The uneven development of the resources of nature that the vector objectifies leads to relations of exploitation between states. Those states in which the ruling class can quickly seize control of abstractions and productively apply them to resources acquire a power over other states and can force relations of unequal exchange upon them.

The most developed states are those in which the feudal patchwork of particular property forms and traditional means of deploying resources is quickly overturned by the more productive, abstract and vectoral forms. Local and qualitative property forms give way to the abstraction of private property, which pits farmers against pastoralists, and workers against capitalists on a local, then regional, then national scale.

At each stage of its unfolding, this abstraction of space develops out of the imposition of abstract geographies of communication vectors on the concrete and particularized geographies of nature and second nature. The vector creates the plane upon which localities merge into regions, regions into states, states into suprastate unions. The development of telesthesia and the bifurcation of the vector into communication and transport greatly accelerate the process.

Wherever the productive hack that best releases the surplus of production can be identified, applied and is put into practice quickly, surplus accumulates, and the territorial power of the most productive localities, regions, states and suprastates grows apace. If the hack accelerates the development of the vector, the vector accelerates the hack. Each is a multiplier of the potential of the other, and of those territories within which this productivity is most developed.

Wherever hacking has been most at liberty, best resourced and most rapidly adopted, a surplus is released and productivity grows. Wherever hacking has been most rapidly applied to commodification, all traditional and local fiefdoms and unproductive pockets have been liquidated, their resources thrown into larger and larger pools of resources, out of which ever more varied productive possibilities may be further generated.

Wherever hacking has produced the most varied productive possibilities, power arises that subordinates territory to its demands. Localities dominate regions, regions states, states other states. Wherever these imperial powers arise, they become a power also over hacking, subordinating it to the growing demand of the ruling classes for forms of abstraction that further enhance and defend their power. Thus the liberty that gave rise to abstraction, and abstraction to power, comes back to impose new necessities on the free expression of the hacker class.

In the states where this process has developed most rapidly, to the point where these centres of power constitute an overdeveloped bloc of states, the exploitation of underdeveloped territories by the ruling classes creates the surplus out of which the state may compromise with the productive classes and incorporate some of their interests—at the expense of the underdeveloped world.

The same vectors that permit an opening of abstraction into the world, allowing the ruling classes to expand into the developing world, can become a means to erect barriers to protect the overdeveloped world. Thus the ruling classes seek to open the developing world to its flows of capital and information, but it cultivates an alliance with the productive classes within the borders of the overdeveloped world for the maintenance of barriers against flows emanating from the underdeveloped world. Neither the labor, nor the products of the labor of the developing world are to be allowed free entry into the overdeveloped territories.

The abstraction of the world that the vector makes possible is arrested in a state of development that represents the interests of the ruling classes, but in which the producing classes of the overdeveloped world have acquired a stake through their partial democratization of the state and partial socialization of property through state ownership. “Production of wealth in the empire of signs is the reproduction of scarcity and the cyber-policed poverty of everything outside.”¹Konrad Becker, Tactical Reality Dictionary (Vienna: Edition Selene, 2002), p. 130. Becker’s text works by turning the language of communications research against itself. He turns up the volume of … Continue reading

Pastoralists and farmers unite against the underdeveloped world in protecting markets for foodstuffs bounded by theoverdeveloped state. Likewise, capitalists and workers unite to protect markets against goods produced in the underdeveloped world. An “historic compromise” arises in which the vector is deployed unevenly, and abstraction stops at the state borders.

The hacker class is also partly accommodated, through the recognition of intellectual property as property, and through its partial socialization. The high rate of production of new abstractions is thus secured by accommodating the interests of the hacker class within the overdeveloped territories. This compromise is contingent and temporary. The overdeveloped world may arrest the abstraction of the vector by turning it into a means of enclosing its local and regional interests, but the overdeveloped world also incubates the rapid hack of vectoral technologies with the capacity to overcome such limits.

The productive classes of the underdeveloped world, though deprived of resources, exceed themselves in their collective ingenuity for creating opportunities out of global disadvantage. Every resistance to their demand for vectoral justice is met with ever more inventive means to circumvent inequality and exploitation. In the underdeveloped world, the hacker class as class may not be well defined, due to the inchoate state of intellectual property law. The creative practice of the hack, however, is far from underdeveloped. It is an organic part of the tactics of everyday life among the farming and working classes, to an extent sometimes lost among the productive classes of the overdeveloped world.

