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A highly contentious, very readable and totally up-to-the-minute investigation of women’s natural relationship with modern technology, an association which, Plant argues, will trigger a new sexual revolution. Zeros and Ones is an intelligent, provocative and accessible investigation of the intersection between women, feminism, machines and in particular, information technology. Arguing that the computer is rewriting the old conceptions of man and his world, it suggests that the telecoms revolution is also a sexual revolution which undermines the fundamental assumptions crucial to patriarchal culture. Historical, contemporary and future developments in telecommunications and in IT are interwoven with the past, present and future of feminism, women and sexual difference, and a wealth of connections, parallels and affinities between machines and women are uncovered as a result. Challenging the belief that man was ever in control of either his own agency, the planet, or his machines, this book argues it is seriously undermined by the new scientific paradigms emergent from theories of chaos, complexity and connectionism, all of which suggest that the old distinctions between man, woman, nature and technology need to be radically reassessed.
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zeros + ones DIGITAL WOMEN + THE NEW TECHNOCULTURE sadie plant fourth ESTATE • LONDON sadie plant fourth estate • LONDON contents preamble 3 ada 5 matrices 9 tensions 11 on the cards 14 second sight 18 anna 1 23 gambling on the future 27 binaries 32 supporting evidence 35 genderquake 37 cultures 45 nets 46 digits 51 holes 55 cyborg manifestos 58 programming language 60 shuttle systems 60 casting on 69 flight 73 virtual aliens 74 cocoons 77 diagrams 82 eve 1 85 masterpieces 88 trials 90 errors 93 eve 8 95 case study 97 what eve 8 next 100 monster 1 102 robotics 103 learning curves 104 anna o 109 multiples 112 switches 114 speed queens 115 secrets 121 grass 124 automata 125 bugs 127 disorders 131 amazone 137 beginning again 140 grapevines 143 enigmas 144 monster 2 151 marriage vows 152 spelling 153 hysteresis 154 cybernetics 156 sea change 165 scattered brains 166 neurotics 171 intuition 176 cave man 177 hooked 182 tact 185 cyberflesh 191 mona lisa overdrive 194 runaway 199 passing 210 chemicals 214 xyz 218 the peahen’s tale 223 loops 229 symbionts 233 eve 2 237 pottering 239 mutants 244 wetware 248 dryware 250 silicon 251 quanta 253 casting off 256 notes 257 bibliography 297 acknowledgments 307 preamble Those were the days, when we were all at sea. It seems like yesterday to me. Species, sex, race, class: in those days none of this meant anything at all. No parents, no children, just our selves, strings of inseparable sisters, warm and wet, indistin guishable one from the other, gloriously indiscriminate, pro miscuous and fused. No generations. No future, no past. An endless geographic plane of micromeshing pulsing quanta, lim itless webs of interacting blendings, leakings, mergings, weaving through ourselves, running rings around each other, heedless, needless, aimless, careless, thoughdess, amok. Folds and fold ings, plying and multiplying, plicatihg and replicating. We had no definition, no meaning, no way of telling each other apart. We were whatever we were up to at the time. Free exchanges, microprocesses finely tuned, polymorphous transfers without regard for borders and boundaries. There was nothing to hang on to, nothing to be grasped, nothing to protect or be protected from. Insides and outsides did not count. We gave no thought to any such things. We gave no thought to anything at all. Every- thing was there for the t