If we take hacking in the cultural sense to be something that emerges out of MIT and similar environments in the middle of the twentieth century, then there’s a certain poetic logic to reconnecting it to everyday, hobbyist kinds of tinkering, which after all was one of its origin stories — the MIT model railways club. Something of the ethos of hacking as another kind of labor, one with some degrees of freedom, which creates its own internal codes of use value, seems to have leaked out into maker culture. The hacker, whether as a professional coder doing her day job, or running a hackspace on the weekend, is someone who one can imagine as still having some shred of a utopian practice. Being good at making something good, within the limits of time and materials. But I think what happened in the ten years since I wrote A Hacker Manifesto is that we won the battle and lost the war. We won certain affordances for the gift, for social creation, for use value, within the commodification of information. But what I call the vectoral class, the class which owns and controls the mode of information, regrouped around a more abstracted kind of control. So, OK, we can play with our data, but they control the metadata. And it’s based on unequal exchange. We get these little smidgens of data, but we give up more than we get. Surplus data as “business model” rather than surplus value.