Hacking Capitalism

1. For an account of how the Jacquard loom worked, see James Essinger, Jacquard’s Web—How a Hand Loom Led to the Birth of the Information Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

2. Concerning the labour issues and the Jacquard loom, see Daryl Hafter “The Programmed Brocade Loom and the Decline of the Drawgirl” in ed. Martha Moore Trescott, Dynamos and Virgins Revisited: Women and Technological Change in History (London: The Scarecrow Press, 1979).

3. Denial-of-Service is a method to close down a computer network by overloading it with requests.

4. Because of changes in fashion, free trade policies, and the high costs of the machinery, it took another thirty years till the Jaquard loom was widely used in England. Natalie Rothstein, “The Introduction of the Jacquard Loom to Great Britain, in ed. Veronika Gervers, Studies in Textile History—In Memory of Harold B. Burnham (Toronto: Alger Press, 1977).

5. For a historical account of the Luddite uprising, see Kirkpatrick Sale, Rebels Against the Future—The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution, Lessons for the Computer Age (Reading Mass.: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1995).

6. Even if machine breaking could not stop industrial capitalism, Eric Hobsbawm estimated that the implementation of labour-saving technologies in local areas was held back due to sabotage. Furthermore, the breaking of machines was part of a more general strategy of ‘collective bargaining by riot’, as he called it, which could also include arsoning the employer’s stock and home. If judged as a method to maintain wage rates and working conditions, it was fairly effective. Eric Hobsbawm, “The Machine Breakers”, Past and Present 1 (February 1952).

7. The joy of writing source code is the lead motive in Linus Torvald’s story about the invention of Linux. Linus Torvalds and David Diamond, Just For Fun—The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary (New York: HarperCollins Publisher, 2001); hereafter cited in text.

8. ed. Elizabeth Wilkinson & L. Willoughby, On the Aesthetic Education of Man—In a Series of Letters/Friedrich Schiller (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1982), 9; hereafter cited in text as Letters.

9. Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures (New York: Augustus M Kelley Publishers, 1971), 54.

11. Andrew Sullivan, “Counter Culture: Dot-communist Manifesto”, New York Times (Sunday 11, June 2000).

12. Slavoj Zizek, “A Cyberspace Lenin: Why Not?”, International Socialism Journal 95, (summer 2002).

15. For a less cosy account of IBM’s political legacy, see Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation (London: Little, Brown & co, 2001). IBM’s modern-day political stand can be read out from their donations to George Bush’s presidential election campaign in 2000 and 2004, hardly an administration associated with the old hippie slogan.

16. In his essay on a socialist theory of mass media, Hans Enzensberger complained about the disinterest among progressives in the topic:

“If the socialist movement writes off the new productive forces of the consciousness industry and relegates work on the media to a subculture, then we have a vicious circle. For the Underground may be increasingly aware of the technical and aesthetic possibilities of the disc, of videotape, of the electronic camera, and so on, and is systematically exploring the terrain, but it has no political viewpoint of its own and therefore mostly falls a helpless victim to commercialism.” Hans Enzensberger “Constituents of a Theory of the Media” in ed. John Hanhardt, Video Culture—A Critical Investigation (New York: Virtual Studies Workshop Press: 1986), 103; hereafter cited in text.

17. For an exhaustive account of the social perils with computers, see Lenny Siegel’s and John Markoff’s The High Cost of High Tech—The Dark Side of the Chip (New York: Harper & Row, 1985). On the global exploitation of workers in East-Asian and Mexican sweatshops where computers are built, see ed. Gerald Sussman and John Lent, Global Productions—Labor in the Making of the Information Society (Cresskill: Hampton Press, 1998). For a more general critique of information technology, see Kevin Robins and Frank Webster, The Technical Fix—Education, Computers and Industry (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989).

18. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001); hereafter cited in text as Empire. For a collection of essays critical of Micheal Hardt and Antonio Negri’s work, see ed. Gopal Balakrishnan, Debating Empire, (London: Verso, 2003). For a summary of the key concepts and thinkers behind the autonomous Marxist tradition, see Finn Bowing, “From the Mass Worker to the Multitude: A Theoretical Contextualisation of Hardt and Negri’s Empire”, in Capital & Class 83 (2004).

19. Antonio Negri, Revolution Retrieved—Writings on Marx, Keynes, Capitalist Crisis and New Social Subjects (1967–83) (London: Red Notes, 1988).

20. The major work by John Holloway is Change the World Without Taking Power (London: Pluto Press, 2005). Some of the debate sparked by the book was covered in a special issue of Capital & Class. See for instance Alex Callinicos, “Sympathy for the Devil? John Holloway’s Mephistophellan Marxism”. Capital e Class 85 (spring 2005).

Notes to Chapter One

1. Bruce Sterling, The Hacker Crackdown—Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier (London: Penguin, 1994).

2. Claude Fischer, in ed. Chant, Sources for the Study of Science, Technology and Everyday Life 1870–1950—A Secondary Reader (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1988).

3. For a detailed summary of the background history of the Internet, see John Naughton, A Brief History of the Future—The Origins of the Internet (London: Phoenix, 2000).

5. Less known is Donald Davies, a British scientist who also worked on a digital communication network and even got a prototype up and running. Janet Abbate, “Cold War and White Heat: The Origins and Meanings of Packet Switching” in ed. Donald MacKenzie and Judy Wajcman, The Social Shaping of Technology, 2nd edition (Buckingham: Philadelphia, Pa: Open University Press 1999).

6. Marie Marchand, A French Success Story: The Minitel Saga (Paris: Larousse, 1988).

7. For a background on UNIX, see Peter Salus, A Quarter Century of UNIX (Reading Mass.: Addison-Wesley 1994).

8. John Naughton, A Brief History of the Future: the Origins of the Internet (London: Phoenix, 2000), 176, italics in original.

9. Cudos is an acronym used to denote principles that should guide good scientific research. It was introduced by the sociologist Robert King Merton. One of the principles of Cudos is that scientific results ought to be freely shared among colleagues.

10. John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (New York: Viking, 2005).

11. Langdon Winner, The Whale and the Reactor—A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986).

12. Steven Levy, Hackers—Heroes of the Computer Revolution (New York: Delta, 1994), 214.

13. Paul Ceruzzi, “Inventing Personal Computing”, in ed. Donald MacKenzie & Judy Wajcman, The Social Shaping of Technology, 2nd edition (Buckingham: Philadelphia, Pa: Open University Press 1999).

14. In the United States, the scope of copyright was originally limited to the protection of maps, charts, and books. When congress passed the Copyright Act of 1976, the general applicability of copyright was broadened so that software could arguably be said to have been included. Software was explicitly covered under copyright after the amendments made in the Computer Software Copyright Act of 1980. Software code had been included in national copyright law in most European countries by the end of the 1980s.

15. Peter Drahos and John Braithwaite, Information Feudalism—Who Owns The Knowledge Economy (London: Earthscan, 2002), 171.

16. Translating source code to binary code is called compiling. The reversed procedure is known as decompiling. It is much harder to decompile and it is often prohibited in law.

17. A collection of Richard Stallman’s speeches, where he outlines the major issues within the free software movement, as well as an appendix with the GNU General Public License, the GNU Lesser General Public License, and GNU Free Documentation License, can be found in ed. Joshua Gay, Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman (Boston: GNU Press, 2002). An excellent study of the FOSS movement has been made by Glyn Moody, Rebel Code—Linux and the Open Source Revolution (London: Penguin Press, 2001); hereafter cited in text.

“You are not required to accept this license, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the program or its derivative works. These actions are prohibited by law if you do not accept this license.” In other words, if a user fails to abide to the provisions made in the GPL agreement, normal copyright law applies. Copyleft is not the same thing as the public domain.

20. Later, the Free Software Foundation added a compromise, Lesser GPL. The weaker version was required since GPL had deliberately been made incompatible with propertarian licensed code. In some areas, where propertarian code has a dominant position, GPL software was effectively shut out and its usefulness was unnecessarily reduced. LGPL is intended to allow GNU software to run side-by-side with property libraries, thus opening up a wider base of uses.

