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A world of cybertwits:: [London edition]
ThompsonNoel, Michael. Financial Times [London (UK)] 25 Oct 1997: 06.
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Sadie Plant is a youngish UK academic, media darling and selfproclaimed cyberfeminist whose areas of expertise apparently include gender, video games, technology and cybersex. Yet
what, exactly, is a cyberfeminist? I still don't know, though thanks to this ridiculous book I believe I have discovered what a cybertwit and a cyberpseud are.
Zeros + Ones is the strangest, most quirky, jumbled, maddening, headachemaking worst nonfiction book I have ever encountered. Once I had finished it I sat there, staring at the
carpet, unable to make sense of it or concoct any explanation of what Plant imagines she has achieved with it.
So I consulted the dustjacket, which claims, preposterously, that Zeros + Ones "shatters the myth that women are victims of technological change. Weaving and typing, computing and
telecommunicating, women have been tending the machinery of the digital age for generations, enjoying intimate relations with the techniques and technologies which are now
revolutionising the western world."
There is more. " Zeros + Ones ," claims the publisher, "is a provocative and inspiring manifesto on the relationship between women and machines in the unmanned cultures of the future . . .
Astonishing, witty and perverse, Zeros + Ones changes everything."
What a load of toffee.
Early on, there are flickering intimations that Plant is heading somewhere. Man once made himself the point of everything, she says. "He organised, she operated. He ruled, she served. He
made the great discoveries, she busied herself in the footnotes . . . She was his helpmate and assistant . . . She did the jobs he considered mundane, often the fiddling, detailed, repetitive
operations with which he couldn't be bothered . . . He cut the cloth to fit a salary; she sewed the seams at a piecerate wage ..."
However, claims Plant, women have been intimately involved in the computer revolution. When computers were vast systems of transistors and valves which needed to be coaxed into
action, it was women who turned them on. When computers became miniaturised circuits of silicon chips, it was women who assembled them. "Hardware, software, wetware before their
beginnings and beyond their ends, women," claims Plant, "have been the simulators, assemblers and programmers of the digital machines."
In the 1990s, she continues, western cultures were suddenly struck by an extraordinary sense of volatility in all matters sexual: differences, relations, identities, roles, attributes, what have
you. In short, there was a genderquake.
At the same time, the continuing decline of heavy industry, the automation of manufacturing, the growing importance of the service sector and the rise of new manufacturing and
informationprocessing industries in the west combined to reduce the importance of the muscular strength and hormonal energies that had formerly been so well rewarded. Instead, there
was now a demand for speed, intelligence and communications skills.
As a result, changing work patterns especially the move to parttime and discontinuous work were affecting skilled, unskilled and professional workers alike. "And, since the bulk of the
old fulltime, lifelong workforce was until recently male, it is men who have found themselves most disturbed and disrupted by these shifts, and, by the same token, women whom they
benefit."
However, it is at this point that Plant drives over a cliff and plummets into the void of her own pretentiousness. Her book zooms crazily into cyberbabble, so that we never discover whether
the digital revolution is, in any concrete sense, aiding the cause of feminism, or even why Plant imagines it might aid the cause good though that would be.
What makes the book almost unreadable is Plant's use of quotations. They are everywhere. Some, in black type, are dropped into the text; many others often snippets are used as the
building blocks of her own sentences and paragraphs, some attributed to their sources there and then, others identified only in the chapternotes.
Zeros + Ones skims across the surface of many interesting subjects: maths, the internet, culture, sex, sperm counts, the workplace, cyborgs, hysteria, witches, AI, robots, replicants,
automata, mutants, bugs, cybernetics and machine code. But the book's organisation and execution are lamentable.
I was left with a horrible suspicion: that the last book ever written will be something like Zeros + Ones : fractured and frenzied an incoherent mess.
Michael ThompsonNoel Copyright Financial Times Limited 1997. All Rights Reserved.
Copyright F.T. Business Enterprises Limited (FTBE) Oct 25, 1997
Subject
Media, Publishing;
Media (publishing);
Products & product use;
Technological developments
Location
United Kingdom, EC
People
Plant, Sadie
Title
A world of cybertwits:: [London edition]
Author
ThompsonNoel, Michael
Publication title
Financial Times
Pages
06
Number of pages
0