Technically Speaking:
An interview with Sadie Plant by Zoey Kroll
June 1999
A citywide transportation strike in Paris and the pouring rain could not deter me from my
rendezvous with British feminist author Sadie Plant. I had been hybernating for the
previous three months in Marseille trying to learn a new languagenot French, but the
foreboding cold grammar of the computer. Whenever I got frustrated, I turned my back
on the screen and indulged in the poetry of Sadie Plant's alternative history of
technology Zeros + Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture.
Marseille, the oldest city in France, might be considered an unlikely place for me to
study C++, especially considering I come from the hightech hub of San Francisco,
where acronyms like HTML, AI, and Y2K are inescapable fixtures of every happy hour
conversation. On the other hand, it was perhaps not any more unexpected than what I
had gleaned from Zeros and Ones, that the daughter of poet Lord Byron invented the
first computer language, that weaving might be considered the first technology, or that
the preeminent World War II code cracker was punished for his homosexuality by
forced injections of female hormones. These interwoven stories throughout Sadie
Plant's text shifted my siliconvalley implanted history, and threatened the coherence of
a testosteronefueled mythology which had shared my own coming of age.
Thus, eating rainsogged croque monsieurs in a sidewalk cafe with one of the darlings
of cyberfeminism did not feel any stranger than the curious machinations of her revised
technological history, one haunted by the voices of Ada Lovelace, Mary Shelley, Alan
Turing, and Anna Freud. I relaxed to the utterly unassuming charm and humor of Sadie
Plant, and we got serious in our discussion of Victorian girls, unexpected technologies,
writing that works, and her newest book Writing on Drugs, to be published by Faber in
September 1999.
Can you talk about the concepts you develop in Zeros + Ones
regarding women's role in the development of technology?
Like everybody else, I had bought the story that computing had emerged from the
worst, most obvious kinds of masculine desire and patriarchal organizations. When I
found that a Victorian teenage girl (Ada Lovelace) had effectively invented the first
computer, or certainly written the first computer software, it was obviously an amazing
discovery. It immediately seemed to me that this fact in itself completely changed the
whole picture.
To then learn that she did this partly by noticing the possibilities of the Jacquard loom,
the most advanced automated machine at that time, gave the history of computing a
relation to weaving, one of the most denigrated, neglected, and also very female
practices. Weaving hasn't been considered an art or a science, but some kind of in
between practice that has never been given much credit. So not only did we now have
a young female figure at the beginning of the history of computing, but also a
connection that could be traced back to the most basic kinds of weaving. Weaving then
began to emerge as, perhaps, the most basic kind of technology.
Later I found a wonderful Freud quote, which is very famous but usually used in
completely different contexts, where he talks about women never having made any
contribution to the history of discoveries and inventions, and then he adds, "except for
weaving." He obviously means that to compound the idea of being completely
irrelevant, as again denigrated, like "oh, all they ever did was weaving." For me this
picture then began to emerge that if weaving was so crucial to the whole history of
technology, and specifically to the history of the computer, then Freud had, in so many
words, said, "women didn't do anythingoh, but by the way, they were there at the
beginning of the history of technology." It was a beautiful way of turning the whole thing
around.
Now obviously there is a limit to how far you can take this kind of new mythology, a limit
to how practically or even theoretically useful it can be, but it seemed to me very
important to tell that story. I felt that almost the only obstacle to women getting involved
with the technology was somehow this deepseated conviction that the whole history of
it, the whole significance of it, was peculiarly male. All the other problems weren't really
the issueit was cheap and actually easy. The only real issue seemed to be a much
deeper sort of psychological block that there wasn't a sense of an alternative story. I
think I've probably been proved right about this in that so many people have said to me
that it has been inspiring to have that alternative picture, to feel that you're joining in
with a very different kind of history than the usual postwar shiny image that we have of
computers.
Before reading your book, I associated the development of
technology only with the history I had always heard of the
military devising the original internet structure. It makes me
wonder how that kind of development is embedded in the
technology and dictates how we use it.
But even that then begins to become interesting. I'm not that keen on automatically
saying that the military development of these things is necessarily a bad thing. Often, of
course, it is, but even that gives you a sense that these technologies are always
weapons. This can be a very important realization when it comes to using them for new
purposes. To think of them more as weapons than as tools is, in itself, quite an
interesting angle.
I want to ask you about what I see as an optimism in Zeros +
Ones, a focus on the possibilities of the technology as opposed
to some of the corporate or militaristic uses which often seem
very threatening.
