Information wants to be free (but is everywhere in chains)

November 11, 2004
McKenzie Wark | The New School

Half of my title comes of course from Stewart Brand; the other half from Rousseau. I argue that it is an inescapable ontological property of information that it can escape from scarcity, that it calls for a whole new kind of economy. And yet what we have is a relentless attempt to stuff it back into the old one by means of legal coercion. But perhaps the future belongs to whoever figures out first how to align their work with the innate qualities of information rather than against it. If we can think of information outside the constraints of scarcity, we can imagine a whole new evolutionary path for our kind. This is in effect what I argue in A Hacker Manifesto.

Intellectual property is no longer what it seems. A distinct rift has developed between many drug and media related companies who are interested in protecting patents and copyrights and the pervasive popular culture of file sharing and pirating. How do we solve this problem? How do we protect the interests of those who create — whether it’s music, computer programs, poetry, math, or medicine? In the widespread revolt against commodified information, Wark sees a utopian promise, beyond the property form, and a new progressive class—the hacker class—who voice a shared interest in a new generation of information.

Speaker Details

McKenzie Wark teaches media and culture at New School University. He is the author of a number of books, including the award winning Virtual Geography, and most recently A Hacker Manifesto. He co-edited the nettimer anthology Readme.