Hacking is the requisite starting point for a departure from capitalism

[Johan Söderberg (Associate professor of Theory of Science, at the department of Philosophy, Linguistics and Theory of Science, Göteborgs Universitet, Sweden) “Hacking Capitalism, The Free and Open Source Software Movement” https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203937853, accessed 7-13-2024]

Though these perils are very real, this book will investigate capital’s bid to commodify information from a different angle altogether. The intellectual property regime should be read out as a ‘negative shape’ in the struggle of hackers. Hacking is the prism through which the book moves outwards to look at intellectual property law, computing, the Internet, and networked capitalism in general. It is the restructuring of capitalism and the possibilities of resisting it that is at the heart of our discussion. The critique is made from a general Marxist theoretical viewpoint. Marxism, however, is as multifaceted as the many topics covered in the book. In order to unravel hacking, we have to cross through innumerable controversies, positions and hypothesises, taking issue with camps within the hacker movement, reformist intellectual property critics, mainstream economic theory, as well as different schools within the Marxist discipline. This is “reflected in the style of writing. The argument in the book progresses by a method of triangulation, closing in on the subject from several different angles at once. Few self-described hackers will recognise themselves in the result. Were we to judge the politics of hacking by an opinion poll among the members of the hacker movement, we might have concluded that hacking is predominantly apolitical, and possibly with a bent towards liberal, voluntarist ideology. Appearance to the contrary, however, this book is not a historical nor an anthropological account of the FOSS community. What concerns us is not ‘hackers as a noun’ but ‘hacking as a verb’. Hacking is emancipatory to the extent that it opens up the practice of intervening in computer technology to a non-denumerable mass of people. In other words, its politics consist in that decisions about technological development escape from being confined to either professions or/and subcultures. This potential of hacking is set back not only by intellectual property law, knowledge monopolies, and black box designs, but also by identities excluding outsiders. The hacker movement is of interest in so far as it helps us to understand the practice of hacking. Our ambition is not, though, to explain the FOSS movement with Marxist theory, but to take hacking as a departing point when reviewing Marxist theory in relation to networked capitalism.