Wark has been working on this Vectoralist concept starting back with A Hacker Manifesto
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.
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.
