Vectorialism as a new vector of information control and algorithmic censorship

Moore’s Law symbolizes the exponential acceleration of technology; every two years the number of transistors on chips would increase by 100%, at the same cost. which has not only brought advancements but also created a new domain of power—vectorism, in which digital giants control infrastructure, data, and consequently, presence and influence in the public sphere. This power is brutally revealed when people are simply eliminated, without justification or recourse. The case of historian Jones Manoel, whose Instagram profile was removed without explanation last year, erasing years of work, is a striking example of this vectorism in operation. This text investigates the workings of this new paradigm of domination.

“The Marxist tradition teaches that there are different modes of production that overlap and interconnect, even if one is dominant. What if there is a new dominant mode of production based on private property and control of information, and not on land and factories? What if we no longer live under capitalism, since the information economy has brought new means of control and exploitation? In that case, what are the new possibilities for resistance? This is what I call vectorism.” —McKenzie Wark

This definition might give the impression that Marx’s idea is at least heretical or outsider, but vectorism is definitely not opposed to Marx; in fact, it’s exactly the opposite, they engage in a highly coherent dialogue. In the Hacker Manifesto, McKenzie proposes the creation of a new class—the hacker class—whose fundamental principle is to fight, just as the proletariat fights, for its emancipation, but above all, for free access to information. A good example of this is the case of Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz, whose life was prematurely cut short by an ethical issue. Apparently, he wanted to use the MIT network to mass-download approximately 4.8 million scientific articles from the paid repository JSTOR, with the intention of making them freely available to the public. And because of this, the penal system treated the act of releasing scientific knowledge with the same severity—or even greater—as it treats violent crimes like homicide in some US states, resulting in persecution by US federal agencies that ultimately cost him his life. Ultimately, anything that has the potential to provide emancipation for the oppressed becomes abominable in a profit-oriented society that depends on the alienation of a class, and there is no doubt which class we are talking about here. The hacker class, composed mainly of researchers, authors, artists, biologists, chemists, musicians, philosophers, and programmers, opposes a proprietary class (the vector class, owner of the information vectors, that is, from large media outlets like Hearst in the last century to private universities like MIT, which depended on the JSTOR repository to control who had access to the articles, releasing them only to enrolled students), which monopolizes the information produced by the hacker class.

The exclusion of profiles like Jones Manoel’s reveals the morphic skeleton of vector power operating through the algorithmic control of visibility (like recommendation algorithms that do nothing more than enclose us in bubbles of people who think like us, and this happens everywhere) and finally the suffocating architecture of terms of use. Platforms like Instagram and Facebook act faithfully to the new measure, now with the advancement of AI. Companies like Anthropic and OpenAI operate in an extremely present way in this technological pandemonium worthy of a Gibson novel, where obscured rules—in a legal-technical jargon inaccessible to the public most affected by this whole story—function as mechanisms of selective exclusion, especially elitist ones. This algorithmic governance creates a dependency that resembles a structure where the more knowledge a creator produces on the platform, the more their legacy becomes hostage to corporate interests, being susceptible to future censorship such as that suffered by Jones. The result is an extremely efficient silencing, without the need for direct confrontation, and once outside these vectors of information, you are erased from society. Vectorism extracts value from the data produced by the hacker class, maintaining the power to silence dissenting voices in the blink of an eye, transforming the digital infrastructure itself into an undeniably efficient instrument of privatized censorship.