Zeros + Ones is unashamedly partisan. It doesn't make any attempt to create a
balanced picture; that's not what it was trying to do. It was just an attempt to pitch in on
one side of an argument or one side of a struggle even. There is so much writing and
so much of a cultural atmosphere that is dealing with the negative sidesthere's no
shortage of that. What i felt was lacking at the time I wrote the book was a more positive
anarchic side, the side that says there is a point where control of any kind hits its own
impossibility. It's continually approaching that limit, and obviously, it maybe never gets
there completely, but that is the new battleground. We are no longer living in a culture
where, for example, we can talk about a political split between left and right. If there is a
new division, then I think it is between all the tendencies working towards hypercontrol
an almost hysterical attempt to controland the opposite, an anarchy and continual
excitement.
In your work, this anarchy and excitement seems to come
through in the writing style. You juxtapose different uses of
language, historical periods, and academic disciplines in short
segments that really do feel like weaving or hypertext. I am
interested in the idea you develop that fragmentation may be
especially akin to how women have had to structure their
thinking and work in the past.
I think it's more attuned to how women have always operated historically; though for a
lot of, for example, French feminist theorists, there has been a tendency to be too quick,
and probably too essentialist about saying that there is something fundamentally
fragmented about the female condition.
It just so happens that, for the worst of reasons, women have had very different
experiences of identity and subjectivity and the whole notion of the self. This applies
even in the most ordinary everyday circumstances; women have always had to do
several different things at once, to be far more malleable. Now obviously, in the past,
they've had to do that in order to fit around men, or in more philosophical terms, to fit
around the phallus, or whatever we want to call the central organizing point of
everything. If that central organization begins to be eroded, obviously not just by
technology, but it just so happens that that is one place where you can see this
happening very clearly, then there is a possibility that the whole culture begins to shift to
a mode of organization which is actually more compatible with the ways that women
have had to operate in the past.
How and why do you think that a technology like the internet
has changed some of the basic ways we communicate and
interact?
The way in which the internet has developed is not only significant in itself, and very
different from the ways in which previous technologies have developed, but it also has
interesting sideeffectsit feeds back into the actual world as well.
For example, Zeros + Ones is an ordinary book, in that it's on paper, and it's published
in a very traditional form, but within the book it tries to at least give some sense of the
possibilities of hypertext, small sections that interconnect. It can be read in any order
potentially, although nobody's actually taken me up on itother people could even add
sections to it. I questioned whether I should write it in book form or whether it should
actually be in electronic form as hypertext. It is interesting to see if an older form, the
book, can rise to the challenge posed by the internet. In other words, can the new
technology feed back into the already existing world? This has some of the most
interesting potential, say, for feminist activity, which has always been famous for
networking processes or skills.
As people develop more working or social relationships through the internet, you find
increasingly that even when they're not using the net, what they've learned from it can
have a profound influence on the rest of their lives. It's a little bit like the situation with
the motor car, in that you don't necessarily have to own a car in order to find yourself
living in a car culture. The car has shaped the whole culture, regardless of whether you
drive or not.
Because your perception of space and how you navigate
through it has changed.
Absolutely, and even your ability to walk down the street. One of the most interesting
sides of all current technological development is its ability to feed back and interact with
so many areas outside of itself. No development is confined to just one specific
application. If something's possible in one area, then immediately it raises possibilities
of whether it could be used in other areas. That, in itself, is quite a new and significant
development.
The internet is a place where you can see the possibilities of an ordered disorder or a
selforganizing system. It obviously is not just completely chaotic, but it doesn't have a
structure in a traditional sense, and that model gives a lot of opportunities for rethinking,
for example, the idea of the city, or the ways to organize a conference, or almost
anything.
Why I think that's possible is because it's not just a new set of ideas. Ideas can come
and go and dissipate, but they rarely necessarily have any kind of concrete purchase on
things. The beauty of the technological development is that it does actually happen. It
really can change the world, I mean not necessarily with the political connotations that
that phrase normally has, but in very small piecemeal ways it can have irreversible
effects. So these are some of the things that I think make the current types and pace of
development quite unique.
And how do you think these developments differ fundamentally
from something like the automobile?
It's very true that the automobile rewrote our culture, but the internal combustion engine
is basically for a particular purpose. What's different about digital technologies is that
the computer is a multipurpose machine; if you can get a computer to do one thing,
then almost by definition, it can do many things. That's how you get this kind of
interconnectivity. Its effects tend to leak out from one particular area. Even if it does
come out in the most unfortunate militaristic or statecontrolled kind of way, it always
has the potential to leak out beyond that. So this brings us back to that question of