21. Ira Heffran, “Copyleft: Licensing Collaborative Works in the Digital Age.” Stanford Law Review (July 1997). On clickwrap licenses, see Julie Cohen in ed. Lehr & Pupillo, Cyber Policy and Economics in an Internet Age, 2003. Many legal scholars have speculated if GPL would stand in an American court and have for most part given a positive answer. Daniel Ravicher, “Facilitating Collaborative Software Development: The Enforceability of Mass-Market Public Software Licenses.” Virginia Journal of Law & Technology (fall 2000), and: Stephen McJohn, “The Paradoxes of Free Software.” George Mason Law Review (fall 2000).

23. Like most things in the hacker subculture, the name (Linux or GNU/Linux) is far from innocent. The use of either name sends signals of allegiance to those in-the-know. Richard Stallman advocates the use of GNU/Linux since the GNU toolbox plays a considerable part of the operating system out of which Linux is merely the kernel. The name dispute has also political ramifications since many within the computer underground and in the industry would like to keep the outspoken Stallman and the Free Software Foundation at an arms length.

24. Peter Wayner, Free For All—How Linux and the Free Software Movement Undercut the High-Tech Titans (New York: HarperBusiness, 2000).

26. Tim Berners-Lee & Mark Fischetti, Weaving the Web—The Past, Present and Future of the World Wide Web (London: Texere, 2000).

27. This fact is happily admitted to by free-software entrepreneur Robert Young:

“Quietly, since Red Hat’s founding in the 1993, we had focused on an approach to software development that enabled us to tap into a worldwide software development team bigger than even the biggest industry giant could afford” Robert Young and Wendy Rohm, Under the Radar—How Red Hat Changed the Software Business and Took Microsoft by Surprise (Scottsdale, AZ: Coriolis, 1999), 9; hereafter cited in text.

28. Eric Raymond would certainly object to be juxtaposed with Marxism. His engagement in Open Source springs from a libertarian conviction and he is a member of National Rifle Association. On learning that China was adopting a national version of GNU/Linux, he exclaimed:

“Any ‘identification’ between the values of the open-source community and the repressive practices of Communism is nothing but a vicious and cynical fraud”. See Linux Today (November 11, 1999).

29. Eric Raymond, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar.” First Monday vol.3, no.3 (1998), 21.

31. Reported by Greg Michalec, Free Software: History, Perspectives, and Implications, 2002, p.29, available at greg.primate.net/sp/thesis.pdf, (accessed 2007-02-08).

32. In words akin to those just quoted from Linus Torvalds, Karl Marx once remarked:

“In fact, of course, this ‘productive’ worker cares as much about the crappy shit he has to make as does the capitalist himself who employed him, and who also couldn’t give a damn for the junk.” Karl Marx, Grundrisse, (London: Penguin Books: 1993), 273; hereafter cited in text as Grundrisse.

33. Robert Young, “Giving It Away—How Red Hat Software Stumbled Across a New Economic Model and Helped Improve an Industry”, in (DiBona, Ockman e Stone).

34. Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian, Information Rules—A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy (London: McGraw-Hill, 1998).

35. Gilberto Camara, “Open Source Software Production: Fact & Fiction.” Mute 27 (spring 2004).

36. Rishab Ghosh and Vipul Prakash, “The Orbiten Free Software Survey”, First Monday, vol.5, no.7 (July 2000).

38. Rishab Ghosh, et al., Free/Libre and Open Source Software: survey and study, part IV, 2002, available at www.infonomics.nl/FLOSS/report/ (accessed 2007-02-08).

40. For an analysis as well as interviews with hackers concerning the male dominance within the hacker movement, see Paul Taylor, Hackers—Crime in the Digital Sublime (London: Routledge, 1999).

41. In an interview conducted for this book in 2005, a member of the feminist hacker group Haeksen observed how the subculture mirrored dominant structures with its own particular flavour. If a woman had the fastest machine among a group of developers, the men upgraded their computer equipment very quickly.

42. Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women—The Reinvention of Nature (London: Free Association Books, 2001); hereafter cited in text, Sadie Plant, Zeros + Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture (London: Fourth Estate.: Beacon Press, 1998).

46. “The proprietary OS [operative system] vendors, with their huge investment in the proprietary software that their products consist of, would be crazy to try and match the benefit we are offering their customers, as we generate a fraction of the revenue per user that the current proprietary OS vendor rely on”, Robert Young, “Giving It Away—How Red Hat Software Stumbled Across a New Economic Model and Helped Improve an Industry” in (DiBona, 119).

47. In following chapters, I will suggest that the exploitation of ‘audience power’ is complementing the exploitation of labour power. The situation is not exceptional to hacking but is a systematic trait in post-modern markets.

48. Nathan Newman, Net Loss: Internet Prophets, Private Profits, and the Costs to Community (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002); hereafter cited in text.

49. On Bill Gate’s manoeuvring to take charge of the browser market, see James Wallace, Overdrive—Bill Gates and the Race to Control Cyberspace (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1997).

50. The name Mozilla was the codename which Mark Andreessen’s team used when hijacking the Mozaic browser—Mozilla/Mosaic-Killer. (Newman, 115).

51. For a comparison between the different philosophies behind Open Source and Free Software, see David Barry, “The Contestation of Code—A Preliminary Investigation into the Discourse of the Free/Libre and Open Source Movements”, Critical Discourse Studies, April, 2004.

52. Robert Young makes a key observation on how intellectual property rights creates enormous losses and hold-ups in downstream industries:

“Executives at the highest levels at the company had long recognized that proprietary operating system manufacturers were not moving their operating systems forward as quickly as Intel was advancing microprocessor technology. […] If it had a new technology available at the processor level that would allow computer users to do new things, it had to wait until the operating system supplier decided it was willing to build support for these features into the system.” (Young, 6).

53. Martin Kenney “Value Creation in the Late Twentieth Century: The Rise of the Knowledge Worker” in ed. Jim Davis, Thomas Hirschl and Michael Stack, Cutting Edge: Technology, Information Capitalism and Social Revolution (London: Verso, 1997), 91; hereafter cited in text.

54. Rebecca Eisenberg, “Genes Patents and Product Development”, Science 14 (August 1992).

55. Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 50; hereafter cited in text.

56. Rebecca Eisenberg, “Intellectual Property at the Public-Private Divide: The Case of Large-Scale cDNA, Sequencing”, University of Chicago Law School Roundtable (1996).

58. RIAA (Record Industry Association of America) and MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) would prefer if people knew DRM as ‘Digital Rights Management Technology’. As with the coining of the term ‘pirate copying’, or the negative associations conveyed from the word ‘hacker’, part of the struggle is fought on a semantic level.

59. Pamela Samuelson, “Regulation of Technologies to Protect Copyrighted Works”, Communication of the ATM 39 (1996), and Peter Drahos & John Braithwaite, Information Feudalism—Who Owns The Knowledge Economy (London: Earthscan, 2002).

60. The third chapter on commodification of information will discuss in more detail the conflict between periphery and centre on intellectual property.

61. It says: “Banning open source would have immediate, broad, and strongly negative impacts on the ability of many sensitive and security-focused DOD groups to protect themselves against cyberattacks,”, quoted in Washington Post (May 23, 2002).

62. So far the company has come out unscratched. The final settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice in 2001 saved the company from a forced restructuring. Amanda Cohen, “Surveying the Microsoft Antitrust Universe”, Berkeley Technology Law Journal (2004).

64. Kerry Goettsch, “SCO Group v. IBM: The Future of Open-Source Software”, University of Illinois Journal of Law, Technology & Policy (fall 2003).

66. Pekka Himanen uses the term ‘hacker spirit’ and applies it as an attitude towards work in general, the spirit of the ‘information age’ as opposed to the attitude towards work in the industrial society. He never considers the existence of conflicts of interest between business, employees and volunteers. For a critical view of how the blurring of work and passion, i.e. the hacker spirit, is taken advantage of by shareholders at the expense of disillusioned, burned-out employees, see Andrew Ross’ study of webdesigners working in advertising bureaus. No-Collar—The Human Workplace and its Hidden Costs (Philadelphia: Temple University Press 2004), Pekka Himanen, The Hacker Ethic—The Spirit of the Information Age (London: Secker & Warburg, 2001).

67. Dennies Hayes, Behind the Silicon Curtain—The Seduction of Work in a Lonely Era (London: Free Association Books, 1989), 85.

68. The tendency was noticeable within the computer industry already in the 1970s when Philip Kraft examined how the computer profession was being transformed by an intensified technical division of labour. Philip Kraft, Programmers and Managers—The Routinization of Computer Programming in the United States (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1977).

69. Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character, (New York: Norton & Company, 1999).

70. David Noble, Forces of Production—A Social History of Industrial Automation (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1984), 231, hereafter cited in text.

71. The story about how Richard Stallman came to realise the virtues of free source code is remarkably similar. A Xerox printer in Stallman’s laboratory frequently malfunctioned. He knew that he could fix the problem, but he was prevented from improving the printer because of the proprietary license. ed. Joshua Gay Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stall-man, (Boston: GNU Press, 2002).

72. The existence of a white collar working class is hardly controversial anymore. For a review of the debate, see Richard Sobel, White Collar Working Class— From Structure to Politics (New York: Praeger, 1989).

73. ed. Bernadette Schell and John Dodge, The Hacking of America—Who’s Doing it. Why, and How (London: Quorum Books, 2002), 117.

74. Andrew Ross, Strange Weather—Culture, Science, and Technology in the Age of Limits (London: Verso, 1991), 92, italics in original.

75. For a discussion on the growth of home-work and how it is related to a twotiered labour market, see Peter Meiksins in ed. McChesney, Wood & Foster, Capitalism and the Information Age—The Political Economy of the Global Communication Revolution, (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998).

76. Translated and quoted by Harry Cleaver, “The Inversion of Class Perspective in Marxian Theory: From Valorisation to Self-Valorisation”, in ed. Bonefeld, Gunn & Psychopedis, Open Marxism, vol.2 (London: Pluto Press, 1992), 137.

77. In a sense, placing the emphasis on the struggle of the working class community as opposed to the individual labourer acknowledges an old fact. Spouses, relatives, and neighbours of workers have always played a significant role in industrial conflicts. Corporate restructuring is not only resisted because of the loss of jobs. The threat to the way of life of the working class community has also been a powerful incitement to action. See ed. Nancy Naples, Community Activism and Feminist Politics—Organizing Across Race, Class, and Gender (New York: Routledge, 1998).

78. Alan Liu, The Laws of Cool—Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004).

79. In the last chapter we will engage closer with the notion of play and struggle.

Notes to Chapter Two

1. Ralf Dahrendorf, Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society (London: Routledge, 1959).

2. Daniel Bell, The Coming of the Post-Industrial Society (New York: Basic Books, 1973).

3. For a collection of essays critical of Castell’s work, ed. Frank Webster and Basil Dimitriou, Manuel Castells—From the Informational City to the Information Age, vol. III (London: Sage, 2004).

4. Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class—And How it’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community & Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 2002).

5. Nick Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Marx—Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-Technology Capitalism (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 37.

7. Frank Webster, Theories of the Information Society (New York: Routledge, 2002).

8. While examining the literature of a closely related subject, post-modernity, Fredric Jameson complained about the lack of Marxist alternatives to post-industrial ideology:

“[…] In the meantime the new mediatic and informational social phenomena had been colonized (in our absence) by the Right, in a series of influential studies in which the first tentative Cold War notion of an ‘end of ideology’ finally gave birth to the full-blown concept of a ‘post-industrial society’ itself.” Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), 400.

9. The focus will be on the fraction of thinkers associated with Antonio Negri. In recent years, Negri’s work has been widely read and lively debated in English-speaking academia and many of his texts have been translated to English. Furthermore, the issues that he is concerned with relates closely to the discussion in this book. Autonomous Marxism is a much more diverse current, however, and some of the sternest critics of Antonio Negri come from within this tradition of thought. For a broader account of autonomous Marxism, see Steve Wright, Storming Heaven—Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism (London: Pluto Press, 2002).

10. It is the concept of totality that is such an anathema to post-modern writers. Best known is Jean-Francois Lyotard’s announcement of an end to all “great narratives”. Of course, as have been pointed out by many of Lyotard’s critics, the end of great narratives becomes a narrative in its own right. By denouncing totality it just slips in the back door, often in less considered forms. Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality: the Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984).

11. Gerald Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History—A Defence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000).

12. The argument of Alvin Gouldner is that the two camps, scientific Marxism and critical Marxism, reflects an inconsistency that is present already in Karl Marx’s own thinking. He believes that this tension is the source of Marx’s intellectual richness, and Gouldner protests against the many attempts to purge Marx of the ambiguity and positivist lapses. Alvin Gouldner, The Two Marxism: Contradictions and Anomalies in the Development of Theory (London: Macmillan, 1980).

13. Wiebe Bijker, Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs—Towards a Theory of Sociotechnical Change (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995), hereafter cited in text.

14. Joel Mokyr, The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (New York Oxford University Press, 1990).

“In effect, capitalist innovation is always a product, a compromise or a response, in short a constraint which derives from workers’ antagonism.” Antonio Negri, “Twenty Theses on Marx: Interpretation of the Class Situation Today”, in ed. Makdisi, Casarino and Karl, Marxism Beyond Marxism (London: Routledge, 1996), 158.

16. To be fair, Antonio Negri is not the only one troubled by such thoughts. Though Antonio Negri and Jurgen Habermas have few things in common, the later writes in a similar tone of voice on this subject:

“Thus technology and science become a leading productive force, rendering inoperative the conditions for Marx’s labour theory of value. It is no longer meaningful to calculate the amount of capital investment in research and development on the basis of the value of unskilled (simple) labour power, when scientific-technical progress has become an independent source of surplus value, in relation to which the only source of surplus values considered by Marx, namely the labour power of the immediate producers, plays an ever smaller role.” Jurgen Habermas “Technology and Science as ‘Ideology’.” in ed. Colin Chant, Sources for the Study of Science, Technology and Everyday Life 1870–1950—A Secondary Reader, (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1988), 190.

17. Bruce Norton highlights, though, that Fredric Jameson silently leaves out more than he takes from Ernest Mandel. The thrust of Mandel’s work was to prove that capitalism moves towards aggravated crises and a definite collapse. Jameson takes a subtext of this argument, the idea that the commodity form is expanding ever outwards to eclipse culture and aesthetics, and makes this his core claim. Fredric Jameson ends up with a capitalism that grows without internal limits and that knows no insurmountable resistance, quite the opposite argument to Ernest Mandel’s idea. Bruce Norton, “Late Capitalism and Postmodernism: Jameson/Mandel”, in ed. Antonio Callari & Stephen Cullenberg & Carole Biewener, Marxism in the Postmodern Age—Confronting the New World Order (New York: Guilford Press, 1994).

18. “Late capitalism, far from representing a ‘post-industrial society’, thus appears as the period in which all branches of the economy are fully industrialized for the first time; to which one could further add the increasing mechanization of the sphere of circulation […] and the increasing mechanization of the super-structure.” Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism (London: Thetford Press limited, 1978), 191, italics in original; hereafter cited in text.

19. In words similar to Ernest Mandel, Manuel Castells announces that the ‘chain of causality’, from the material base to the superstructure, has broken down when the superstructure becomes productive in itself, in:

“[…] the information age, marked by the autonomy of culture vis-a-vis the material bases of our existence”

(Castells, 478). Castell is typical in that he partially accepts the postulates made in the historical materialist theory and follow these up to the point of the big rupture between the industrial and the post-industrial and/or the modern and post-modern society. From then onwards, however, the informational mode of production renders historical materialism obsolete, by which it is also implied that Marxism and the very idea of a universal, emancipatory project has been invalidated. Manuel Castells echoes the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s charge against Marxism under the banner of simulacra. In The Mirror of Production, were Baudrillard definitely departed from his Marxist heritage, he announced that political economy had been overturned by semiotics. At a closer look, however, it becomes clear that simulacra is mobilised exactly for the purpose of simulating the dogmas of bourgeoisie political economy. Jean Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production (St Lois: Telos Press, 1975); hereafter cited in text.

20. One exception is the Soviet linguistic Valentin Volosinov. Already back in the 1920s he studied language in relation to class struggle, and argued that signs must be seen in its material and social context. Valentin Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (New York: Seminar Press, 1973).

21. Paulo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude—For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life (New York: Semiotext, 2004), 61.

22. The impression that the Virtual has disconnected itself from real space and become autonomous and pre-eminent is highly questionable. Katherine Hayles puts it well:

“[…] The efficacy of information depends on a highly articulated material base. Without such a base, from rapid transportation systems to fibber-optical cables, information becomes much more marginal in its ability to affect outcomes in the material world. Ironically, once this base is in place, the perceived primacy of information over materiality obscures the importance of the very infrastructure that makes information valuable.” Katherine Hayles, The Condition of Virtuality” in ed. Peter Lunenfeld, The Digital Dialectic—New Essays on New Media (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1998), 72.

