Hacking is key to creating intellectual freedoms as a means of survival---solves innovation.

The networked meshing of hackers, artists and activists has made public free/libre, open-source and creative-commons concepts.1 This section will consider the hacker identity and hacker social and cultural relations. I posit that increasing contact with f/los & creative-commons artifacts, technologies and economics and the wider dissemination of f/los & creative-commons memes is raising popular consciousness of several emerging redefinitions for concepts such as freedom, property, production and ownership. Freedom and openness are two central concepts in hackerism and the contemporary social movements it has influenced. This section examines critically the political philosophies of hackerism in order to reveal the meaning of these emerging redefinitions of freedom and openness and the challenges they present to the corresponding dominant liberal notions of the same terms. To hack is to play, to learn, to survive.2 The hacker supports his/her own being through the application of his/her individual characteristics in relation to his/her social and material conditions and gains pleasurable satisfaction in doing so. As MacKenzie Wark puts it in A Hacker Manifesto, the hacker “produces the possibility of production, the possibility of making something of and with the world - and of living off the surplus produced by the application of abstraction to nature - to any nature.”3 . The hacker disposition is demonstrated in the real, lived lives of humans and the development of all human civilisations. What I am suggesting by ascribing these characteristics to all humans qua human is that the hacker is the innate modality of humanity. Hacking, according to Wark, discovers “the nature of nature, its productive - and destructive - powers. This applies as much in physics as in sexuality, in biology as in politics, in computing as in art or philosophy. The nature of any and every domain may be hacked. It is the nature of hacking to discover freely, to invent freely, to create and produce freely.”4 To hack is also to subvert and resist. The desire to hack the information society emerges negatively, in opposition to the challenge of increasingly rapid enclosure of the immaterial and cultural commons and against the dislocation from history and society that virtual and networked property relations effect. Indeed, as both Wark and Himanen have argued, it is the hacker who is capable of answering the property question in capitalist societies by proposing an “alternative spirit for the network society”5 creating “new kinds of relation, with unforeseen properties, which question the property form itself” 6 . This presents a challenge to the dominant spirit of contemporary advanced capitalism. The hacker proposes free production and free access in contrast to the private property of capital. I will return to these new kinds of relationships later.