Home > Author > McKenzie Wark
1 " In some ways, the great danger for this commodified universe is our boredom with it ... There is this sort of dialectic that you could tease out, that even in this overdeveloped late-capitalist world, that boredom was still this kind of critical energy that you could work on and try to theorize and then act on, to find other kinds of belonging, other kinds of desire, other kinds of life. "
― McKenzie Wark
2 " In Japan itself it seemed as if theory had been absorbed the same way Japanese media culture absorbed everything else—by turning it into a spectacular subcultural style. "
― McKenzie Wark , General Intellects: Twenty-Five Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century
3 " We act in and against a world that remains other to us. Reduced to nothing but users, and our actions forced into the commodity form, our collective work and play produces a world over and against us, one that massively persists in its own habits of functioning.53 Worse, collective human labor made a world for a ruling class that keeps making not only itself but us in its image. "
― McKenzie Wark , Capital Is Dead. Is This Something Worse?
4 " One thing that the left and right now seem to agree on is that the society in which we live is called capitalism.1 And strangely enough, both now seem to agree that it is eternal. Even the left seems to think that there is an eternal essence to Capital and that only its appearances change. The parade of changing appearances yields a series of modifiers: this could be necro capitalism, communicative capitalism, cognitive capitalism, platform capitalism, neoliberal capitalism, or computational capitalism. "
5 " Wright advocates for some salutary counterhegemonic strategies, based in geographic rootedness, local public goods, and worker’s cooperatives. But one has to wonder whether such things are all that viable (at least as traditionally conceived), given that the forces of production drive increasingly abstract relations of production, which appear then as transnational legal and treaty forms protecting information as private property. Trebor Scholz proposes a form of platform cooperativism as a more contemporary approach.47 The vectoralist stack needs to be countered with a counterstack on the infrastructural level. "
6 " The dominant ruling class of our time owns and controls information. "
7 " The preferred worlds to simulate were either sci-fi or Edo-period Japan, as if the two breaks of the Meiji restoration (1868) and the occupation (1945) had not happened. Azuma links simulation to the practice of détournement or the fan-based making of derivative works, which “official” products then borrow from in turn: “the products of otaku culture are born into a chain of infinite imitations and piracy” (O26). Simulacra thus float free from both the notion of an historical time and from the authoring of original works. "
8 " Evangelion is not so much an original as itself already a copy of popular anime elements, “an aggregate of information without a narrative” or a “grand non-narrative” (O38). This results in part from industrial changes. By the ’90s, any product can spawn all the others: a series of stickers or a company logo could bloom into a series of manga, TV or film anime, games and more. By now “the narrative is only a surplus item "
