But in class society, the production of a surplus also creates new necessities. Surplus producing societies may be free societies, or they may be subject to domination by a ruling class or coalition of ruling classes. What calls for explanation are the means by which successive ruling classes capture the surplus and turn it away from free production, and toward the reproduction and repetition of class rule.

Class domination takes the form of the capture of the productive potential of society and its harnessing to the production, not of liberty, but of class domination itself. The ruling class subordinates the hack to forms of production that advance class power, and the suppression or marginalisation of other forms of hacking.

When the pastoralist class dominates, it is indifferent to any hack that develops non-agricultural production. Production remains land based and dedicated to the valorization of land. When the capitalist class dominates, it frees the hack for the production of new forms of useful production, but it subordinates the hack to the accumulation of capital. Hacking that leads to the production of new types of consumable object and consuming subject are the only kind not marginalized. So while the capitalist class provides resources and encouragement for the nascent hacker class, it is under the condition of subordination to commodification. When the vectoralist class dominates, it frees the hack for the production of many kinds of useless production, and thus is often seen as an ally of the hacker class. The vectoralist class act only out of self-interest, for they extract their margin from the commodification, not just of production, but of the production of production. Their goal is the commodi- fication of the hack itself.

Under pastoralist or capitalist rule, the free and useless hack is suppressed or marginalized, but otherwise retains its own gift economy Under vectoralist rule, the hack is actively encouraged and courted, but only under the sign of commodified production. For the hacker, the tragedy of the former is to be neglected, of the latter, not to be neglected.

Whether in its pastoralist, capitalist or vectoralist phases, commodity production stages again and again a struggle within its ruling class between that fraction which owns the means of production directly and that fraction which can control it indirectly through the accumulation of money with which to finance it. The power of finance is an abstract and abstracting power, quantifying and objectifying the world, directing resources from one development to another with increasing speed. The development of finance is inseparable from the development of the vector of telesthesia, which frees flows of quantitative and qualitative information from any specific location. Finance is that aspect of the development of the vector that represents its objectifying power in the world. But while finance acquires ever-greater velocity and viscosity as the vector develops, it always depends on finding a productive outlet for its investments. If the ruling class is a vampire, finance is the vampire’s vampire.

Production produces not only the object as commodity, but also the subject who appears as its consumer, even though it is actually its producer. Under vectoralist rule, society becomes indeed a “social factory” which makes subjects as much as objects out of the transformation of nature into second nature. “Laboring processes have moved outside the factory walls to invest the entire society”²Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Labor of Dionysus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), p. 9. This is an essential point—everyday life becomes a social factory, but its reverse is no … Continue reading The capitalist class profits from the producing class as producer of objects. The vectoralist class profits from the producing class as consumer of its own subjectivity in commodified form.

The producers of commodities, be they farmers turning the earth, or workers turning the lathe or the page, are themselves all products of production. As the production of objects becomes complex and manifold, so too does subjectivity Lukacs: “This fragmentation of the object of production necessarily entails the fragmentation of its subject. In consequence of the rationalization of the work-process the human qualities and idiosyncrasies of the worker appear increasingly as mere sources of error.”³Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness (London: Merlin, 1983), p. 89. This text narrowly misses being a crypto-Marxist classic. Taken on their own, Lukacs’s analyses of the reification of … Continue reading As the work process extends beyond the factory to the whole of life, so too does this production of the fragmented subject. Whole new industries then arise promising therapies and diversions and miracle cures to make this aberrant subject whole again, including political miracle cures promising to reunite the subject within its envelope by abolishing the vectoral complexities of production. Hacking cannot be a return to this imaginary wholeness of being, but it can open toward the becoming of the virtual.

Production that produces subjects as if they were objects produces also its own—temporary—return of a free produc- tivity beyond the vectoral subject. Since the great upheavals of 1989 in the south and the east, the world is periodically swept up in weird global media events, in which movements grasp their moment, taking over the streets, and through capture of symbolic space capture also moments of media time, in which to demonstrate to the world that another life is possible. Whether in Beijing or Berlin, Seattle or Seoul, Genoa or Johannesburg, the productive classes come momentarily to the same conclusion. Guattari: “The only acceptable finality for human activity is the production of a subjectivity that is auto-enriching its relation to the world in a continuous fashion.”⁴Felix Guattari, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm (Sydney: Power Publications, 1995), p. 21. Where Marx sees living and dead labor as an ensemble, Guattari likewise sees human and inhuman … Continue reading What calls for a creative application of the hack is the production of new vectors along which the event may continue to unfold after its initial explosion into social space, and avoid capture by representation.

What the farming, working and hacking classes have in common is an interest in abstracting production from its subordination to ruling classes who turn production into the production of new necessities, who wrest slavery from surplus. What the farming and working classes lack in a direct knowledge of free production the hacking class has from direct experience. What the hacking class lacks is the depths of an historic class memory of revolt against alienated production. This the farming and working classes have in spades. Having produced the surplus out of which free productivity may yet be hacked, it remains only to combine the objective existence of the working and farming classes with the subjective capacity of the hacker class to produce production as free production. The elements of a free productivity exist already in an atomized form, in the productive classes.

What remains is the release of its virtuality. The vectoralist class knows this, and does its best to reduce productivity to property, information to communication, expression to representation, nature to necessity.

The vectoralist class puts its snout into the trough of the surplus on the basis of an ever more abstract, and hence more flexible, form of property than the pastoralist or capitalist class. Zizek: “the thing can only survive as its own excess.”⁵Slavoj Zizek, Repeating Lenin (Zagreb: Bastard Books, 2001), p. 82. What Jerry Seinfeld’s observational humor is to comedy, Zizek’s observational theory is to criticism. Some of these … Continue reading But property also presents it with a problem that threatens its existence. So-called intellectual property is property that not merely has a separate legal existence to other property, but is different in kind. Land need only occupy different space to other land, capital’s property likewise need only be distinct in space and time. The vectoralist class depends on the hacker class to produce the qualitative differences of intellectual property that it comes directly to own, and indirectly to profit by, and the owner of the vectors of its distribution. It depends on the very class capable of hacking into actuality the very virtuality it must control to survive.