The compromise between the ruling and productive classes in the overdeveloped world only encompasses the pastoralist and capitalist ruling interests, who are in any case limited by the partial development of the potential of the vector from conceiving of their productive universe on a global abstract plane. The rise of a vectoralist class that profits by the abstraction of information itself rapidly overcomes this prudent limiting of the territorial ambitions of the ruling class. The vectoral class aspires to rule in the underdeveloped world directly, reaching through the pores of its envelopes, into its networks, its identities—and as a consequence provokes the fiercest reactions.

While the vectoral class played a subordinate role in the development of the abstract space of the commodity economy of the overdeveloped world, it assumes a leading role in extending abstraction to the world at large. Its capacity to vectoralize all of the world’s resources, to put them all on the same abstract and quantifiable plane, creates the conditions for the expansion of the territorial ambitions and desires of all the ruling classes.

The commodity economy has always been a globalizing force, but under the rule of capital, the global served the interests of the powerful ruling states, whereas under the rule of the vectoral, states come to serve the interests of an emerging global power. The vectoral class detaches power from its spatial fixity. It dreams of a world in which place gives way to space, where any and every locus the vector touches becomes a node in a matrix of values, yielding objects that can be freely appropriated in their productivity, freely combined with any and every other object, regardless of distance, or the particular happenstance of origin.

As the vectoral class detaches itself from the envelope of the state, it shreds the historic compromises capital made with the productive classes within their borders, and carves transnational, commodified information out of national, socialized culture and education. Vectoralists come to represent their interests through suprastate organisations, within which the ruling classes of all the overdeveloped states enforce upon others the global conditions most conductive to the expansion of pastoralist, capitalist and vectoralist interests around the globe. An index of the influence of the vectoral interest in supranational politics is the priority given to international patent, copyright and trademark protection, and media and communication deregulation. The abstractness of the property upon which the vectoral class stakes its power requires the globalization of regime of law and policing to protect it.

Under the leadership of the vectoral class, the ruling classes of the overdeveloped world pit themselves against the interests of the ruling classes of the underdeveloped world, and against the state envelopes within which these less powerful states sought to limit the inroads of global commodification. The vector provides all of the ruling classes of the overdeveloped world with a direct, subtle and instantaneous means of coordinating not only the objectification of all resources, but the surveillance and deterrence of the national aspirations of the underdeveloped world.

As the ruling classes of the underdeveloped world struggle to maintain the protection of their state envelopes, they restrict the potential productivity of their productive classes, and cut themselves off from the accelerated production of abstraction the comes from the rapid spread of any and every potential new hack. But the only option these ruling classes are offered is to sell out to the ruling classes of the overdeveloped world, and hand over their territories to the liquidation of local practices and subordination to emerging global norms.

Desperate for the investment of the surplus appropriated by the overdeveloped world’s ruling classes, the states of the underdeveloped world are forced to choose between surrendering their sovereignty or reconciling themselves to a diminished rate of growth of the surplus and a relentless diminution of power relative to the overdeveloped world.

The choices facing the productive classes of the underdeveloped world are even starker. When their states lose their sovereignty, they become a resource for the global production of food and goods, which everywhere seeks to extract the maximum surplus. The state loses its ability to socialize part of that surplus as a condition of access to capital and entry to the emerging global order.

The only alternative offered the productive classes is to ally itself with that faction of the local capitalist and pastoralist classes that resist the erosion of national sovereignty. In this case the productive classes may strike a bargain within a state cut off from development and left behind in the global production and distribution of surplus. Some bargain. The result is often the merging of the ruling classes with the state in a bureaucratic or kleptocratic form, which, should it become weak enough, may be subverted or even attacked outright by the military wing of the military entertainment complex of the overdeveloped world. The examples of Serbia and Iraq are warning enough to other such states to become even more repressive, devoting even more of a meagre surplus to arms, lest they fall prey to the punitive powers of the overdeveloped world.

The rise of a vectoral class, within first national, and then international spaces, brings with it the demand for the privatization of all information. The vectoralist class everywhere comes into conflict with its erstwhile allies to the extent that the vectoralists seek to extract as much surplus as the market will bear for all aspects of the production and circulation of information. The capitalist and pastoralist classes were formerly content to permit the state to take charge of these activities, which they regard as unproductive, and to socialize them. The vectoral class presses the state to privatize all holdings in communication, education and culture, and at the same time to secure stronger and stronger forms of intellectual property right, even when these developments are contrary to the logic of expanding the surplus as a whole.

The interests of the vectoralist class also come into conflict with those of the subordinate classes who benefited from the partial socialization of information through the state.Some of the cost to the subordinate classes within the dominant states is offset by the exploitation by the vectoralists of the developing world, where increases in the cost of information weigh particularly heavily on the struggle to wrest freedom from necessity.

