Wendell Wisdom

http://piez.org/wendell/

This is from Wendell Piez. A little entertainment from his projects page. Tucked under the rubric "Weeds Along the Information Superhighway".

Ideas aren't property, they're currency: burdensome unless used, worthless until exchanged.

Use and exchange. Marks of the hacker class. (See McKenzie Wark, A Hacker Manifesto)

We are the hackers of abstraction. We produce new concepts, new perceptions, new sensations, hacked out of raw data. Whatever code we hack, be it programming language, poetic language, math or music, curves or colorings, we are the abstracters of new worlds. Whether we come to represent ourselves as researchers or authors, artists or biologists, chemists or musicians, philosophers or programmers, each of these subjectivities is but a fragment of a class still becoming, bit by bit, aware of itself as such.

Not quite sure about the emergence of a hacker class; certainly buying into the notion of a zeitgeist of DIY and bricolage (à la Levi-Strauss and picked up by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in their 1972 book Anti-Oedipus: they identify bricolage as the characteristic mode of production of the schizophrenic producer).

And so the exchange goes on and

And so for day 898
29.05.2009