24. Wiebe Bijker describes technical artefacts as ‘bundles of meanings’ negotiated between relevant social groups. But Bijker also concedes that an artefact is not infinitely malleable:

“The relevant social groups have, in building up the technological frame, invested so much in the artefact that its meaning has become quite fixed—it cannot be changed easily, and it forms part of a hardened network of practices, theories, and social institutions. From this time on it may indeed happen that, naively spoken, an artefact ‘determines’ social development” (Bijker, 282).

25. The slogan of Mitch Kapor echoes Langdon Winner’s inquiry into the ‘politics of the artefact’. Winner’s famous example is the low bridges over the motorways going to Long Island, New York. Robert Moses, an influential city planner in New York for many decades, specified the height of the bridges so that buses would be unable to pass under them. His intention was to keep black people and the working class, who depended on public transports, from accessing the beaches and parks at Long Island. Langdon Winner, “Do Artifacts Have Politics?, Daedalus, vol.109, no.1 (winter 1980). Winner’s case has been contested by scholars who, pointing out that nowadays the bridges are a hindrance to luxury SUV-cars, have stressed the failure of artefacts to affect political outcomes. Bernward Joerges, “Do Politics have Artefacts?” Social Studies of Science, vol. 29, no.3 (1999).

26. For a summary of different positions on post-Fordism, see ed. Ash Amin, Post-Fordism: A Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994). Sceptics have objected to the sharp distinction drawn between Fordism and post-Fordism and questioned if there is solid empirical evidence for the periodisation. Andrew Sayer, “Postfordism in Question”, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35 (1989). The qualifications against the theory are valid. Still, that the economy has drastically changed over the last forty years is an uncontroversial statement. The need to categorise this change is suggested by the many writers abiding to the industrial age/information age dichotomy. An analysis of contemporary capitalism is far better off starting with the concept of post-Fordism.

27. Michel Aglietta, A Theory of Capitalist Regulation (London: NLB, 1979). The French Regulation School has been criticised for theorising capitalism from an institutional horizon, thus failing to give due credit to the role of class struggle. see ed. Werner Bonefeld & John Holloway, Post-Fordism and Social Form—A Marxist Debate on the Post-Fordist State (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991).

28. For a compilation of claims about the rise of a new class, Richard Barbrook, The Class of the New (London: Mute, 2006).

29. “Precisely because it is placed in the centre of the most complex mechanisms of organisational capitalism, the new working class is brought to realise more quickly than the other sectors the contradictions inherent in the system. […] Its objective situation places it in the position of seeing the deficiencies in modern capitalist organisation, and to arrive at a consciousness of a new way of organising productive relationships, as the only way of satisfying the human needs which cannot be expressed within the present structures.” Serge Mallet, The New Working Class, Nottingham: Spokesman, 1975), 29.

30. Maurizio Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labour”, in ed. Paolo Virno & Michael Hardt, Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).

31. For a critique of this tendency in Negri’s thinking, see Nick-Dyer Witheford’s “Cyber-Negri: General Intellect and Immaterial Labour”, in ed. Timothy Murphy & Abdul-Karim Mustapha, The Philosophy of Antonio Negri—Resistance in Practice (London: Pluto Press, 2005).

32. It must be stressed that a ‘necessary need’ is socially defined. What is deemed as necessary depends on the time, place, and class position of the individual in question. This distinction will be further examined in chapter four.

33. George Caffentzis, ”On Africa and Self-Reproducing Automata”, in New Enclosures/Midnight Notes Collective (Jamaica Plain, Ma.: Midnight Notes, 1990). Antonio Negri is oblivious to this argument since, though he acknowledges that labour is still the basis of value, insists that scientific labour is immeasurable and that the law of value has ceased to operate.

34. Tessa Morris-Suzuki “Robots and Capitalism” in (Davis, Hirschl & Stack18).

36. Stuart Hall “Encoding/Decoding” in ed. Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe and Paul Willis, Culture, Media, Language (London: Rout-ledge, 1996).

37. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984).

39. ed. Vincent Mosco and Janet Wasko, The Political Economy of Information (Madison, Wisc: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988).

40. To equate ‘audience power’ with ’labour power’ of employed workers is controversial to say the least. In his exhaustive review of Marxist perspectives on the topic of communication, Vincent Mosco dodges the question if audiences can be equated with living labour as a source of surplus value for capital. Mosco grants that the relationship between audience and broadcaster, a relationship of mutual dependency and yet ripe with antagonism, can metaphorically be likened with the uneasy coexistence between workers and management. Vincent Mosco, The Political Economy of Communication (London: Sage Publications, 1996), 149.

42. Mariarosa Dalla Costa & Selma James, The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community (Bristol: The Falling Wall Press, 1973). Harriet Fraad, Stephen Resnick & Richard Wolff, Bringing it all Back Home—Class, Gender and Power in the Modern Household (London: Pluto Press, 1994).

43. Martin Kenney “Value Creation in the Late Twentieth Century: The Rise of the Knowledge Worker” in (Davis, Hirschl & Stack 94).

44. Eric von Hippel, professor in economics at MIT, studies how end users contribute to innovation. He is positive about the trend and stresses that users can design equipment closer to their needs than if they depend on the guesses of a manufacturer. Eric von Hippel acknowledges that the reluctance among many companies towards enrolling user-centred innovation schemes owes to the perceived threat to the social division of labour. He goes on, however, to advocate user centred business models as a matter of social welfare, failing to see the antagonism of such a scenario. Eric von Hippel, Democratising Innovation (Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 2005).

45. Tiziana Terranova, Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age (London: Pluto Press, 2004).

46. The culture industry has successfully established ‘pirate copying’ as a term in the public debate. Many hackers refuse to use the vocabulary which they find ideologically loaded. However, to replace the word ‘pirate’ with ‘un-authorised copying’ or ‘illicit copying’ does not suffice since everyone will fill in the word ‘pirate’ in their heads. It is more appropriate to replace the last word ‘copying’ with ‘sharing’. By juxtaposing the two emotionally charged words ‘pirate’ and ‘sharing’, the agenda behind the term ‘pirate copying’ is brought into the limelight.

47. Stewart Brand, The Media Lab—Inventing the Future at M.I.T. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), 202.

48. Fritz Machlup, Knowledge: Its Creation, Distribution and Economic Significance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 159.

49. John Stuart Mill, The Principles of Political Economy (Kitchener, Ont.: Batoche, 2001), 1129.

50. The words of Thomas Jefferson, written in a letter dated 1813, have become iconic in the computer underground. “He who receives an idea from me, receives instructions himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.” ed. Joyce Appleby & Terence Ball, Thomas Jefferson—Political Writings (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 580.

51. Max Horkheimer & Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (London: Verso, 1997), 161.

52. Lawrence Lessig, The Future of Ideas—The Fate of Commons in a Connected World (New York: Random House, 2001), 93 and 94.

53. The label has been made up by Dan Shiller, “The Information Commodity: A Preliminary View” in (Davis, Hirschl & Stack).

54. Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1972), 4.

55. See Michael Perelman, The Innovation of Capitalism—Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000).

56. Dan Shiller, “How to Think About Information” in ed. Vincent Mosco & Janet Wasko, The Political Economy of Information (Madison, Wisc: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 41.

57. Katherine Hayles, “The Condition of Virtuality”, in ed. Peter Lunenfeld, The Digital Dialectic—New Essays on New Media (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1999).

58. The opportunity has not been missed by mainstream economists. If Fritz Machlup’s sentence is modified, so that ‘knowledge’ is read out as ‘labour’, the thrust of this development becomes absolutely clear:

“The point to grasp and to remember is that the same amount of knowledge that is used to make m units of output will serve to make m + 1 units, and the same knowledge that is used by n persons (producers) can enable n + 1 persons to make the same product. There might be a cost of the transfer of knowledge, of teaching it and learning it, but there is no additional cost of using it once it has been acquired.” Fritz Machlup, Knowledge: Its Creation, Distribution and Economic Significance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 160, italics in original.

