I welcome you all to Replicants, the future of cyberfeminism. I'm Sadie Plans and I'm chairing this and we hope that this will be very much a panel discussion that will involve the audience as much as possible. In fact, we intend to say very little, really. And I know myself, and I'm sure there's lots of other people as well, who are working on a lot of the issues that we'll be talking about. So this is a very serious and genuine invitation for some good conversation, hopefully. If I can just start by introducing the panel, I'll start over there. We have Francesca Derimini, who is, amongst other things, connected with the BNS Matrix
group in Australia, and I'm sure lots of people have seen her presentation coming with it, just still don't be thought that it's getting hazy. And just to point out as well, that Fran will be running workshops from half past two to half past four today on the net in terms of mood spaces or so on. So she'll be leaving the panel shortly, so she disappears, and when she disappears, that's why. Next to her is Josephine Starrs, also a member of the BNS Matrix Collective, who again, you probably saw her presentation. And next to her we have Pat Cadigan, and some of you may have been in the earlier panel that Pat was on. But for those who don't know, Pat's the author of,
what I've widely acknowledged to be some of the best cyberpunk novels of our time, and recently won the Arthur C. Clarke Memorial Prize for Science Fiction as well for her lovely calls. And then we have Gwyneth Jones, who has written two books out at the moment, White Queen and North Wind, which she says are basically about sex, and one of them is about sex and war. And she also has a book called Kairos, which is being reprinted, which is actually set in Coventry, so that's another one that's about. Partly set in Coventry, I suppose entirely would be asking. Okay. And we also have added Camilla Griggis to our
panel as well who is based at Carnegie Mellon University and is completing a book called Becoming Woman that will be out next year, Spring 96. And immediately next to me is Lianna Borahee from Florence University who again, the beginning of a few words in that, talking about vampires and cyborgs and things. Without setting an agenda, if I could just say a few things, just sort of set a scene of set a scene, if you like, of what this term cyberfeminism has been used to cover. Then I'll get each member of the panel to say a little bit about their involvement in these issues and how they've been dealing with them in their work. As you can tell, we've got academics and artists and writers, and a very good mix of people
here, so they obviously all have very different perspectives. But in the first place, I think just a few things to say about cyberfeminism. I think probably amongst a lot of people who've been using this term, and obviously I'm sure amongst people who haven't, that there is a widespread feeling that there is a limit to how far this term, psycho-feminism, is useful to us. Not least because it still has the term feminism very prominently in it. And I think it would be a good idea if we didn't get too caught up in questions about what this term actually means and the questions of terminology in general. But just to, in a sense, acknowledge the fact that this term has been clearly very helpful in providing an umbrella for many women and men, and of course all sorts of indeterminate creatures,
to deal with some of what I think are widely acknowledged to be some of the most fascinating issues around the whole cybernetic revolution. And in the first instance, I think one thing that cyberfeminism as a term has done is really to debunk the notion that women are not involved with computer technology in general, and clearly from events here this weekend and also obviously and a cool and a relatively objective look at the world, it's clear that women are, in fact, very much involved, often in some of the most leading and certainly in terms of the arts world, some of the most interesting experimental areas around VR, multimedia and internet. And, of course, as is often said as a cliché, but nevertheless it's very well worth making as a significant point,
women often are able to make the computers as well. So at every level of the computer industry, clearly there is, a very thorough involvement. So cyber feminism, I think, has debunked that myth that it's all a boy's field. It's also obviously allowed for a lot of issues around identity, sexuality, sexual difference to really be put on the map in a context, not just around technology as in the hardware and the software, but in terms of a whole notion of paradigm shift away from very linear centred ways of thinking about these issues and into more parallel distributed complex ways of thinking which have come off the whole area of cybernetics, chaos theory, complexity theory and non-linear dynamics generally.
