**Profile** McKenzie Wark is an Australian-born theorist whose writing ranges across [[Media]] studies, critical theory, cybernetics, ecology, gender, and contemporary art. She is known for an agile, experimental style that blends theoretical exposition with memoir, cultural criticism, and speculative thinking. Her work often explores how digital technologies reshape class, desire, and political imagination. **Key ideas and works** **1. A Hacker Manifesto (2004)** One of her most influential books, it proposes that “hackers” form a distinct class: those who produce new information, concepts, or abstractions. This class is exploited by what she calls the “vectoralist class,” which owns and controls the vectors—networks, infrastructure, and platforms—through which information circulates. The book reimagines class struggle in informational rather than purely industrial terms. **2. Digital capitalism and the vectoralist era** Across later works, including _Capital Is Dead_, she argues that contemporary power may no longer be adequately described as “capitalist” in the classical sense. Instead, the dominant form of control lies in ownership of data, platforms, supply chains, and technical vectors. This shift produces new hierarchies and new vulnerabilities. **3. Autotheory and queer/trans poetics** Recent books such as _Reverse Cowgirl_ and _Raving_ blend theory with autobiography. Here she considers desire, gender, nightlife, and the politics of embodiment, drawing on queer/trans experience to rethink what counts as knowledge. The writing becomes both intimate and analytical, using lived experience as a theoretical method rather than mere illustration. **4. Situationism and media ecologies** Wark has long engaged with the legacy of the Situationist International (e.g., _The Beach Beneath the Street_). She treats situationist thought as a continuing resource for examining spectacle, urban space, and collective play. She also reflects on media ecologies more broadly: how technologies and environments co-shape cognition and [[Culture]]. **5. Climate, logistics, and planetary crisis** In _Molecular Red_, she explores how the Anthropocene demands new [[Politics|political]] categories, drawing on Soviet scientists such as Bogdanov to propose forms of collective organisation fit for a damaged planet. The book situates climate breakdown within questions of labour, technology, and imagination. **General significance** Her work is distinctive for its mixture of Marxian analysis, media theory, and queer/trans lived experience. Rather than offering fixed systems, she develops conceptual tools for navigating a world increasingly structured by digital networks, environmental instability, and shifting social identities. If you wish, Lord Thomas, I can summarise any of her books individually, or outline how her ideas intersect with other thinkers you’re exploring. `Concepts:` `Knowledge Base:`