59. David Noble has argued this point in a widely read article were he predicts a proletarisation of higher learning. David Noble “Digital Diploma Mills” in ed. Benjamin Johnson, Patrick Kavanagh and Kevin Mattson, Steal this University—The Rise of the Corporate University and the Academic Labor Movement (New York: Routledge, 2003).

60. Paolo Virno, “Notes on the General Intellect” in ed. Saree Makdisi, Cesare Casarino & Rebecca Karl, Marxism Beyond Marxism (London: Routledge, 1996), 271, italics in original.

61. The neoliberal author Ayn Rand might have sensed this possibility when making her passionate defence for intellectual property rights:

“Patents are the heart and core of property rights, and once they are destroyed, the destruction of all other rights will follow automatically, as a brief postscript.” Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (New York: New American Library, 1966), 128.

Notes to Chapter Three

1. William Fisher “Theories of intellectual property” in ed. Stephen Munzer, Essays in Legal and Political Economy of Property (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

2. Dragan Milovanovic recaptures the criticism directed against Pashukanis by his contemporaries in the introduction to Evgeny Pashukanis, The General Theory of Law and Marxism (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2002).

5. ed. William Scheuerman, The Rule of Law Under Siege—Selected Essays of Franz L. Neuman and Otto Kirchheimer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).

6. Jane Gaines, Contested Culture—The Image, the Voice, and the Law (Chapell Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 6.

7. Bernard Edelman, Ownership of the Image—Elements for a Marxist Theory of Law (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979).

10. Brendan Scott, “Copyright in a Frictionless World: Toward a Rhetoric of Responsibility”, First Monday, vol.6, no.9 (September 2001).

11. Carla Hesse, “Enlightenment Epistemology and the Laws of Authorship in Revolutionary France, 1777–1793”, Representations 30 (1990).

12. Makeen Fouad Makeen, Copyright in a Global Information Society—The Scope of Copyright Protection under International, US, UK and French Law (Hague: Kluwer Law International 2000).

13. Lyman Ray Patterson, Copyright in Historical Perspective (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1968).

14. Michel Foucault in ed. Paul Rabinow, The Foucault Reader (London: Penguin Books, 1991), 118–119.

15. The fact that modern copyright and trademark law is framed within utilitarian and narrowly defined economic goals does not rule out that it has a chilling effect on free speech and free thinking. Occasionally, copyright law is used directly to silence dissenting voices. George Bush’s campaign staff sent a cease and desist letter to Zack Exley, the creator of <gwbush.com>, where he parodied Bush’s own site. Exley was threatened with legal action because he had graft inappropriate material “onto the words, look and feel of the Exploratory Committee’s site.” The endnote of the story is delivered by George Bush himself, whose comment was: “There ought to be limits to freedom”. Reported by Hannibal Travis in “Pirates of the Information Infrastructure: Blackstonian Copyright and the First Amendment”, Berkeley Technology Law Journal vol.15, no.2 (spring 2000).

16. “In the same way that ‘by serving the machine’ the proletarian squanders his freedom through the use of his labour power, so the photographer squanders his creative freedom in putting himself at the ‘service’ of his apparatus” Bernard Edelman, Ownership of the Image—Elements for a Marxist Theory of Law (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), 45.

17. Celia Lury, Cultural Rights—Technology, Legality and Personality (London: Routledge, 1993).

18. Walter Benjamin made a similar remark while investigating the film media. He noted that the film actor is selling his own persona:

“This market, where he offers not only his labour but also his whole self, his heart and soul, […].” Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 231.

19. Eva Hemmungs Wirtén, No Trespassing—Authorship, Intellectual Property Rights, and the Boundaries of Globalization (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004).

20. The right to own the image of oneself might sound appealing and natural. But as with all kinds of private property, it comes with a catch. After examining a number of court cases, Jane Gaines concludes:

“What I mean is that in current legal thought a person does not have publicity rights in himself or herself unless, at one time or another in the course of her career, he or she has transferred these rights to another party.” Jane Gaines, Contested Culture—The Image, the Voice, and the Law (Chapell Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 190. See also Rosemary J. Coombe, “Author/izing the Celebrity: Publicity Rights, Postmodern Politics, and Unauthorized Genders,” Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal 10 (1992).

22. It is explicitly stated in the European Patent Convention, article 52:2(c), that computer programs shall not be regarded as inventions but protected as literary works, i.e. under copyright law.

23. See Robert M. Kunstadt, F. Scott Kieff, and Robert G. Kramer, “Are Sports Moves Next in IP Law?” National Law Journal (May 20, 1996).

24. The right to patent life-forms was first introduced when the US Supreme Court decided in 1980 to uphold the microbiologist Ananda Chakrabarty’s patent claim over a genetically engineered oil-eating bacterium. Ketih Aoki, “Neocolonialism, Anticommons Property, and Biopiracy in the (Not-So-Brave) New World Order of International Intellectual Property Protection, Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies (1998). Of no less controversy are patents on medical methods. Physician Samuel Pallin’ filed an infringement action against a fellow ophthalmologist, Jack A. Singer, for having used the patented method to cure a patient. Public outrage followed and the Federal District court invalidated the patent claim. Joel Garris, “The Case for Patenting Medical Procedures,” 22 American Journal of Law and Medicine 85, (1996). The question of who is the rightful owner of genetic information is raised by the story about John Moore. He underwent treatment for leukaemia in 1976. The doctors recognised the commercial value of his cells and, after removing Moore’s spleen, patented a cell line found in the tissue. In 1990, the supreme court of California ruled that Moore did not own the information extracted from his cells. One irony with the ruling, pointed out by James Boyle, is that while the court denied John Moore ownership rights over his body tissue because such a right would impede the progress of science, the court acknowledged the patentee’s property right as a matter of scientific discovery. James Boyle, Shamans, Software, and Spleens—Law and the Construction of the Information Society (London: Harvard University Press, 1996), hereafter cited in text.

25. On US policy towards the Berne convention, see Vaidhyanathan, Copyrights and Copywrongs—The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity (New York: New York University Press, 2001).

26. Marta Pertegás, Cross-Border Enforcement of Patent Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 45.

27. Cherif Bassiouni, “Universal Jurisdiction for International Crimes: Historical Perspectives and Contemporary Practice”, Virginia Journal of International Law, vol.42, no.8 (2001).

28. In her study of globalisation, Saskia Sassen points out human rights codes and global capital markets as two instances that override the legitimacy of the nation state. Saskia Sassen, Losing Control?—Sovereignity in an Age of Globalization (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).

29. There has been much research on the redistributive effects of the TRIPs treaty and the role of corporate interests in drafting the treaty. Keith Maskus, Intellectual Property Rights in the Global Economy (Washington DC: Institute for International Economics, 2000), Duncan Matthew, Globalising Intellectual Property Rights—The TRIPs Agreement (London: Routledge, 2002), Susan Sell, Private Power, Public Law—The Globalization of Intellectual Property Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

30. Michael Perelman “The Political Economy of Intellectual Property” Monthly Review (January 2003), 34.

31. Julian Dibbell, “We Pledge Allegiance to the Penguin” Wired (November 2004).

33. There are similarities between high-sea piracy and high-tech piracy beyond the rhetoric of the copyright industry. Like pirate sharing, high-sea piracy was perceived as a threat against sovereignty and provoked nation states to collaborate on the first ‘universal’ jurisdiction. Cherif Bassiouni referes to a ruling by chief Justice John Marshall in 1820 where it is stated that crews sailing under a flag acknowledging the authority of no state is subject to the penal code of all nations. Cherif Bassiouni, “Universal Jurisdiction for International Crimes: Historical Perspectives and Contemporary Practice”, Virginia Journal of International Law, vol.42, no.8. (2001).

34. Contrary to the reports in media, Jon Johansen was not the author of the program. The naming rights for writing the DeCSS is claimed by a hacker collective to which Jon Johansen was affiliated, the Masters of Reverse Engineering (MoRE). Allegedly, they were provided with the cracked CSS files by an un-named, German hacker.

35. Richard Spinello, Regulating Cyberspace—The Policies and Technologies of Control (Westport, Conn.: Quorum Books, 2002).

36. The mass exposure of the DeCSS code was partly in response to a related legal case. The motion picture studios and the DVD Copy Control Association filed suit against hundreds of people under Californian trade secret law for posting DeCSS or linking to websites with the source code. This claim was overturned since the information was public and no longer a trade secret. Alex Eaton-Salners, “DVD Copy Control Association v. Bunner: Freedom of Speech and Trade Secrets”, Berkeley Technology Law Journal (2004).

