Hackers are not criminals. Hackers are people who find new ways to express the inexhaustible virtuality of life and the real.
To hack life is to experiment with the potentialities inherent in our bodies, minds, and societies. In this sense, it is from the virtual that ever-new expressions of actuality can even emerge.
What is the virtual you ask?
The virtual is not just the realm of ideas, but also the realm of dreams, wishes, and desires; it is what allows us to create new worlds and new modes of being in our present world.
The virtual is an inexhaustible space of possibility that exists independently of what we think or say about it.
The virtual is not only an idea or a representation; it has a material existence that we live in every day: we are surrounded by things that only exist as ideas and beliefs, but which we treat as if they did in fact exist, like money.
The virtual can be understood as an abstract machine that produces its own realities by generating differences: between potentials and actualities, between thoughts and things, between words and worlds.
Hackers produce new realities by tapping into and stretching the fabric of this inexhaustible source of difference — or rather by producing new sources of difference that are themselves inexhaustible. We never “use up” these differences because they’re infinite; we just create more of them by hacking into new realities, dimensions, and domains.
Hackers are a class of people who are good at finding new ways to make these abstractions work for them. We’re good at hacking the world for the better of humanity.
Hackers are defined not only by what we produce but by what we consume: information.
Knowledge is power, as they say; but information is freedom.
Hackers alone have access to both knowledge and information; hence their freedom from a job description, representation, or social station.
Hackers don’t just enjoy abstraction; we ride abstractions like surfboards and flow with them like waves.
We’re not just good at making abstractions work for ourselves though; we’re good at making everyone else’s abstractions work for them through our relationship with reality & technology. We don’t just take advantage of new technologies; we create them from mere ideas and keep everything open-source for the public.
Hackers aren’t defined by a race or a gender or an ethnicity or a nationality; we’re not even a group of people with similar economic interests or political beliefs.
Being a hacker is a way of seeing the world, an orientation toward reality, a way of understanding how things really work and how they can be made to work better — a kind of collective perceptual intelligence.
We don’t just write software, though most of us do; we also write books, articles, essays, and poems about our experiences; we use film, art, sound, and music as a way to hack into the harmony of today and freely express our innermost being.
The formation of this hacker class as a class comes at just this moment when freedom from necessity and sovereignty from class domination appears closer than ever before.
And it is only through the production of new forms of abstraction, through the hacking of life itself, that we can manifest the best possible outcomes for all of humankind.
So we ask you, do you consider yourself a hacker?
