McKenzie Wark’s new book consists of 388 numbered paragraphs organised into seventeen ‘chapters’, organised in alphabetic order, from ‘Abstraction’ to ‘Writings’ and going through ‘Class’, ‘Hacking’, ‘Representation’ and the like. Wark is batting for a high score, as the opening sentence, with its breezy allusion to Marx, indicates: ‘A double spooks the world, the double of abstraction.’ One of the things the format of the book suggests – not simply with the numbered paragraphs (which invoke Nietzsche and Wittgenstein as well as Wark’s chosen model, Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, 1967) but also the whole aphoristic style – is a throwback to those Big Bad Books that were out to blow up or at least transform the world, starting by changing the way we thought about it. In this it has something in common with John Gray’s Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2003), which seeks to convince us that humanism and anthropocentrism are grand delusions and that there is no way that man can be thought of as master of his fate. Wark isn’t nearly as apocalyptic as this, but he is pretty ambitious all the same. He is trying both to call into existence and to write the blueprint for a new class, the hacker class: