Re: <nettime> The Gentrification of Hacking: How yuppies hacked the

[Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>]

The philosopher Moishe Postone says that with every fresh growth cycle 
of capitalism new use values are created, offering common working people 
a sense of possibility, a feeling of experimentation and social 
transformation, that is the mainspring of the expansion itself. This 
happened in the early 20th century, then again in the 50s-early 60s, 
then again in the late 80s-90s. However, the logic of exchange soon 
comes to bear, foreclosing those possibilities in favor of reconstituted 
mechanisms of profit and control, thus creating a kind of treadmill 
effect. Just when you think you are buiilding a new society, then you 
are not anymore.

Certainly this happened to the kinds of people now called hackers, but 
not only them. The expansion of the 90s was cultural as well as 
informational. On the cultural side, it was all about opening up and 
then monetizing the fresh relational possibilities created by minority 
struggles in the 60s and 70s. Gentrification is basically the monetizing 
phase of this cultural transformation, as expressed in urban space. Just 
when you think you are creating a revolution in everyday life, then you 
are not anymore.

The new expansion has begun in the US and will do so globally when 
Europe's and China's current problems are resolved (perhaps there is one 
more good crash coming before then). The new expansion has 
gentrification and a number of other co-optation routines baked in, so 
there's more of that to come. Plus new things we are only just now 
experiencing as glimmers of possibility. But I would like off this 
treadmill. It's really unbearable. There has to be a better way.

This thread seems extremely timely, not just for the analysis of what 
has happened, but also for what's to come.

yours in a very deep refusal, Brian


On 08/11/2015 10:48 AM, Alessandro Delfanti wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> Johan Soderberg and I are writing this paper titled "Repurposing the
> hacker. Three temporalities of recuperation". We do adopt a deeper
> historical framework while trying to understand how hacking has been
> hacked, and try to answer a more general question on how to
> analyze/avoid what Brett calls "gentrification" -- more traditionally,
> we call it "recuperation" -- and believe this is part of a series of
> processes of co-option that go much further than hacking. Indeed we
> describe recuperation of hacking in terms of social movement development
> and evolution of capitalism. You can download it here, please note it is
> just a draft!
<...>


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