And that too gets us away from the notion that all these issues are simply to do with the machinery and the sense that there is a far broader cultural shift of which technology is obviously very much a part, which is really carrying the whole agenda around these issues of sexuality and sex, gender, identity and so on. And finally, I think sub-feminism has also really thrown up the possibility that this new paradigm really does begin to interrupt the entire sort of linear, centralised framework of Western culture and its philosophical tradition and has really opened up spaces for new ways looking at issues of anti-sex and gender that have little in common with older versions of sort of second wave feminism. So just to put those on the table as some of the themes really
that have been talked about under this rubric of cyber feminism and possibly some of the things we might talk about or at least use the starting point perhaps to move forward in those points today. So if I could just get each person on the panel to perhaps say a little bit about how they've dealt with these issues or any of these issues at work or what your feelings are about any of these issues as you've confronted them. I don't mind where we start. Sometimes everybody gets to have a say. Do you want to go first, Fran? I've actually got to leave quite early. No, I think. Well, a volunteer then. I'll volunteer. Thank you. Is this your name? Yeah. Myself, I have been working more and more with the organic in relation to electronic
culture and machine culture, and recently in particular form of cancer as the return of the organic in the electronic and machine culture in the form of neoplasties in a toxic environment. And I gave a paper here this weekend on biopsychiatry. And so I'm interested in having a discussion with the group on issues of the body. And I'm interested for cyberfeminism in how it relates to these issues. And politically, I'm concerned for cyberfeminism in how it deals with the neo-right, how it will deal with the neo-right. And I'm speaking very much as a citizen of the U.S. in saying that. as I watch the rise of various proto-fascisms appear in my country.
And I'm particularly concerned with the way that the new right formulates a statement that says that fantasy is reality, and therefore you can't have a rape online, right, because it's the same thing. And so I'm concerned about the way that cyberfeminism also produces a statement that is very similar that says that in many ways. and so I'm concerned to hear cyberfeminism sort of articulate the differences and articulate a kind of self-representation and sense of agency, a sense of awareness about its own relationship to these movements in the social. I understand that fantasy, I mean, women go to fantasy in cyberspace the same way they went to fantasy
and continue to go to fantasy in fiction because of the limitations of the social, and there is an agency in doing that. But there's also the social body with its various kinds of cancers, both political and biological, that also has to be dealt with. I'm a member of VNS Matrix and I just want to talk a little bit about the actual projects that we've done because I'm not really a theorist. I've been at that, I've always been practicing artists and that's what kind of, I'll just talk about the things that we are doing. And I'm not sure if cyber-fanism does say what you just said, but there's no difference between the fanism.
One of the projects that the NS Matrix has done is we do work with the engineer and we did a high vehicle space called Cyber-Sucker. Oh, Pop was fantastic, the Moo. And it wasn't a real Moo, but each space in the Moo was based on the body. So you could go to the eye, you could go to the Moo, you could go to... And we did various performances in that hypothetical space. And the idea was to bring that disembodied space back to the body, because we do think that the body is not to be forgotten. The other thing that we have done is we've also made a hypothetical game called All the Gen, and that grew out of our worry about computer games that always seem to be directed mainly at young boys.