Just as the producing classes in the overdeveloped world struggle within the state against the privatization of information, so too they can join with interests across the class spectrum from the developing world in the global struggle against a vectoralist monopoly of information. While in many other respects the productive classes of the overdeveloped and underdeveloped world find their interests opposed to each other, here they find common ground.

The spread of information vectors creates an ever more abstract space within which the world may appear as an array of quantifiable resources. The particular and contingent borders and local qualities give way to an abstract space of quantification. This process is not natural or inevitable and everywhere meets resistance, but this resistance is itself a product of the process of abstraction, which makes what once appeared as natural local conditions appear as something threatened by an emerging plane of abstraction. Mere resistance to the vector takes on, willy-nilly, a vectoral form. The challenge for the producing classes is not merely to react to the vector, or use it reactively, but to see beyond its actual form to its virtual form.

The spread of the vector homogenizes space and unifies time, passing through the pores of the old state bordersand threatening the particularities that once resided unchallenged with the state’s envelope. Those local identities that come to experience themselves in the wake of the globalisation of the vector are not its antithesis, but merely a product of the vector bringing representations into contact and conflict. The “traditional” and the “local” appear as representations when they cease to exist as anything but representation.

Vectoralists of the underdeveloped world learn to manage and exploit representations of their own traditional culture for global commodified consumption. No sooner have they identified and marketed the expression of their culture as a commodity than the global vectoral interests learn to duplicate this appearance of authenticity Unlike commodities with material qualities, information as a commodity may be freely counterfeited. But where the vectoralist interests emanating from the overdeveloped world fiercely protect their “intellectual property,” they freely appropriate the information of value from the underdeveloped world.

The vector transforms local representations into footloose global competitors, sometimes even bringing them into violent confrontation as it breaches their seemingly natural relation to place. But the vector also opens a virtual domain for the production of qualitatively new kinds of difference. These differences too may be caught up in the war of representation, and the policing of information’s domains of meaning and mattering. But the vector may also be the plane upon which a free expression of difference may affirmand renew itself. Heterogeneity flourishes alongside the imposition of uniform global commodity forms, as a new multiplicity hacked out of the vectoral.

The politics of globalization comes to represent the confluence and confusion of these trends. It pits the overdeveloped world against the underdeveloped world, and calls into being temporary and opportunistic alliances across class lines within a state, or across state lines within a class. Along both axes, the vectoral class comes to dominate all others in its ability to make and break alliances at will, through its domination of the vector, the very means of exchanging the representation of identity or the expression of interest.

The productive classes are hampered in their ability to develop alliances, even among their own kind, but particularly with the productive classes of other states of differing trajectories of development. The productive classes mostly still exist within national envelopes, having come to perceive their interests and desires to date within the limits of national identity rather than class expressions of a transversal nature.

The state machine in the overdeveloped and underdeveloped world alike is losing its ability to incorporate the interests of the productive classes in the form of a compromise with local ruling interests. The ruling classes everywhere abandon their compromises within the state, at the expense of the productive classes. This both attenuates and erodes the representation of interest in terms of nationalism. The productive classes everywhere retreat behind nationalism at the point at which it becomes incapable of securing any but the most illusory representations of desire.

The puncturing of national envelopes develops unevenly. The productive classes in the overdeveloped world maintain their power to slow the free flow of food and goods from the underdeveloped world and to maintain opportunities for work that might otherwise benefit both the ruling and producing classes of the underdeveloped world. But this only hampers the ability of the productive classes of the overdeveloped world to form alliances with the productive classes of the underdeveloped world, and encourages the productive classes of the underdeveloped world to embrace their own rulers as representing their interests.

Differences emerge also in the politics of developing a suprastate apparatus capable of representing interests on a regional or global scale. In the underdeveloped world, the productive classes may identify their interests with local capitalist or pastoralist interests, who struggle to use suprastate organs as a means to open up the markets of the overdeveloped world to their goods and food to the same degree as they are forced to open their territories to ruling interests from the overdeveloped world, particularly as represented via the suprastate organs that the ruling class of the overdeveloped world disproportionately control.

While the overdeveloped world remains relatively closed to the objects produced in underdeveloped world, it thereby becomes a magnet for its subjects. Many members of theproductive classes of the underdeveloped world seek to migrate, legally or illegally to the overdeveloped world. As the overdeveloped world will not take its goods, thus causing under-employment and migration, so too it refuses to embrace this migration that it has itself unleashed. Migration further strains the potential for alliances between the productive classes of the overdeveloped and underdeveloped worlds, as each sees in the other a foreigner opposed to his or her local identity.

