Objects in Flux - RMIT Research Repository - RMIT University

Objects in Flux
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it is also reenforced through continual conflict within the consumer
environment. As consumers are confronted with commercial control
mechanisms that seek to restrict information they develop tactics that
overcome these control mechanisms and re-assert their claim for free
and open access.
This struggle within consumer society is essentially one of property
rights, however consumers are not simply exerting a claim of ownership.
The call for free and open access to information presents a
fundamental challenge to established notions of intellectual property.
By refusing to treat information as property, by giving it away or by
rendering it a communal resource (as achieved through FOSS copyright
license agreements), practices of consumer production rewrite
the nature of intellectual property and undermine the privatising force
of capitalism. In A Hacker Manifesto McKenzie Wark claims this
challenge to intellectual property rights signals a revolution within
contemporary society. While intrinsically linked to the revolutionary
forces cited by Leadbeater and Miller (2004) and Von Hippel (2005),
the threat here is more fundamental than a simple mirroring of professional
practice. Acts of consumer production disrupt professional
practice through a general disregard for the logic by which it operates;
practices of hacking, modding and DIY are irreducible to economic,
functional or professional concerns.
While consumer production may be captured by economic structures
and positioned as a form of productive labour, there remains something
excessive, illogical or deliberately disruptive in these divergent
acts. This excess emerges in the non-utilitarian, the comic, and the fictive
aspects of object modification and may be likened to Bill Brown’s
account of thingness as that which exceeds an object’s materialization
or utilitization (2001). Hacking, modding and DIY practices are often
proudly non-professional, non-commercial and anti-institutional.
These productive acts do not supplant one form of logic with another;
rather they run amuck with the established order, challenging normalized
relations and turning logical procedures on their head. Consumer
production can best be understood as a form of creative play that seeks
to explore the limits of the system in which it operates; as such, it is
endlessly adaptive and responsive to circumstance. Introducing barriers
in an attempt to limit divergent consumer behavior is equivalent to