and so we wanted to make a game. We wanted to parody cyberpunk fiction and we wanted to parody computer games in general so it was more like a walking installation of a game, part that is on the CD-ROM. The other thing that Francesca and I are doing is we're making video about women and madness and we're working with the videos made up of black and white photographs and it's the visuals that I'm put to Francesca's poetic prose on madness. So we're dealing in a lot of different, sort of dabbling in a lot of different areas and
We also, well, we put up all these posters today and they've all just disappeared. So that's really good because I think everyone's stolen them and taken them home. But we like to, you know, we have sort of caught in the media a lot in Australia. We have had lots and lots of media. And it's true that when you, you know, if you want the media to be interested in you, you know, just get a few girls together and make her and call them cyber-feminists or call them technology or whatever. It seems to be very sexy at the moment, but at the same time, we caught the media, but then we can have a place to get our genders out there, and that's
what's important. Can I just follow up on that? Because I guess it's where we've been lucky that we've had so much media attention and it's always our first project, if you could write out a feminist manifesto and we talk about, we say that we are the virus and the people are a disorder. We released our virus four years ago and it has, its vectors are many wide and they've definitely reached the mainstream, straight down the mainstream president had stories about computer pages and the national papers back home and the computer magazines and the rock magazines. So it's sort of appearing in all sorts of areas but I've just noticed that in style magazines, computer magazines, newspapers,
there are all these stories, just as either feminism, I guess internationally, it's getting some kind of cashier, I don't know if that's the right word, credibility. There are all these stories that are coming out about what a bad, spooky, horrible place in the internet is, and how it's, you know, the whole thing about pornography on the net and women getting harassed on the net. So I thought that just as this time when the notion is being developed that women aren't involved in technology, there's a really big thing which is saying, get off the street, get some help from there, just the street, and saying, get back to your house, it's really nasty if you go out there, it's going to be harassed. So that's what's being promoted, and which seems to be coming at the same time,
the horizon of cyber-menic. And I guess I think also, and I think cyber feminism still has a role in play about making access more equitable to the groups that we don't understand. And I mean I want to do artists in Australia, doing the work I do on the internet as an artist, and I work on this really crappy NC, I mean it does the job, but it's why I got this really and that's aligned with, I guess, my position as a woman. You know, financial status, I guess. So, I mean, as long as those inequities, things, that would be having less money. We're not going to have some of the toys, it's the boys. You know, they kind of hang out with a lot of them.
Boys, we hang out with a lot of kids and boys, and they're 20 and they've all got personal organisers and they've got power masks and other jobs. that there's a kind of... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... But we need to kind of hold that because there's also some really interesting lawyers doing work and we want to work, and we do work for them because that would be a group and we want to work for them.
Just sort of, I think we need a new kind of term or feeling of a community that's in the area. is more I want you to call me when you reach the point where you get the boys to come to dinner and give you the software We're really bad. Now for something completely different.
I tend to look at the whole issue. Well, I don't really have much choice about how I look at it because I'm really busy all the time. I have a nine-year-old son. And so as soon as he was able to sort of sit up unassisted, he sat up at my computer. It was interesting watching the changes from generation to generation when I was more acquainted with nine-year-old boys that weren't interested in learning how to type. And now they all want to know how to type. And for a person of my age, that's an interesting development. And I find that because my son is in a school system where they can have, they don't have a computer for every kid, but they have a reasonable number of computers so that the kids can get their turn on them in a reasonable period of time.
And he really doesn't think anything of it any more than I ever thought of a ballpoint pen or notebook. But it's also interesting to watch what happens in my son's classroom. Because kids, at least in America, or at least in my portion of where I live, seem to learn most of their sexism at schools. And I found that, to my dismay, that even if you run a tight household that doesn't include any ethnic slurs as part of the house vocabulary, your kids will go out and bring them back, and if you haven't covered what they mean, you can hear it in a very untimely way.
but the girls in class tend to be divided you know into the ones that aren't afraid of the computer and the ones that are and generally it is not a hard fast rule but the girls who do not have older sisters are not afraid of the computer more there are more of them who are not afraid of the computer than ones who have older sisters who are afraid. And I thought, you know, I wonder if I can follow up that statistic, but I'm really busy all the time. So, yeah, it's free, take it. Get a grant.
No, but, so when I'm dealing with this, I'm usually thinking in terms of, you know, being real busy raising my son all the time. And so I tend to deal with it on a really basic, you know, day-to-day level. And although, you know, it's like whatever I do with my son now is going to have very, you know, long-term complications, it's like I can't be, you know, as long-sighted as I would like to be because I'm really busy all the time. I was just going to get you at some point to talk about your fiction as well. Oh, no, no, no, sorry, that wasn't... Just to put it on the map. I'm sure people would be interested to hear about all your girl figures.
