We thus live in asymmetrical times, and we are afforded only a small number of things in exchange for giving ourselves away like this, namely, “the privilege of playing” online whenever we like, as Wark confesses she loves to do in the book’s introduction: “Things like online quizzes hold our attention long enough for us to escape boredom, and it gives something to post on social media, presumably to snag other people’s attention ….” Meanwhile, the old gears of IRL capital keep grinding workers somewhere. The vector is our information traveling in one direction away from us to become something more valuable to someone whom we can’t see. What is at stake is neither a bios nor a polis but a regime of property in information extending into the organism. not capital but the vector enters the flesh and commands it, and not just as meat, but also as information, through monitoring its stages, through modifying its functions with drugs that alter chemical signals, through patenting aspects of life as design. They insist upon a certain kind of hyper-consumerist lifestyle: They alone know the secrets of how to analyze this data for their exclusive profit and greater overall societal control. The vectoralists own not only the means of production, as with the capitalists - in fact, the vectoralists own the capitalists - but also the greater communicational and distributional means and infrastructure that control how our information permeates the world via our new technology. The hacker class could be anyone and everyone who uses the internet or so-called smart technology, like that “mineral sandwich in your pocket” as Wark describes the smartphone. The vector is our unwitting input, which charges the system with every click, share and purchase - for example, whenever we want something and want it to be delivered as soon as possible to wherever we are located. Something new and much worse, involving what Wark calls “the vector,” has usurped it. This creeping reality, as the author’s latest book, Capital Is Dead: Is This Something Worse?, sets out to illustrate, is that the big, evil Capital, which we all think we’re so familiar with, often taking for granted (whether we like it or not) that it remains the eternal system that rules our lives … is actually dead. According to Wark, a new kind of class struggle, unlike anything Karl Marx could have diagnosed, now ravages our world on an unprecedented scale. McKenzie Wark writes in order to identify and describe an unrealized global “info-prole” (short for information proletariat), or “hacker class,” as she dubbed it in her 2004 book A Hacker Manifesto. Capital Is Dead: Is This Something Worse? by McKenzie Wark (image courtesy Verso Books)
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