On Oppressive tech
20/11/2025 | Tech
Before I start there's a bit of history to go over.
Property is something that is owned by someone. When someone owns property, they control it, and use it for money and power. This has always been true throughout history, but at different times different kinds of property brought the most power/money. We usually think of property as physical things in the real world, but over time that has changed.
Originally the most powerful form of property was land. The group that controlled the land were called pastoralists. Other people worked the land. That group was called workers. Really they were peasants and slaves. The owner got to keep most of what was produced, and the workers only got a small portion. Land, was the most valuable property, and therefore brought the most power. Often this land was taken unfairly.
Then the industrial revolution happened in the early 1900s. Suddenly land was no longer the most valuable property, factories were. A new group came about called the industrialists. They owned the factories and the worker group worked in them and got a very small share of what they produced, and the rest went to the factory owner. They were treated better than slaves, but were still very much taken advantage of.
By the 1980s yet another new form of property was invented. This time it was financial assets (basically stocks and bonds, wall street type stuff). These aren’t physical items, it’s abstract. That means it’s a concept/idea. This was owned by the Investor group, and since it was the most valuable property it brought the most power. Now the money made from the employees work was mostly going to the investor group.
In the 90’s a woman wrote a book called The Hacker Manifesto about a new form of property and 2 new groups. This woman pretty much perfectly predicted today’s world 30 years ago, she was very smart. She said that the newest form of property is information. She called the people who control information the Informationalist group. By information she meant things like patents, copywrite, and also the flow of information. If you control the flow of information than really you control the information itself. She didn’t realize it yet, but it also includes human information. Human information is now the most powerful form of property. Not only does it produce unprecedented sums of money, but it can be used to manipulate and control people in ways never before seen.
But she also talks about another new group. A group that is separate from the usual worker group. She calls them the hacker group. She doesn’t mean criminals or cyber security hackers, she means anyone who builds things with technology. The programmers and system admins and networking engineers. The hacker group are the people that actually make the technology that make information control possible. They don’t generate physical objects like the worker group, they generate ideas. The informationalists used the hackers to build their empires. Sometimes they hired and paid them as employees, but often the technology was taken from people who built open things, things intended to make the world a better place. Informationalists didn’t just use this technology, they appropriated it. What I mean is that instead of just using it, they took it and try to control it. They try to keep it all for themselves, because they know the power that it has. Sadly the hacker class has mostly just let this happen. Most of them took jobs so they could get paid to do what they loved, not realizing the oppressive systems they were building. Some were fully aware and just didn’t care because the money was so good.
Some tried to stop it, but by the time the world recognized what was going on it was practically too late. The Informationalists are now so big and powerful that the “normal” ways of controlling them, by having laws and regulations, aren’t an option anymore. Their power is, in some ways, greater than that of most governments.
So what’s the answer? Well the hacker group must recognize itself as a group, and must all stand together. If massive droves of programmers walked out of work in protest, if they recognized that they informationalists *need* them, they could exercise that power and take back control from the informationalists. It wouldn’t be the first time a group has realized it is a group and worked together to take back control. But in the past, those groups have been desperate enough to do so, and I don’t think the hacker group is there yet. By the time they are, if that ever comes, it may be too late.
We must seize the information tech.