Anyway, great. I'm sorry. I don't know if I'm any of that. I said I'm writing books about sex, which is in fact broadly true. What I've been doing recently, in the last two books that I've written, is I've been trying to invent a heterarchy, a society that isn't divided along reproductive, along the lines of reproductive function. And these people, they're called aliens, but I think of them as people, I think of them as a possible version, a possible version of the future. They are immortal in a way. They recognize their own immortality, they recognize that their selves are reborn and reborn,
that there is no individual single self that dies and goes away at the end of one particular life. Any one of them could reproduce, but most of the time they don't really know whether they're going to or not. They're just like plants. They bud and they don't really know why. Stress. They think that stress probably does it. And they can, what we call sex, their physical intercourse, their physical intercourse is social and communicative. It's a way of flooding, you flood the other person with information about yourself and your biochemical state. and that's the way information passes around the, I don't want to call it a super-organism, I'd rather call it a heterarchy, passes around the society of different versions.
They look on themselves as different versions of what they regard as a single or indefinite self. That's basically what I'm writing about at the moment. There's a background of a war going on between the poor, benighted human beings, the gender warriors. I've seen from that war I described in internet detail yesterday. I don't really have any immediate connection with the term cyberfeminism, except in the sense that I'm looking at organically futures which seem to have some relation to the agenda
that cyber-feminism appears to have a very vague sense appears to have a single agenda that's where maybe my heterography is somehow related to that I wanted to start speaking in Italian I shall spare you the experience. The reason why I wanted to talk in Italian was to make you understand that the question of access is no joke for those who do not speak English, and I think we should all remember that. For me, the question is particularly important because of my several belongings, I will call it that way. I have been for many years now part of the feminist community in Italy.
I was one of the founding members of the bookshop. I had a publishing house, very small publishing house for a while. I have, of course, taught at the University of Bologna, the University of Florence, et cetera, et cetera. But I think that things change for me vis-à-vis technology. And the day when, for some reasons, that I hadn't been able to figure out yet, and probably never will, Rosie Braylotti picked me up, ultimately, to work on a science fiction project. I had been working for many years in science fiction, and sort of the soft feminist side of it. And she wrote me into a project dealing with gender and technology. So I'm very young to this milieu, and you have to forgive all my silences as well as my inadequacies.
I mean, this is all I have to offer. I've worked with Rosie and the Utrecht Project for the best part of four years now, and we have done several things. I have of course been teaching what I would call cyber feminism, which is of course not cyber feminism at all, it's just some version of my interaction with a view of the world which owes a lot to Teresa de la Redis an awful lot, an awful lot really to Rosie Bradotti and other theoreticians. And I would add somebody who's become very important for me, and that is Donna Haraway. My translation, the Sidebook Manifesto, as well as other essays, just came out in Italy. And if you've read the Manifesto, which I'm sure you will have,
you'll know how difficult it was to translate it. But it wasn't a question of translating it. It was a question of becoming the text, in a way, which was a very, very difficult thing for me to do. And also, I have been teaching now for the past three years my version, again, again, of what I managed to pick up here and there with great modesty and gratitude from people like you, whom I thank very much for this opportunity. And the other thing that I wanted to say is that I feel very strongly the question of transmission and responsibility, not in the sense of missionary positions and things like that. I love sex in other ways, broad and free. No, I was really in Florence.
For instance, I belong to Ria Wanda, which is a lesbian feminist group, but I'm also part of the lesbian and gay community, with all sorts of problems that have to deal with the disapposition of the politics of identity and other nomadic subject positions, which has to do, again, an awful lot with new technologies and the sort of configurations that you hear about in this context. On the other hand, I also belong to something called WISE, which is Women International Studies Bureau. I am one of the national members for Italy. And so we network with women from all over Europe who do women's studies.
