George Dafermos' Weblog

Friday, June 18, 2004

Football, Hacking, Marx, and Crete Boiling Hot

it's been a month since i last updated this blog. well, i had been away for longer than i had expected, and upon my arrival i realised that summer has kicked in for good. right now, it must be something like 35degrees C outside, and i am on the verge of a terminal thermoparalysis episode. it's good, no complaints. everyone is driving to the beach, and the general mood is on the rise. on top of everything, the EURO commenced a few days ago and every single male is hunkered down in his chair sipping mohittos, eating pizza, watching football, and wishing that some miserable travesty of a team will finally spare him a few god-given moments of satisfaction, hope, and national pride. what a spectacle indeed! and thought it's close to impossible to believe that a game like football which is dominated by $ could be pure and true in the midst of a ruthless capitalist cyclone that imprints its own set of rules to the core of any game that is summoned to the green ticket's call, yet, i admit i can't get my own fat ass out of this bloody chair. well, i guess there's no escaping the spectacle, whether we like it or not. i hopelessly try to give myself the benefit of the doubt by thinking that i 'm always on the side of the weaker team.

....and i happenned to read a trully path-changing, disturbing excerpt from a yet unpublished (and for the time being unfinished) book tentatively called "hacking capitalism". ~~sorry i can't tell any more about it right now~~, but beyond any doubt it's the best piece i've ever read as far as the revolutionary demands of hacking are concerned. the author, johan soderberg, takes us on a journey into the unmapped territory of the non-space, that is the vortex of the Empire. i mean, it's dog's bullocks: fast prose full of references and literary wit. in 2 hours, it made me reconsider many of my previous ideas about free software, interactivity, user-generated content, copyright and the widely adopted stance by reformist critics of ip law (which, put bluntly, is that institutional reform in copyright and patent law will not abolish property relations in the real world; it' ll just make things a little bit more fair) , and then some. there is hardly a line that didn't compel me to stop and think twice. not an easy read for an intellectually-crippled child of the chemical generation like me, but very rewarding in terms of shaping my overall worldview. ~~dodn't bother google for it-it's not online yet; but i'll post the link here and elsewhere when it will be~~ update: the essay is available online here. and i've posted some of my thoughts here.

however, and thanks to mihalis le directeur for pointing this out so eloquently yesterday morning, there is something that is missing from the excerpt (i can assure you that it's not missing from the book, but i haven't got the book in my hands, just a tiny excerpt), namely the question why hacking is relevant to the marxist doctrine and vice versa? It's obvious when we take a look at hacking from the perspective of the person who's constantly craving for fresh knowledge, (particularly for knowledge that has been put to the service of capital by means of intensifying and imploding the wealth bondage that keeps unpaid-for-labour hostage), for knowledge is power as francis bacon so convincingly exclaimed, but knowledge, i hate to confess, is not always free (libre) and certainly not free of charge. the cost of the investment in time required to pick up a new skill aside, what's left to the genuinely creative inquiring mind who wishes to navigate and internalise an external domain of knowledge, but who has no money to pay for it? this question becomes all the more interesting when looking at the software market. Say i have no problem spending loads of time getting myself up to speed with personalbrain, photoshop, logic, and other pieces of software made possible by incredible programming inenuity, but my pockets are not full. what do i do then? do i refrain from using them as a result of my inadequate funding?or do i take that bloody red pill and step outside from my (previously?) assigned role as a passive consumer of reality and resort to programming a real alternative myself (ie. The GIMP vs. photoshop)? lots of people 've done it in the past, and even more are doing it nowadays, chief among them RMS in his persistence and conscious realisation of the means he would have to employ to meet the ends he had set to pursue during his lifetime crusade in digital freedom. hacking for freedom! he prompts us, and this attitude now takes a new dimension altogether as the condition of commodified knowledge has become inextricably linked to the emerging psychopathy of immaterial labour. when on the lookout for a knowledge-work kind of job, one is inevitably confronted with interview questions like "what's your level of expertise in the use of photoshop?" and blank CV fields that need be filled in with corporate eponymies like cisco and brands/products like SPSS. From this vantage point, free software developers, illegitimate vendors of software, as well as people who crack software programs, are located in the avantguard of the modern knowledge revolution. too sad that so many of them are unaware of their actions' real effect on the world of commodified knowledge. but hopefully this is also grounds for hope for were all those people to realise the significance and meaning of their efforts and go on pursuing those very same goals in a conscious, determined manner, then we would all be bound to be shaken. i now have to go back to the telly and get my daily dose of football.

update 1: this entry was actually posted on june 18. don't ask me why this blog thinks differently.like his master, it has its own mind about things.

update 2: the essay i referred to is reluctant revolutionaries - the false modesty of reformist critics of copyright, written by johan soderberg. proper hyperlinks added above.

10:20:08 PM

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