A special issue of e-flux journal
“Information wants to be free, but is everywhere in chains.” This insistence, a marriage between Stewart Brand and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, was at the heart of McKenzie Wark’s book A Hacker Manifesto, published back in 2004 by Harvard University Press. The book has since stayed in print in English and has been translated into thirteen other languages. Soon, it will be the twentieth anniversary of the manifesto’s book-length version—and the twenty-fifth anniversary of its first appearance online, in 1999.
A Hacker Manifesto proposed a fresh conceptual language for theory and practice, in and against a world ruled by control over information vectors, stocks, and flows. (Wark has since revised some details of this language in her 2019 book, Capital is Dead.) The theses of A Hacker Manifesto have found their way into work by other writers, artists, and activists over the years. Some have found the book useful; some have been critical, some have plagiarized it.
For summer 2024, e-flux journal, together with guest-editor McKenzie Wark, will publish a special issue on A Hacker Manifesto at twenty. We invite writers and creative workers in all fields to propose contributions for this issue which critique, adapt, revise, extend, modify, mutate, or modulate in relation to the text.
Proposals are due January 12 for consideration and potential publication in our June 2024 issue.
For written proposals, please submit a Word document or PDF containing your 200-word abstract plus 1–3 sample paragraphs to journal [at] e-flux.com, attached to an email with the subject line “Hacker Proposal.” Final written contributions will be a maximum of 4,000 words. Proposals in other media will be considered.