37. Lawrence Lessig, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 126.

38. The notion was coined by Denise Caruso, a columnist in New York Times. Denise Caruso, “The Legacy of Microsoft’s Trial”, The New York Times (December 6, 1999).

41. Andrew Barry, Political Machines: Governing a Technological Society (London: Athlone, 2001).

42. See for example many of the essays in ed. McChesney, Wood & Foster, Capitalism and the Information Age—The Political Economy of the Global Communication Revolution (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998).

43. Gail Grant, Understanding Digital Signatures—Establishing Trust over the Internet and Other Networks (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1998), 14.

44. The term ‘Social Taylorism’ is coined by Kevin Robins and Frank Webster. They define it as follows:

“Our argument is that this gathering of skill/knowledge/information, hitherto most apparent in the capitalist labor process, is now entering a new and more pervasive stage. […] We are talking of a process of social deskilling, the depredation of knowledge and skills, which are then sold back in the form of commodities […].” Robins and Webster “Cybernetic Capitalism: Information, Technology, Everyday Life” in ed. Vincent Mosco, & Janet Wasko, The Political Economy of Information (Madison, Wisc: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 65–66.

45. Hybridization has many parallels with the Digital Rights Management technologies now being deployed to prevent pirate sharing on the Internet. Vandana Shiva, in a study of how intellectual property affects farmers in Third World countries, remarks that:

“Processes like hybridization are the technological means that stop seed from reproducing itself. This provides capital with an eminently effective way of circumventing natural constraints on the commodification of the seed.” Vandana Shiva, Biopiracy: the plunder of nature and knowledge (Boston: South End Press, 1997), 49.

46. Jack Kloppenburg, First the Seed—The Political Economy of Plant Biotechnology 1492–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

47. Stuart Biegel, Beyond Our Control? Confronting the Limits of Our Legal System in the Age of Cyberspace (Cambridge Mass., MIT Press, 2003).

48. Milton Mueller, Ruling the Root—Internet Governance and the Taming of Cyberspace (Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press 2002).

49. The Internet is not the first technology that has become a focal point of the struggle over how to organise communications. In Hans Enzensberger’s contribution to a radical theory of communication, drawing from the insights of Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht, he identifies the interests behind one-way, mass communications. The radio media is a case in point:

“Every transistor radio is, by the nature of its construction, at the same time a potential transmitter; it can interact with other receivers by circuit reversal. The development from a mere distribution medium to a communications medium is technically not a problem. […] The technical distinction between receivers and transmitters reflects the social division of labour into producers and consumers […]” (Hanhardt, 98).

51. Mark Stefik, The Internet Edge—Social, Legal, and Technological Challenges for a Networked World (Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 1999).

52. ed. Anil Jain, Ruud Bolle & Sarath Pankanti: Biometrics—Personal Identification in Networked Society, (Norwell: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999), p.vii.

53. David Harvey, Spaces of Capital—Towards a Critical Geography (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001), 246–7.

54. Some examples hereof are the Simputer sponsored by the Indian government and the $100-computer from MIT. In both cases the machines are intended for rural populations in developing countries. In addition to closing the so-called digital divide, these projects will help to spread free software in the South.

55. Interview with Damjan Lampret, initiator of OpenCores. The project can be found at: www.opencores.org. Another interesting free hardware project is the GNUbook. http://gnubook.org/

56. In an article in a computer magasine with the title “Can Software Replace Hardware”, the journalist tells about the promises of FPGA technology.

“In economic terms, this enables new hardware systems to be built for producers in fractions of a second at little cost.”; and:

“Our edge is that we can use easily available programming skills to do what previously required expensive and hard-to-recruit chip designers” Marcus Gibson, “Can Software Replace Hardware”, Ericsson Connexion (June 1999), 36 and 38.

The advantage with reprogrammable hardware is, in other words, its expediency in deskilling and cheapening labour.

58. Ellen Goodman, “Spectrum Rights in the Telecosm to Come”, San Diego Law Review (February/March 2004).

Notes to Chapter Four

1. The term ‘affluent society’ derives from the heterodox, liberal economist Jon Galbraith’s book The Affluent Society. The popular adoption of the term in the computer underground, however, differs from the Keynesian arguments put forward by Galbraith under the same title.

2. The schematic summary of ‘hierarchy of needs’ has to be amended. Maslow does not present his steps in a so straight-forward fashion, but stresses the interface of differing needs, the influence of habits on behaviour, and the overall complexity of the human brain. Abraham Maslow, Motivation and Personality (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1970).

3. Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (London: Heinemann, 1976), 26.

4. Thomas Davenport and John Beck, The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business (Boston, Mass.: Harvard Business School Press, 2001).

5. This is best shown by Marx’s own words: “The course of social development is by no means that because one individual has satisfied his need he then proceeds to create a superfluity for himself; but rather because one individual or class of individuals is forced to work more than required for the satisfaction of its need—because surplus labour is on one side, therefore not-labour and surplus wealth are posited on the other. In reality the development of wealth exists only in these opposites: in potentiality, its development is the possibility of the suspension of these opposites.” (Grundrisse, 401, italics in original).

7. Of course, it is not the phenomenon that is novel, but the extent to which it applies. Already in 1899, Torsten Veblen wrote his famous remarks on the conspicuous consumption of the upper classes:

“If, as is sometimes assumed, the incentive to accumulation were the want of subsistence or of physical comfort, then the aggregate economic wants of a community might conceivably be satisfied at some point in the advance of industrial efficiency; but since the struggle is substantially a race for reputability on the basis of an invidious comparison, no approach to a definitive attainment is possible.” Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (London: Compton Printing, 1970), 39.

9. In Economies of Signs & Space, a standard reference in discussions about the aesthetisation of the economy, Scott Lash and John Urry skips over the concept of use value in two sentences and with a reference to Jean Baudrillard. Likewise, in Consumer Culture & Postmodernism, another milestone in the field, Mike Featherstone cites Baudrillard extensively but the name Guy Debord seems never to have crossed his mind. Scott Lash & John Urry, Economies of Signs & Space (London: Sage Publications, 1994), Mike Featherstone, Consumer Culture & Postmodernism (London: Sage Publications, 1991).

10. Wolfgang Haug, Critique of Commodity Aesthetics: Appearance, Sexuality and Advertising in Capitalist Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1986); hereafter cited in text.

11. For an early, influential critique of the inadequacy of mass-consumption in satisfying aesthetic needs, see Tibor Scitovsky, The Joyless Economy—an Inquiry Into Human Satisfaction and Consumer Dissatisfaction, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).

13. Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth—How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women (London: Vintage, 1991), 76. She goes on to remind the reader that the opposite concept of beauty is when the features of a person become attractive to another person because of their unique relation.

16. Stephen Kline, Nick Dyer-Witheford & Greig De Peuter, Digital Play—The Interaction of Technology, Culture, and Marketing, London: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003.

17. Angela McRobbie, “From Holloway to Hollywood: Happiness at Work in the New Cultural Economy?”, in ed. Paul du Gay & Michael Pryke, Cultural Economy: Cultural Analysis and Commercial Life (London: Sage, 2002), hereafter cited in text.

18. Paul Heeles, “Work Ethics, Soft Capitalism and the ‘Turn to Life’”, in (du Gay).

19. Though making few explicit references to needs, and though there are differences between the younger and the mature Marx, it is clear that ‘needs’ play a central role in Marx’s thinking. For an account of this part of Marx’s philosophy, see Agnes Heller, The Theory of Need in Marx (New York: St. Martin’s Publisher, 1976).

20. In his conclusion, Henry Jenkins write: “The irony, of course, is that fans have found the very forces that work to isolate us from each other to be the ideal foundation for creating connections across traditional boundaries; that fans have found the very forces that transform many Americans into spectators to provide the resources for creating a more participatory culture; that fans have found the very forces that reinforce patriarchal authority to contain tools by which to critique that authority.” Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers—Television Fans & Participatory Culture (New York; Routledge, 1992), 284.

21. Raoul Vaneigem gave voice to a line of thinking characteristic of the Situationist International and the New Left, where capitalism was chiefly accused for the boredom and degradation of life which it causes. Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life (London: Left bank books, 1983).

