In the 1980s, western capital owners moved to defeat the rising labor movements in the United States and Europe through the process of globalization, the opening up of global trade and the transference of industry to developing nations, in an attempt to side-step the power of domestic labor entirely. However, in creating these new, sweeping networks of trade, western capitalists unintentionally fostered the rise of a new mode of production centered around the control of information: vectoralism, which has now subsumed capitalism as the dominant mode of production.
This is the controversial and thrilling thesis explored by Mckenzie Wark in her work “Capital is Dead, is this Something Worse?” from Verso Books. An expounding on her earlier essay “The Hacker Manifesto,” Wark takes a deep dive into the ways in which information technology has been shaping our lives and creeping into every facet of our being.
To Wark, it no longer seems necessary to directly own the means of production in order to capture wealth. Rather, it is much more profitable to own the means of organizing production: the vector, the abstract digital construct through which information is organized. By controlling the vector one is able to capture, process and dictate the use of the vast quantities of information generated everyday by the innumerable number of interactions between people and their environment.
Wark labels those who own the data infrastructure necessary to manage the vector the vectoralist class. These are Google, Microsoft and Amazon, along with smaller (yet still influential) operations such as Uber and AirBNB. These corporations do not generate wealth through the extraction of profit from labor as capitalists do, but instead use their capability to process information to facilitate consumer transactions with an efficiency never seen before.
In 2020, Google made 80.9% of its $181.69 billion in revenue from advertising services alone. Car-and home-sharing services such as Uber and Airbnb do not own the capital being shared, but instead own the means through which customers and contractors are connected: the vector.
Just as the capitalist class extracts profit from the working class, the vectoralist class uses the talents of the hacker class to generate new information from the bounty of raw input provided by the vector. “Hackers” are data scientists, programmers, advertisers, listicle writers on BuzzFeed—anyone whose job it is to process, understand and create information. Their productivity is not measured in sameness and hours, as it is for a factory worker, but in difference, the creation of new and “unique” pieces of content (intellectual property), and can happen in variable time.
Where does all of this information come from? Wark terms it “free labor,” which occurs every time you interact with your smart devices. When you search for a product on Google, like a post on Instagram or even wear your FitBit to bed, you generate information, which is transferred to the vectoralist’s data infrastructure by means of the vector. It is then worked with for a myriad of purposes (generating marketing reports, sold to third-parties, etc) by hackers. We “info-proles” generate information, but lack the means to realize its value.
As the age of information continues to unfold, Wark urges us to recognize the disintegration of privacy in the name of wealth, and asks us to reject the commodification of our very minds.
