McKenzie Wark (born 1961) is an Australian-born writer and scholar. Wark is known for her writings on media theory, critical theory, new media, and the Situationist International. Her best known works are A Hacker Manifesto and Gamer Theory. She is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at The New School in New York City. Life Wark was born in Newcastle, Australia in 1961 and grew up with her older brother Robert and sister Susan. When McKenzie was 6 years old, her mother died. Brother Robert McKenzie Wark remembers reading to McKenzie as a young child and the three children were brought up by their architect father Ross Kenneth Wark. McKenzie received a bachelor's degree from Macquarie University, a Master's from the University of Technology, Sydney and received a PhD in communications from Murdoch University. Wark was married to Christen Clifford, however they announced their separation in summer of 2021. Wark is a trans woman. Works In Virtual Geography, published in 1994, Wark offers a theory of what she calls the 'weird global media event'. Examples given in the book include the stock market crash of 1987, the Tiananmen square demonstrations of 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. She argues that the emergence of a global media space – a virtual geography – made out of increasingly pervasive lines of communication – vectors – was emerging as a more chaotic space than globalisation theory usually maintains. Much of Wark's early engagement in public debate occurred in the Australian post-marxist quarterly Arena, through a number of articles and exchanges about the character of real abstraction, the meta-ideological character of post-structuralism, and the consequences of these issues for emancipatory social theory. In two subsequent books, The Virtual Republic, published in 1997, and Celebrities, Culture and Cyberspace (1999), Wark turned her attention to the national cultural space of her homeland, Australia. The first of these works examines the so-called 'culture wars' of the 1990s as symptomatic of struggles over the redefinition of Australian national identity and culture in an age of global media. The second of these 'Australian' books looked at the transformation of a social democratic idea of the 'popular' as a political idea into a more market-based and media-driven popular culture. Both these studies grew out of Wark's experience as a public intellectual who participated in public controversies, mainly through her newspaper column in The Australian, a leading