Notes to Chapter Five

1. Michael Howard & John King, “Capitalism, Socialism and Historical Materialism” in ed. Antonio Callari, Stephen Cullenberg & Carole Biewener, Marxism in the Postmodern Age—Confronting the New World Order (New York: Guilford Press, 1994), 427.

2. Frederic Scherer, Industrial Market Structure and Economic Performance (Chicago: Rand McNally & Co., 1970), 392, hereafter cited in text.

3. It goes without saying that this practice was much preferable to the owners. Collaboration between engineers working in different mines was facilitated by a custom of cross-ownership in the mining district. Alessandro Nuvolari, “Collective Invention during the British Industrial Revolution: The Case of the Cornish Pumping Engine”, Cambridge Journal of Economics vol.28, no 3 (2004).

4. Chrisitne MacLeod, Inventing the Industrial Revolution—The English Patent System, 1660–1800, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

5. Erik Barnouw, A Tower in Babel—A History of Broadcasting in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969).

6. Robert Allen has written a classic paper arguing the prevalence of ‘collective invention’. Robert Allen, “Collective invention”, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization (March 1983). For a case against software patents, see Ben Klemens, Ma+h You Can’t Use—Patents, Copyright, and Software (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2006).

8. Dorothy Nelkin, Science as Intellectual Property (New York: McMillan Publishing Company, 1984), David Noble, Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), ed. Benjamin Johnson, Patrick Kavanagh & Kevin Mattson, Steal this University—The Rise of the Corporate University and the Academic Labor Movement (New York: Routledge, 2003).

9. National Research Council, Bits of Power: Issues in Global Access to Scientific Data (Washington: National Academy Press, 1997).

10. Robert Merges, “Contracting Into Liability Rules: Intellectual Property Rights and Collective Rights Organizations”, California Law Review (October 1996).

11. Richard Dunford, “The Suppression of Technology” Administrative Science Quarterly 32 (1987).

12. “The apparatus of antiproduction is no longer a transcendent instance that opposes production, limits it, or checks it; on the contrary, it insinuates itself everywhere in the productive machine and becomes firmly wedded to it in order to regulate its productivity and realize surplus value—which explains, for example, the difference between the despotic bureaucracy and the capitalist bureaucracy.” Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus—Capitalism & Schizophrenia (London: Athlone Press, 2003), 235.

13. Ketih Aoki, “Neocolonialism, Anticommons Property, and Biopiracy in the (Not-So-Brave) New World Order of International Intellectual Property Protection, Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies (1998).

14. A number of dissenting economists have come to the conclusion that the culture industry can gain from so-called piracy. If the net effect is negative or positive depends on the circumstances, but on balance, Bakos, Brynjolfsson, and Lichtman assert that media companies profits when consumers share information goods. Yannies Bakos, Erik Brynjolfsson & Douglas Lichtman, Shared Information Goods, Journal of Law and Economics (April 1999). For a collection of unorthodox views on illicit copying, argued from within neoclassical economic theory, see ed. Wendy Gordon & Richard Watt, The Economics of Copyright—Developments in Research and Analysis (Northampton, Mass.: Elgar, 2003).

15. Oz Shy, The Economics of Network Industries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

16. Stan Liebowitz, ”Copying and Indirect Appropriability: Photocopying of Journals.”, Journal of Political Economy 93 (1985).

17. For a thorough investigation into the Napster case, see Joseph Menn, All the Rave—The Rise and Fall of Shawn Fanning’s Napster (New York: Crown Business, 2003).

18. Gnutella was rapidly followed by other architectures that radicalised decentralisation and anonymity even further. Freenet, initiated by Ian Clark in 1999, is more robust against surveillance than Gnutella. Freenet stores content on the computers of its users without letting the users know what the content is. The only thing a user of Freenet knows for sure is that a space in her computer has been designated by the system to store files which other users of Freenet may access. Thus, users are guaranteed a ‘plausible deniability’ if those files happen to be claimed by a third party.

19. Dorothy Kidd in ed. McCaughey & Ayers, Cyberactivism—Online Activism in Theory and Practice (New York: Routledge, 2003), Dan Gillmore, We the Media—Grassroots Journalism—By the People, For the People (Cebastopol C.A.; O’Reilly, 2006).

20. Eben Moglen, “Anarchism Triumphant, Free Software and the Death of Copyright”, First Monday, vol.4, no.8 (August 1999).

21. See David Anderson, “SETI@home” in Andy Oram, Peer-to-Peer—Harnessing the Benefits of a Disruptive Technology, (Sebastopol: O’Reilly, 2001), 2001.

22. Mark Poster, What’s the Matter With the Internet? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 97.

25. Peter Kropotkin, Fields, Factories and Workshops Tomorrow (London: Freedom Press, 1985), 182.

27. Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998), 318, hereafter cited in text.

28. ed. Stephen Wood, “Introduction”, in The Degradation of Work?—Skill, Deskilling and the Labour Process (London: Hutchinson, 1982).

29. ed. Andrew Zimbalist, “Technology and the Labour Process in the Printing Industry”, in Case Studies on the Labor Process, (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979).

30. A number of sociologists, management writers, and Marxists could be quoted to demonstrate this point. It will suffice with a remark by Clause Offe on service workers:

“Here the anticipated outcome of action is often more likely to be achieved the less means and ends are specified in detail, the more there is scope for interpretation and manoeuvre, the less the personal motivation of the service worker is subject to external control and, hence, given greater opportunity to respond ad hoc to the particular features of a particular environment which in principle cannot be standardized without producing counterproductive consequences.” Claus Offe, Disorganized Capitalism—Contemporary Transformations of Work and Politics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1985), 106–7, italics in original.

31. Andrew Friedman, Industry and Labour—Class Struggle at Work and Monopoly Capitalism (London: Macmillan Press, 1977).

32. To cyber-feminists, however, the blurring of the human subject and the machine into what they call a ‘cyborg’ becomes a new starting point for fighting patriarchy and capitalism. That outlook is rather close to the hacker perspective.

33. Humberto Maturana & Francisco Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition—The Realization of the Living (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1980), 82; hereafter cited in text.

34. “In a word, the real difference is not between the living and the machine, vitalism and mechanism, but between two states of the machine that are two states of the living as well. The machine taken in its structural unity, the living taken in its specific and even personal unity, are mass phenomena or molar aggregates; for this reason each points to the extrinsic existence of the other.” Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus—Capitalism & Schizophrenia (London: Athlone Press, 2003), 286.

Notes to Chapter Six

1. Michael Albert, Parecon—Life After Capitalism—Participatory Economics (New York: Verso, 2003).

2. Two books giving an overview of network science are Albert-László Barabási, Linked—The New Science of Networks (Cambridge Mass.: Perseus Publishing, 2002), Duncan Watts, Six Degrees—The Science of a Connected Age (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2003).

3. Alexander Galloway, Protocol—How Control Exists After Decentralization (Cambridge Mass.:MIT Press, 2004).

4. “Accumulation, where private property prevails, is the concentration of capital in the hands of the few, it is in general an inevitable consequence if capital is left to follow its natural course, and it is precisely through competition that the way is cleared for this natural disposition of capital.” Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (USSR: Progress Publishers, 1981), 37, italics in original; hereafter cited in text as 1844.

5. Thomas Malone & Robert Laubacher, “The Dawn of the E-Lance Economy” Harvard Business Review (September 1, 1998).

6. ed. Oliver Williamson and Sidney Winter, The Nature of the Firm: Origins, Evolution, and Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

7. Yochai Benkler, “Coase’s Penguin, or, Linux and The Nature of the Firm”, The Yale Law Journal vol.112 no.3 (December 2002), and The Wealth of Networks—How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).

8. Walter Powel, in ed. Barry Staw & Larry Cummings, Research in Organizational Behavior (London: Jai Press, 1990), 303.

9. A few hard-dies insist that the calculating power of computers have been the missing piece that finally can make a centralised, planned economy feasible:

“Where the to be a revolution in any country in the world tomorrow, the possibility for an immediate transition to democratic and efficient planning using the Internet would put to rest the claims about the infeasibility of a socialist economy.” Andy Pollack, in ed. Robert McChesney, Ellen Meiksins Wood & John Bellamy Foster, Capitalism and the Information Age—The Political Economy of the Global Communication Revolution (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998), 220.

