McKenzie wrote her masters thesis from behind the counter of Numbers, a sex shop on Oxford Street, Sydney. To move forward, allow me to go backward. New class relations entail new forms of exploitation novel threats to our autonomy and social order. Expanding upon the terms “Hacker” and “Vectorialist class,” first coined in her 1994’s The Hacker Manifesto, McKenzie questions our reluctance to re-define our reality-suggesting that this reluctance also circumvents our ability to reckon with it. In Capital is Dead, Wark argues that we are living under a new form of class relations. I’m calling McKenzie to discuss the class relations in this fraught landscape, most recently interrogated in her book, Capital is Dead, published by Verso Books last year. Drawing on the writings of a surprising range of classic and contemporary theorists, Wark offers an illuminating overview of the contemporary condition and the emerging class forces that control-and contest-it.Writer, theorist and educator McKenzie Wark writes in 2019’s Capital is Dead: “reduced to nothing but users, and our actions forced into the commodity form, our collective work and play produces a world over and against us.collective human labor made a world for a ruling class that keeps making not only itself but us in its image.” Can we see technology as a social and psychic apparatus-that the two are dependent on one another? An ambient dread is palpable. So how do we find a way out? Capital Is Dead offers not only the theoretical tools to analyze this new world, but ways to change it.

The new ruling class uses the powers of information to route around any obstacle labor and social movements put up. While techno-utopian apologists still celebrate these innovations as an improvement on capitalism, for workers-and the planet-it’s worse. Even Walmart and Nike can now dominate the entire production chain through the ownership of not much more than brands, patents, copyrights, and logistical systems. And it’s not just tech companies like Amazon and Google. Through the ownership and control of information, this emergent class dominates not only labour but capital as traditionally understood as well. In this radical and visionary new book, McKenzie Wark argues that information has empowered a new kind of ruling class. In this interview, McKenzie Wark explains the ideas and theories behind her book Capital Is Dead: Is This Something Worse? What are the workplace injuries attached to digital labour? We need to understand these injuries as not only physical and mental, but as the social effects of the commodification of information by a ruling class.Ĭapital Is Dead: Is This Something Worse? | The full interview What is this new model of exploitation based on information asymmetry? Is this Capitalism as we know it, or something worse?

We produce information all the time, but we don’t own or control it.

Wark capital is dead