Necessity is always and everywhere just necessity. That humans fuck and eat and suffer and die is the eternal preoccupation of the aphorists. That something over and above necessity emerges out of collective human endeavor produces not just history, but the production of history as a representation. Bataille: “The history of life on earth is mainly the effect of a wild exuberance, the dominant event is the development of luxury, the production of increasingly burdensome forms of life.”¹Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, vol. 1 (New York: Zone Books, 1988), p. 33. Bataille is an exemplary crypto-Marxist author, who in this work does more than anyone to undermine the iron grip of … Continue reading

The accumulation of a surplus, the struggle over its disposition, its investment in war or feast or history writing, or back into the production of yet more surplus, this is the experience of history and the history of experience. The gathering of a surplus implies the creation of an abstract plane upon which to struggle over its disposition. This history is a secret history. Each victorious ruling class in the struggle for the distribution of the surplus represents history itself as entirely of its own authorship. But in the secret history of the surplus, it is the hack that produces the possibility of surplus through its abstraction, and the labor of its extraction and accumulation that constitutes history’s surplus, carried over as a murmur, from one era to the next.

Class society in its abstract form emerges out of the accumulation of surplus, and represents a break from the dispersal of surplus in the form of luxury and the gift, and the ploughing back of the surplus into production itself. Henceforth, it will be production itself that will be in surplus, seeking always a surplus of desire to match.

Theories that attempt to grasp in the abstract the productive development of human society may take one of two forms. They may be based on the concept of scarcity, and legitimize the rule of one or other class who must take charge of scarce resources. Or they may be based on the scandal of surplus, on the conviction that the productive classes in society produce more than their immediate needs, and may consider themselves deprived of this surplus. From the point of view of the productive classes, only one of these is a theory, the other an ideology — which is to say, not conducive to the expression of its interests.

That there is an oppressive experience of scarcity in the world at large is all too real, and so too is its attenuation by the vectoralization of the world. As more and more of nature becomes a quantifiable resource for commodity production, so the producing classes in the overdeveloped and underdeveloped world alike come to perceive the power the vectoral class has brought into the world: the power to steer development here or there at will, creating sudden bursts of productive wealth, and, just as suddenly, famine, poverty, unemployment, and scarcity.

The same vectoral flows of information that chasten the productive classes with the knowledge of their own temporary grasp on a pay packet and the commodified bounty, also show again and again the immense productive resources the world possesses, and the artificial nature of this experience of scarcity. The vectors along which thread the information that knits objects and subjects together in the vast global dance of productivity are the same vectors which show the world to be nothing but the spectacle of surplus.

The same vectoral connection shows the limitless virtuality of information itself, which again and again escapes the commodity form and flows as pure gift among the producing classes as an advertisement for its own bounty, only to be stuffed back into the objectified commodity form by the vectoral class and held apart from the producing classes as an artificial scarcity.

The vectoral class must maintain a surplus of subjective desire over and above the surplus of objective things. Desire must be pushed one step ahead, lest demand slacken and the useless profusion of things appear in the naked light of its futility It’s harder than it looks. The producing classes again and again create their own expressions of desire, desire outside lack and commodification, only to find that this collective expression of desire is appropriated from them, transformed into commodities and sold back to them, as if they somehow lacked the productive energy that is their birthright.

The pastoralists are the very scions of scarcity. The capitalist class maintains its rule of scarcity with some confidence; the vectoralist class maintains scarcity only with increasingly artificial means. The vectoral class commodifies information as if it were an object of desire, under the sign of scarcity. The producing classes rightly take all commodified information to be their own collective production. We, the producers, are the source of all the images, the stories, the wild profusions of all that culture becomes. The vectoralist class wrestles all this into the commodified form, while the producing classes bootleg and pirate any and every expression of information freely Mauss: “One likes to assert that they are the product of the collective mind as much as the individual mind. Everyone wishes them to fall into the public domain or join the general circulation of wealth as quickly as possible.”²Marcel Mauss, The Gift (New York: Norton, 1990), p. 67. This is a text that calls for a re-examination, in the light of the abstract form the gift may take in the vectoral era. Mauss’s socialism … Continue reading

The vectoralist class enlists the efforts of hackers to produce ever-new ways and means to commodify this productivity, and so maintain a surplus of desire and the scarcity of the desired object. But short of seizing hold of a monopoly on all vectors for producing and distributing information, the vectoralist class cannot entirely limit the free productivity of the hacker class, which continues to produce yet more fuel for the free productivity of desire. New images and stories, new vectors with which to organize them, new technical means of perceiving and organizing the world, new cultural means of producing experience. In its desperate need to encourage productivity, the vectoralist class induces the very productivity that exceeds the commodity itself.

Farmers and workers discover for themselves, outside the commodified flows of information, that hackers exist and are struggling to produce new abstractions on both the subjective and objective axes, which have the potential to liberate desire from the negativity of scarcity. They learn to adopt and adapt new abstractions for themselves, rather than in the commodified form in which the vectoralist class would sell virtuality to the masses.

Farmers and workers discover, with a little help from the hacker class, that information wants to be free, that its scarcity is maintained only by the artificial means of the commodification of the vector and the policing of representation by the state. Initially, the producing classes discover the means to propagate information freely as a means to acquire what it desires. But the freeing of information, even in the margins of third nature, breaches the economy of scarcity, and the separation of subject and object maintained by the object’s scarcity. The producing classes are reunited with their own free productivity, at first inadvertently, but in such a way as to plant the seeds of a desire for desire outside of scarcity itself.

The vectoralist class discovers — irony of ironies! — a scarcity of scarcity. It struggles to find new “business models” for information, but ends up settling for its only reliable means of extracting a surplus from its artificial scarcity through the formation of monopolies over every branch of its production. Stocks, flows and vectors of information are brought together in vast enterprises, with the sole purpose of extracting a surplus through the watertight commodification of all elements of the process. By denying to the producing classes any free means of reproducing their own culture, the vectoralist class hopes to extract a surplus from selling back to the producing classes their own souls. But the very strength of the vectoralist class — its capacity to monopolize the vector, points to its weakness. The only lack is the lack of necessity. The only necessity is the overcoming of necessity. The only scarcity is of scarcity itself.