10. Kim Moody makes a valid point about the relation between small production sites and big corporations:

“The irony here is that production systems have grown so large and complex over time that the giant facility of yesterday is not large enough to enclose more than a fraction of the overall process.” Kim Moody, Workers in a Lean World—Unions in the International Economy (London: Verso, 1997), 151.

11. Alan Felstead, The Corporate Paradox—Power and Control in the Business Franchise (London: Routledge, 1993).

12. Bennett Harrison, Lean and Mean—The Changing Landscape of Corporate Power in the Age of Flexibility (New York: Guilford Press, 1997).

13. Cyril James, State Capitalism & World Revolution (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, 1986).

14. Bob Jessop, The Future of the Capitalist State (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002).

15. “At the roots of the crisis that induced perestroika and triggered nationalism was the incapacity of Soviet statism to ensure the transition to the new informational paradigm, in parallel to the process that was taking place in the rest of the world.” Manuell Castells, The End of Millennium, vol.III (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999), 8.

17. Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: the Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

18. Self-managed collective use of commons is not an isolated event specific to pre-industrial times. New attempts are made in contemporary society when a community faces the depletion of resources on which it depends. For a collection of such examples, see David Fenny, Fikret Berkes, Bonnie McCay, and James Acheson “The Tragedy of the Commons: Twenty-two Years Later.” in ed. John Baden and Douglas Noonan, Managing the Commons (London: Indiana University Press, 1998).

19. Lewis Mumford, Technics and Human Development, (New York: HBJ Book, 1967), 96.

20. Jean-Joseph Goux argues that with the post-modern turn of capitalism, Georges Bataille’s thinking has become attractive to capital’s apologetics. Jean-Joseph Goux, “General Economics and Postmodern Capitalism” Yale French Studies 78 (1990). Scott Shershow agrees with Goux but appeals for a rescuing of Bataille. Scott Cutler Shershow, “Of Sinking: Marxism and the ‘General’ Economy”. Critical Inquiry vol 27, no 3 (spring 2001).

21. Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share—An Essay on General Economy, vol.I (New York: Zone Books, 1988).

22. Michael Heller, “The Tragedy of the Anticommons: Property in the Transition from Marx to Markets”, Harvard Law Review (January 1998).

23. Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies (London: Routledge, 1988).

24. Derrida declares that there can only be such a thing as a Gift if it is not thought of in terms of circulation and tit-for-tat exchange. Jacques Derrida, Given Time. Counterfeit Money (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

“[…] social exchange processes yield for the larger society a moral code of behavior which acquires an independent existence outside the social exchange situation and which informs all social, economic, and political interpersonal relationships in society.” Peter Ekeh, Social Exchange Theory—The Two Traditions (London: Heinemann, 1974), 58.

26. Igor Kopytoff “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process” in ed. Arjun Appadurai, The Social Life of Things—Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

27. When Richard Barbrook wrote his article he set out to present an alternative to the cyber-libertarian, free market perspective that was then dominant on the Internet. The text was rhetorical and tongue-in-cheek and Barbrook has since modified the claims made in the article. Richard Barbrook, “The High-Tech Gift Economy”, First Monday vol.3, no.12 (December 1998).

28. John Frow, Time & Commodity Culture—Essays in Cultural Theory and Postmodernity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 207.

29. Peter Wayner, Free for All—How Linux and the Free Software Movement Undercut the High-Tech Titans, (New York: HarperBusiness 2000), 157, my emphasis.

30. Howard Rheingold coined the term ’virtual community’. Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community—Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000).

31. Robert Ellickson has demonstrated the pivotal role of norms rather than law in upholding social order. For norms to regulate social behavior, however, a few conditions have to be met:

“To achieve order without law, people must have continuing relationships, reliable information about past behavior, and effective countervailing power” Robert Ellickson, Order Without Law: How Neighbours Settle Disputes (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 284.

32. Peter Ekeh, Social Exchange Theory—The Two Traditions (London: Heinemann, 1974), 205.

33. Jacob Strahilevitz “Charismatic Code, Social Norms, and the Emergence of Cooperation on the File-Swapping Networks”, Virginia Law Review (May 2003). It doesn’t occur to Strahilevitz that his idea could be reversed in order to explain the lack of reciprocity in the surrounding society. Uncharismatic Code conspires to hide from us the cooperative behaviour of our neighbours. Separated from our peers, our only source of security is in those structures which are upholding uncharismatic code. Virtual reality differs in that the means to write code is not monopolised by the state and capital. When peers are free to write code they choose to write it ‘charismatically’.

34. Claude Lévi-Strauss makes this point quite clear in his study of archaic societies:

“Goods are not only economic commodities, but vehicles and instruments for realities of another order, such as power, influence, sympathy, status, and emotion; and the skilful game of exchange […] consists in a complex totality of conscious or unconscious manoeuvres in order to gain security and to guard oneself against risks brought about by alliances and by rivalries.” Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 54.

35. In a study of the warez movement, Alf Rehn has documented the great length crackers go to in order to make their activity known to their peers. Mirroring the development in the copyright industry, some warez groups have even developed digital signatures to ensure that no-one fakes the credits announced in their releases. Alf Rehn, Electronic Potlatch—A Study of New Technologies and Primitive Economic Behaviour (Stockholm: KTH, 2001), 204.

Notes to Chapter Seven

1. Kostas Axelos, Alienation, Praxis, and Techné in the Thought of Karl Marx (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1976), 194.

2. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization—A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (London: Routledge, 1998), 195, italics in original; hereafter cited in text as Eros.

3. Herbert Marcuse, ”On the Philosophical Foundation of the Concept of Labor in Economics”, Telos, 16 (summer 1973).

5. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000), 140; hereafter cited in text as history.

6. Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978).

7. Eve Chiapello, “Evolution and Co-optation: The ‘Artist Critique’ of Management and Capitalism”, Third Text vol.18, no.6 (2004).

8. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens—A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955).

9. Roger Caillois, Man, Play, and Games (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2001).

10. Gordon Burghardt, The Genesis of Animal Play: Testing the Limits (London: MIT Press, 2004).

11. Edward Thompson, “Patrician Society, Plebeian Culture”, Journal of Social History, vol.7, no. 4 (summer 1974).

12. Francis Hearn, “Toward a Critical Theory of Play”, Telos 30 (winter 1976–1977).

13. Max Horkheimer & Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (London: Verso, 1997), 137.

14. André Gorz, Reclaiming Work—Beyond the Wage Based Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), Jeremy Rifkin, The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era (New York: G.P. Putnam’s sons, 1995), Jeremy Seabrook, The Leisure Society (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988).

15. Quoted in Michael Perelman, The Innovation of Capitalism—Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), p.46; hereafter cited in text.

16. Gustavo Esteva and Madhu Prakash have studied the coping strategies of the extremely poor in Third World countries. These people are forced to sustain themselves independently or partially independently of the circulation of commodities. The authors suggest that this provides a model for activists in the industrial world for cutting off ties with global circuits of capital. Gustavo Esteva & Madhu Prakash, Grassroots Post-Modernism—Remaking the Soil of Cultures (London: Zed Books), 1998.

17. Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America—Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1976).

18. Nicos Poulantzas, for instance, based his categorisation of the working class on the distinction in Marxist theory between productive and unproductive workers. It led him to exclude service workers, office clerks, and technicians, among others, from the working class. Nicos Poulantzas, Classes in Contemporary Capitalism (London: Verso, 1979).

19. Ernesto Laclau & Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985)

20. Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau & Slavoj Zizek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality—Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (London: Verso, 2000).

21. John Holloway, ”Crisis, Fetishism, Class Composition” in ed. Werner Bonefeld, Richard Gunn & Kosmas Psychopedis, Open Marxism, vol.2 (London: Pluto Press, 1992).

22. Antonio Negri, Revolution Retrieved—Writings on Marx, Keynes, Capitalist Crisis and New Social Subjects (1967–83), (London: Red Notes, 1988).

23. McKenzie Wark, A Hacker Manifesto (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004).

24. Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality: the Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984).

25. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984).

26. Frederick Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1995), 7.

27. Gernot Böhme, “Technical Gadgetry: Technological Development in the Aesthetic Economy”, Thesis Eleven 86 (August 2006).

28. Neil Gershenfeld, FAB—The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop—From Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication (New York: Basic Books, 2005).

Notes to Summary

1. Theodor Adorno, “On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening” in ed.Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt, The Essential Frankfurth School Reader (New York: Continuum, 1998), 293.

Notes

Note to Introduction