Is open source software provocative to capitalism because it is free, or because it is authored in a way that subverts the labor-wage-consumption relations that are so central to Post-Fordist capitalism?

This is the central question taken up in "Hacking Capitalism: The Free and Open Source Software Movement" (Routledge, 2008) by Johan Soderberg. He comes down on the side of the latter, arguing specifically that the hacker movement has replaced the increasingly ineffective labor struggle with a new form of struggle: play struggle. "Resistance has here become a game" (183).

Soderberg has a knack for interdisciplinarity, traversing a vast terrain of historical, technical, and theoretical material without sacrificing depth in any particular area. Hacking Capitalism is the sort of thought-heavy book that you read slowly, not because it is inaccessible or esoteric, but because it is appropriately dense and informative, and you want to both take in every word and enjoy the read.

Soderburg also has a knack for framing theoretical work in larger discourses and contextualizing it in history, which makes the book a useful resource for students seeking a broader understanding of Marxist and NeoMarxist thought in general.

The bulk of Hacking Capitalism is an overview of the usual suspects in NeoMarxist critiques of capitalism - deskilling & alienation of labor, excess commodification, and the cycle of production and consumption - but with a particular emphasis on the networked society and its impact on the labor struggle. Soderberg clearly believes that the underlying productive processes of hacking are more important than the products that result, or the methods of distribution. "It is not pirate sharing that makes peer-to-peer networks subversive, though, but the peer-to-peer labour relations of which this technology is an example" (123).

Pulling from a weatlh of examples - ranging from GNU/Linux to file sharing to fan fiction - Soderberg argues that the hacker movement is part of a larger revolt "against the boredom of commodified labour and needs satisfaction" (44).

In other words, living standards have improved enough (in developed nations) that workers, particularly middle class knowledge workers, no longer have an incentive to work harder to improve their living standards, or to participate in the antiquated labor struggle, and they are instead simply becoming bored with work. The expression of this boredom, for Soderberg, is play struggle. Noting that scholars frequently fixate on the question of hacker's incentives - "What drives hackers to write code when there are no direct economic incentives for them to do so?" - Soderberg dismisses the very idea that hackers are motivated by the market: "All of that is invalidated once we start taking play seriously" (165).

As Soderberg's first book, Hacking Capitalism is clearly paving the way for future research, and he admits as much from the beginning, dedicating his book to those "who make something new and interesting with it." Viewed in those terms, the book is certainly a success, but it is not without its limitations. Two, in particular, stood out to me.

First, the term "hacker," so central to the book, is loosely defined and inconsistently used. Soderberg discusses both the libertarian and anarchist tendencies of early hackers and, more recently, content pirates, as well as the distinctly non-libertarian perspectives of the Creative Commons, but he fails to either distinguish between these perspectives or justify grouping them together. He invokes Pekka Himanen's "hacker spirit" as an umbrella term for a wide variety of activities, but neglects to pin the term down. While he correctly observes that "no-one can represent the hacker community since there are no clear borders" (179), the lack of precision in defining the boundaries of his own object of study hurts the overall argument.

Second, Soderberg's primary topic, his theory of play struggle, occupies only a liminal place in his book (though traces of it persist throughout). I felt, as a reader, that I spent the majority of the book anticipating his ultimate argument, rather than experiencing and understanding it. In the closing chapter, I felt a rising sense of panic as the final pages slipped past too quickly, without enough depth to satisfy me, and I closed the book with a touch of disappointment. Perhaps Soderberg was wary of overstating the significance of the "hacker spirit", and opted to conservatively understate it instead.

However, despite these criticisms, my overall opinion of the book is that it is a phenomenally well-written and invaluable resource, particular to young scholars like myself. Hacking Capitalism is a must read for anyone doing research on hacktivism, the commons, the information economy, the future of technology, and any topic that starts with "free," "open," or "hack."