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Real hackers are on both sides of the spam game. There is too much money for smart people to not do it. For a short time I worked for a company who was very sp

by sheraz 14y ago

Real hackers are on both sides of the spam game. There is too much money for smart people to not do it. For a short time I worked for a company who was very spammy and outright sketchy. They had a team of dev and ops people who cranked out hundreds of millions of emails and "free ipod ads" per day. There were heavy API integrations with Commission Junction and the porn affiliate networks, redundant systems, and all that. I leaned a lot in the 45 days I worked there. All of them "hackers" in this sense. They got the job done, and it worked. But I hated every minute of it.

laurentoget 14y ago
I used the word hackers as defined in McKenzie Wark's 'Hacker Manifesto' ( http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors0/warktext.html http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors0/warktext.html ). 01. There is a double spooking the world, the double of abstraction. The fortunes of states and armies, companies and communities depend on it. All contending classes - the landlords and farmers, the workers and capitalists - revere yet fear the relentless abstraction of the world on which their fortunes yet depend. All the classes but one. The hacker class. 02. Whatever code we hack, be it programming language, poetic language, math or music, curves or colourings, we create the possibility of new things entering the world. Not always great things, or even good things, but new things. In art, in science, in philosophy and culture, in any production of knowledge where data can be gathered, where information can be extracted from it, and where in that information new possibilities for the world are produced, there are hackers hacking the new out of the old. While hackers create these new worlds, we do not possess them. That which we create is mortgaged to others, and to the interests of others, to states and corporations who control the means for making worlds we alone discover. We do not own what we produce - it owns us. 03. And yet we don't quite know who we are. While we recognise our distinctive existence as a group, as programmers, as artists or writers or scientists or musicians, we rarely see these ways of representing ourselves as mere fragments of a class experience that is still struggling to express itself as itself, as expressions of the process of producing abstraction in the world. Geeks and freaks become what they are negatively, through their exclusion by others. Hackers are a class, but an abstract class, a class as yet to hack itself into manifest existence as itself.

by sheraz 14y ago

laurentoget 14y ago

I used the word hackers as defined in McKenzie Wark's 'Hacker Manifesto' ( http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors0/warktext.html http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors0/warktext.html ). 01. There is a double spooking the world, the double of abstraction. The fortunes of states and armies, companies and communities depend on it. All contending classes - the landlords and farmers, the workers and capitalists - revere yet fear the relentless abstraction of the world on which their fortunes yet depend. All the classes but one. The hacker class. 02. Whatever code we hack, be it programming language, poetic language, math or music, curves or colourings, we create the possibility of new things entering the world. Not always great things, or even good things, but new things. In art, in science, in philosophy and culture, in any production of knowledge where data can be gathered, where information can be extracted from it, and where in that information new possibilities for the world are produced, there are hackers hacking the new out of the old. While hackers create these new worlds, we do not possess them. That which we create is mortgaged to others, and to the interests of others, to states and corporations who control the means for making worlds we alone discover. We do not own what we produce - it owns us. 03. And yet we don't quite know who we are. While we recognise our distinctive existence as a group, as programmers, as artists or writers or scientists or musicians, we rarely see these ways of representing ourselves as mere fragments of a class experience that is still struggling to express itself as itself, as expressions of the process of producing abstraction in the world. Geeks and freaks become what they are negatively, through their exclusion by others. Hackers are a class, but an abstract class, a class as yet to hack itself into manifest existence as itself.