Wark has been working on this Vectoralist concept starting back with A Hacker Manifesto
its still capitalism. we just have information capital on top of finance and industrial capital. industrial capital owns the means of production, finance capital owns the rights to allocate the goods produced, and information capital owns receptacles of data and methods of communication
That's pretty similar to the thesis presented, but there more emphasis on the differences in class relations of the different kinds and their antagonisms and contradictions.
I think there's some clear examples when you see how much small business bourgeoisie are politically against many of the new formations of info and financial capitalists, but they have no theory with which to express it. So it becomes nonsense like Zuck or CitiBank is implementing communism.
This is part of the new leverage of the flows of info (vectors) that allow for different strategies of controlling political economy, and it often involves negotiations between the classic capitalist formations and these newer info and financial formations. This is what is markedly different from the classic understanding. Ownership of the means of production of informational synthesis is a new kind of class relation on top of and often in friction with the classic mode.
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.
The word "hacker" has become so definitively uncool and unpunk in recent years that I feel disgust when I see the word being used most of the time. :disgost:
The terminology was originally used in A Hacker Manifesto about 20 years ago.
As wark herself explains in the book, I think the vectoralism thing is interesting wether or not it is correct, because it forces you to reevaluate the terminology and look at how capitalism has changed.
I personally could see those as internal capitalist factions (industrialists vs finance capital, vectoralism could fit in there to me), but Wark's book was still interesting and I recommend it.
The choice of word for "hacker" is a pretty bad one because not many people are going to intuitively get what she means by it, but the analysis of the upper layers of capitalism through a new layer of property relations, that of intellectual property, property of the knowledge and information that now lays on top of the means of production, is still interesting.
The RealPage rental price collusion software company is such a clear example of vectoralist formation as a service to small landlords and financial institutions managing large numbers of properties. They are all paying to feed their private data into the algorithm so they can receive coordinated pricing recommendations in return, all while the software firm takes their cut off the top without owning anything besides an info platform and algorithm.
These are definitely interesting evolutions in class relations amongst the ruling classes.
Obviously there are a lot of different contexts in different times and places but didn't peasants have more ownership and control over the land they worked generally than a laborer has over the means of production in the modern economy? Assuming that hacker in this context means programmer for hire (as comparing a independent hacker to a peasant wouldn't make any sense) then they have basically no control right? I suspect that the horizontal axis is meant to represent increasing worker specialization and the vertical increased autonomy that they are able to demand. I guess it is true in the case of pay and some social freedoms but only in comparison to a still existing laborer class. But the hackers don't really have any more control or ownership over the product of their labor than the toiling laborers.
Basically I don't think I agree with my interpretation of this graph and I didn't read whatever it is from.
Pretty sure the vertical is struggle and toil, and the hacker still has to contend with the landlord and the capitalist while also trying to retain some value from the 'hacks' they produce in labor for the vectoralist. Considering the abysmal rate of creative worker unionization in the info space, I think it makes sense. The hack doesn't usually require reproductive labor in the same sense as the previous forms, so it's much more difficult to create labor power under this relation. Software developers are regularly laid off after they deliver working code for example, and the labor can be replaced by coders at much cheaper pay in another country with very little friction.
