Review: Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse?

by Jean-Hugues Kabuiku

Who is Mckenzie Wark?

McKenzie Wark is an Australian-born, tenured professor at The New School in New York, best known for her influential work A Hacker Manifesto (2004). In recent years, she has gone on a publishing blast, releasing a  series of books—including Reverse Cowgirl, Philosophy for Spiders, Capital Is Dead: Is This Something Worse?, and Sensoria within a concentrated period around 2019–2020.

I will focus on her book Capital Is Dead: Is This Something Worse?, published by Verso in  2019.

General Issues with the Thesis and the Book

The first chapter is largely spent criticizing a certain style of leftist critique that Wark labels "nostalgic." The problem is, it doesn't do much theoretical work. It mostly serves to preemptively justify the inconsistencies in her own thesis. Yes, she calls out the canonization of Marxist texts and the obsession with "essence" (see p.31) and that's a fair move. But it would be more convincing if it were grounded in a theory that actually holds up. And it's not. The critique feels hollow because it's not offering a coherent framework in its place—just a gesture of rejection.

Then we get to Chapter 2, and the problems deepen. It showcases all the classic weaknesses of cultural theory with unnecessary references to pop culture. Do we really need to refer to three different films or TV shows within the space of four lines, just to make a simple point? The writing jumps epistemologically from one register to another you're constantly wondering: Where is this going? Do we really need all this ceremonial, over-ornamented prose to arrive at the insight that some people feel alienated by their work, are experiencing a new form of alienation, while others are somewhat less alienated? It's not that these points are wrong. It's that the delivery is so bloated, the argument gets lost in the performance.

There's a weird fetishization of information in the book, giving it an ontological magical power somehow. On information, McKenzie Wark says: "This is because information really does turn out to have strange ontological properties [...] Information wants to be free but is everywhere in chains." Information is just another thing being enclosed and commodified. It influences social and labor relations, sure, but that doesn't mean it needs to be treated as a special or unique category.

Also, if we're going to talk about rent-seeking, it's worth noting that it's been around for centuries. We can also talk about different forms of gatekeeping information through academia, for example, or the way the billionaire class has been spreading misinformation through media. For instance, Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, at one point, owned more than 800 companies in over 50 countries. Elon Musk bought Twitter to avoid a lawsuit regarding unlawful market manipulation and also to push a right-wing agenda on the platform—he admitted it himself—to manipulate the election to elect Trump. Media in the UK and France are famously owned by the billionaire class. But furthermore, there is something to say about how the state seems to be at the service of that billionaire class.

Maybe what McKenzie Wark should actually be talking about, instead of brushing it aside because it's not as trendy as the techno-feudalism theory, is that Milton Friedman's and alike ideas about society and neoliberalism are very much alive and have created a social reproduction crisis where people bound to labor as the sole means to reproduce themselves are struggling.

Those policies that are creating this crisis are pushed via the billionaires class that own most of the media and Wark writes: "Nobody else gets to be Google's Sergey Brin precisely because there is a Sergey Brin [...] He is the real unicorn: the hacker become owner." Wark is rewriting history through a hacker class definition that includes Sergey Brin, but more concerning, she seems to ignore basic political economy during the 21st century. The concept of "winner takes all"—where a single company or a small number of firms dominate a market and capture most of the value—has deep roots in Silicon Valley's history, dating back to at least the 1970s and 1980s.

Do we need to create a new jargon term to explain this concept? That capital accumulation in the past decade by Venture Capitalists and privatization and commodification is ensuring that a single company or a small number of firms dominate a market and capture most of the value? Overall, Wark's theory lays on a misunderstanding that capital only relies on production, when capital accumulation always had multiple forms. As Steven Shaviro puts it in No Speed Limit: Three Essays on Accelerationism: "Capital accumulation proceeds not only by direct exploitation but also by rent-seeking, by debt collection, and by outright expropriation."

Hacker Vector Class Concept Weakness: Every Accusation Is a Revelation

Wark accuses a certain Marxist scene of being too literal in their reading of Marx and having an evangelical vision of the text. Yet she seems to have an issue with Marx's text when it doesn't mention particular evolutions of the modern economy, and sometimes in bad faith. For example, when she says that tech founders aren't capitalists because they don't own the means of production, she's not only being too literal in her reading of Marx—as theory is always evolving, she should be able to complete and make it evolve to fit our current situation—but she's being oblivious in her reading of current political economy, and it's not her creation of new labels/social categories that is helping her.

Owning the means of production is not the alpha and omega of Marx's critique of political economy. He already mentioned finance in his theory written in the 19th century. If there is evolution within how tech company founders use financial instruments to assert their ownership in intellectual properties—why not complete the theory where it's lacking?

Wark presents concepts like the "Hacker" and "Vectorialist" classes as a radical break, yet her theory often feels like a rebranding of old dynamics. She defines the "new information" her hackers produce as simply whatever intellectual property law recognizes—a legal framework central to capitalism since the 18th century. How is this a post-capitalist phenomenon if it's based on a foundational capitalist principle?

Her use of labels becomes inconsistent to the point of being meaningless. A PhD student from Stanford where the tuition at the time he dropped out in 1998  his PhD was 22,110$ and is now 63K$ is a "hacker" (Sergey Brin. a term stripped of its DIY, counter-cultural origins. This isn't an evolution of theory; it's a distortion of terms to fit a narrative. The core issue is that the fundamental relation of production selling our labor to survive —persists, even in the age of platform commodification.

Her analysis sidesteps crucial economic and historical context. She claims to be doing political economy but refuses to engage with key concepts like financialization. When discussing Japan's industrial rise, she falls into orientalist tropes, ignoring the violent union-busting and the entire neocolonial relationship with the U.S. that gave it market access for its automobile industry for instance. If her "new" mode of production relies on centuries-old legal structures as intellectual property that was invented during the after-math of the French revolution,  and ignores the persistence of wage labor, why invent new categories instead of evolving existing theory to fit our current situation?

Criti-Hype

As Evgeny Morozov highlights in his "Critique of Techno-Feudal Reason," the theorists employing the "techno-feudalist" hypothesis don't literally claim capitalism is dead or that we've returned to the Middle Ages. Rather, the more nuanced argument is that certain features of our current economy echo feudalism, even as capitalism remains dominant. The term's appeal lies in its shock value and meme-worthiness, a gamble to jolt people from their stupor. Its online traction is undeniable: a YouTube discussion on the topic between Varoufakis and Žižek surpassed 300,000 views in three weeks.

This is exactly what's happening with Wark and similar theorists. As my colleague Guillaume Heuguet, founder of the journal Audimat and teacher at Clermont-Ferrand art school, coined the term we will see below, while we were discussing the book : writers are using clickbait-like theories to secure book sales and generate attention, effectively creating hype around their critiques at the detriment of the quality of their work,

Let's call it criti-hype. Maybe one of the perks of this book is that it’s so much anchored in this criti-hype trend that it’s a use-case of how to recognize it and criticize it accordingly.