To the extent that the underdeveloped world finds any opportunity for development in spite of all obstacles, it finds itself the object of the surplus-seeking interests of the vectoralist class. Where other ruling classes merely want to exploit the labor or resources of the developing world, and are more or less indifferent to its cultural expression and subjective life, the vectoralist class seeks to turn the productive classes all over the world into consumers of its commodified culture, education and communication. This only further hardens resistance to the abstraction of the world and the retreat to nationalism or localism as a representation of interests.

But what of the hacker class as a class? Where do its interests lie in all of these globalizing developments? The interest of the hacker class lies first and foremost in the free expansion of the vectors of communication, culture and knowledge around the globe. Only through the free abstraction of the flow of information from local prejudice and contingent interests can its virtuality be fully realized. Only when free to express itself through the exploration and combination of any and every kind of knowledge, anywhere and everywhere in the world can the hacker class realize its potential, for itself and for the world.

There is a stark difference between the free abstraction of the flow of information and its abstraction under the rule of the commodity and in the interests of the vectoral class. The commodification of information produces nothing but a new global scarcity of information, restricting the potential for its free expression and widening inequalities that limit the free virtuality of the vector. The hacker class opposes the actual form of the vector in the name of its virtual form, not in the name of a romantic desire to return to a world safe behind state envelopes and local identities.

The vectoral spread of commodified information produces both the commodification of things and the commodification of desire. This heightens awareness of a global exploitation that benefits the ruling classes of the overdeveloped world, but it does so by representing injustice only as material inequality. The producing classes of the overdeveloped and underdeveloped worlds come to measure themselves against representations of each other. One despises the other for what it has—and itself for what it lacks. One despises the other for what it wants—and itself what it has to lose.

In the underdeveloped world arises envy and resentment; in the overdeveloped world, fear and bigotry Even when the productive classes become aware of the vectoral dimension to their exploitation, they represent their interests purely in local or national terms, and become deaf to the contradictions between different local interests. The struggle for an abstract expression of the interests of the global producing classes finds itself beset by thickets of local and particular interest that refuse reconciliation, but which class awareness on a global scale is not abstract and multiple enough to embrace.

The hacker class always finds its interest in the free productivity of information subordinated to the interests of the vectoral class in extracting a surplus from the hack and from furthering only those hacks that generate a surplus. But it also finds that the vectoral class recruits more and more subjects into this world in which they appear to themselves as nothing more than what they lack, thus leading the productive classes into the thicket of particular and local representations, which are more and more the product of nothing but an abstract and universalizing vector.

As difficult as it may be, the hacker class can commit itself to the free alliance of productive classes everywhere, and can make its modest contribution to overcoming the local and contingent interests that pit the productive classes everywhere against themselves. This contribution may be technical or cultural, objective or subjective, but it can everywhere take the form of hacking out the virtuality that a free global abstraction would express as an alternative to the commodified subjection that both local and global domination by private property represents.

Commodity production is in transition from the domination of capital as property to the domination of information as property. The theory of the transition to a world beyond commodity production has yet to make this same transition. This body of theory has been through two phases, which correspond to two kinds of error. In the first phase, when theory was in the hands of the workers’ movement, it fetishized the economic infrastructure of the social formation. In the second phase, when theory was in the hands of the academic radicals, it fetishized the superstructures of culture and ideology. Theory of the first kind reduces the superstructure to being a reflection of the economy; theory of the second kind awards the superstructure a relative autonomy Neither grasps the fundamental changes in commodity production that render obsolete this understanding of the social formation or the new kinds of class struggle now emerging under the sign of the domination of information as property. Property is a concept that occupies a liminal, undecidable place between economy and culture. Our task today is to grasp the historical development of commodity production from the point of view of property, fulcrum on which not only infrastructure and superstructure hinge, but also the class struggle.

Through the renewal of history, as hacker history, emerges a theory of the vector as class theory. This theory offers at one and the same time an abstraction through which the vector as a force of abstraction at work in the world can be grasped, as well as a critical awareness of the chasm between the virtual powers of the vector and its actual limitations under the reign of the vectoral class. From this emergent perspective, past attempts to change the world appear as mere interpretations. Present interpretations, even those that claim filiations to the historical tradition, appear as captives of the commodification of information under the reign of the vectoral class.

In this tiresome age, when even the air melts into airwaves, where all that is profane is packaged as if it were profundity, the possibility yet emerges to hack into mere appearances and make off with them. There are other worlds and they are this one.