As cultural critic and New School University professor McKenzie Wark sees things, today's battles over copyrights, trademarks, and patents are simply the next phase in the age-old battle between the productive classes and the ruling classes that strive to turn those producers into subjects. But whereas Marx and Engels saw the battle of capitalist society as being between two social classes -- the proletariat and the bourgeoisie -- Wark sees one between two newly emergent classes: the hackers and a new group that Wark has added to the lexicon of the academy: the "vectoralist class."

Wark's opus A Hacker Manifesto brings together England's Enclosure Movement, Das Kapital, and the corporate ownership of information -- a process that Duke University law professor James Boyle called "the Second Enclosure Movement" -- to create a unified theory of domination, struggle, and freedom. Hacking is not a product of the computer age, writes Wark, but an ancient rite in which abstractions are created and information is transformed. The very creation of private property was a hack, he argues -- a legal hack -- and like many other hacks, once this abstraction was created, it was taken over by the ruling class and used as a tool of subjugation.