i agree that the information sector warrants an updated view on political economy, but i dislike the hard distinction between capitalists and "vectorialist." ultimately the "vectorialist" would be the owners of a firm that produces, aggregates, or disseminates information; and all of this requires the input of labor. distinguishing between "laborer" and "hacker" is strange bc (assuming "hackers" are those working for vectorialists) both sell their labor. the landlord/capitalist distinction exists bc, although they both extract surplus value, the capitalist extracts it by selling the product of labor (textiles, grocery service, NYT article) while the landlord extracts it directly from the laborer (or capitalist) in the form of rent.
The distinction as iirc is that the hack gets crystallized onto a vector which is the point of value extraction. The labor of the hacker is not required once the ownership of the hack is put in service of value extraction via the flows of info in the vector. This is more like someone selling a patent than selling labor. The hacker that came up with some social media skinnerbox cashes out to Zuck or whatever, and Zuck gets to keep sucking value out of the vector in perpetuity as long as the info continues to flow via the non-labor labor of the user base. Salary and hourly workers that patch the servers and such are not considered hackers in this context.
i agree that the information sector warrants an updated view on political economy, but i dislike the hard distinction between capitalists and "vectorialist." ultimately the "vectorialist" would be the owners of a firm that produces, aggregates, or disseminates information; and all of this requires the input of labor. distinguishing between "laborer" and "hacker" is strange bc (assuming "hackers" are those working for vectorialists) both sell their labor. the landlord/capitalist distinction exists bc, although they both extract surplus value, the capitalist extracts it by selling the product of labor (textiles, grocery service, NYT article) while the landlord extracts it directly from the laborer (or capitalist) in the form of rent.
The distinction as iirc is that the hack gets crystallized onto a vector which is the point of value extraction. The labor of the hacker is not required once the ownership of the hack is put in service of value extraction via the flows of info in the vector. This is more like someone selling a patent than selling labor. The hacker that came up with some social media skinnerbox cashes out to Zuck or whatever, and Zuck gets to keep sucking value out of the vector in perpetuity as long as the info continues to flow via the non-labor labor of the user base. Salary and hourly workers that patch the servers and such are not considered hackers in this context.