I think I tried to explain this above, but again. I’ll use an example. Before the internet, you needed professional private studios, which were expensive, and to sign on to the record company for your production, distribution and marketing. These were unavoidable vectors. Today, you can make and distribute music outside of this control. The new vectors are the platforms, but their mode of operation is quite different. They ‘invite’ people to exchange and share amongst each other, but don’t have exclusive control, i.e. it is very much possible to make and distribute music using your own channels. Nevertheless, because of network effects, their role is crucial as an intermediary of a new type. This new situation , which differs from the one described by McKenzie Wark, is what I call netarchical.

I have read the Hacker Manifesto by McKenzie Wark where the vectoralist class is described, and my strong impression was that he uses it for a situation in which both the means of production and transmission are controlled, and where IP is an essential control mechanism; for me this corresponds very well to the first phase of networking, when the networks where exclusively available to capital; in the second phase of its democratisation because of the internet, the means of production are largely outside of the control of that class, and even the means of transmission, but not the means of monetization and many other aspects of the system as a whole; and IP is rather marginal for Google and Facebook, who directly profit from human cooperation. It is for these, ‘the hierarchy of the network’, that I use the concept of net=archical.

“The vectoralist thesis says that a new class has arisen which controls the vectors of information, i.e. the means through which information and creative products have to pass, for them to realize their exchange value.”

That describes 17th Century delivery services and Amazon equally well, I think.

In your reply to my comment above you write the vectoralists “control the means of production AND transmission of cultural and information production”, which reference to controlling production is quite different than your description in the blog.

As near as I can tell, the meaningful change in the technology begins with p2p telephones. Your invented term ‘netarchical’ seems to me to contrast with ‘hierarchical’, and intuitively fits the distinction between institutionalized and collaborative production.

The way I understand McKenzie Wark’s vectoralist thesis is that they control the means of production AND transmission of cultural and information production. Their means of control is copyright and IP and monopolistic media transmission.

But the situation now is different, it has become radically more easy to produce culture and knowledge, and the internet has democratized transmission. Now while the platforms have of course vectoralist elements, they can’t monopolize production nor transmission, and do not essentially rely on IP. They have a different strategy of encouraging production and transmission by peers, but exploit this human cooperation in different ways than the vectoralist class.

Vectors were opposed to peer production, netarchs enable but exploit it.

Now to complexify, we now know that it is not enough to democratize the means of cultural production, as there is a complex infrastructure of services in which this is embedded, and therefore, makes autonomous monetization and social self-reproduction still difficult to achieve. We need to construct a complex counter-infrastructure for this.