On the net, I'm also part of two or three situations, and we are slowly developing some kind of language that we would call, I don't even know that we can term it feminist because, you know, with the new subjectivities, we don't even know what woman is anymore. But in fact, we are exploring possibilities. And one of the things an awful lot of us are really anxious about is how to maintain some form of cohesion and alignment between one fashionable term, probably, and two not very fashionable terms. The first one is agency, which, as you know, was on the agenda of the old feminism, and I think we should maintain at all costs. The second one is responsibility, because I do feel that we are responsible to a lot of people,
I feel responsible towards those, for instance, who do not speak English and I can't talk to, or speak English better than I do. The worst part. And the other one is a question of accountability. Now, how the three things intersect, and again, forgive, they're all terms, how the three things intersect on a feminist agenda which is an agenda of maximum sort of opening, redefinition of the subject, interaction with new, as you know, affiliations on one hand or politics of coalitions on the other, etc, etc, how this happens. This I would like to throw to the audience. And perhaps nobody will answer, but I hope that sort of later somebody will.
Thank you. Well, that was a good cue. Let's throw that all to the audience. Is there anybody who does have an immediate question or statement? I've got an immediate comment to make to what you said, the Piennese matrix, that cyberfeminism allegedly has broken a myth that toys are only for boys and electronic toys, and girls are good as well. I think it's only two within a very small minority in the league, which which is falling in cyber communities. The vast majority of people still, if you look at the internet, there's certainly more than 90% of all internet people are still there, like.
It's two to one now. Two to what? It's two to one, yeah. Those figures came out fairly recently, and I had it written down when you did the research, but that's what we were talking about, propaganda that that only that only five percent people on the internet and women it's not true yes but let's say among the people who are putting up websites I think If feminists want to protect women or want to make women's voice heard on that, they will have to introduce genetic websites.
Go to Geekgirl website as early as it will be. Exactly, things like Geekgirl, magazines like that. There have to be more of these. I think also it's important to recognise it's not just about the internet or any of the specific technologies. Because I mean, it may well be the case that it's a relatively small number of people generally using the internet, but it's the broader cultural shift, which obviously everybody's involved in. I mean, nobody, no one of us are untouched by that. I mean, any angle you take, the collapse of the family, for example, the changing working patterns, I mean, there's a whole range of issues that nobody's really looking for, and
that gives a whole area of significance. I just wanted to ask the panel, with regard to fiction, there's this opposition between between cyberpunk and the rest of the fiction, and whether they've read any of Marge Pearce's stuff or Octavia Butler, and whether there were better ways to be found in fiction as maybe Octavia Butler as regards to breaking down typical family values and blood lineage and affinity rather than affiliation, rather than reiterating the cyberpunk, men are tough.
I'm not sure about this, the problem about cyberpunk being separated from all other fiction. You could separate any kind of fiction from all other fiction temporarily. It's not an essential separation. The fiction of Octavia Butler, yes, I have read some of it. It's very much a heterosexual fiction, science fiction, and a heterosexual consideration of gender problems. I think exclusively so, and that puzzles me rather, as regards to opening out the question
of our future sexual identities. Sorry, what was the rest of the question? I was just seeing whether anyone, it wasn't so much that cyberpunk seems as different, but cyberpunk is used in more post-modern discourse rather than other fiction. Yeah, it really amuses me, the number of people who've read Neuromancer, or at least believe they should have read Neuromancer, who don't read any other science fiction at all. It's quite strange to me, as a science fiction reader and critic, to come to a conference like this and see science fiction being enacted in front of me and thinking yes okay i read that 20 years ago and this is it must be i it must be strange for people coming to this experience without a context and uh there's um a lot a lot more to science
fiction than neuromancer or to um a lot more science fiction than cyberpunk i don't know i have a kind of a weird relation with cyberpunk because well it came out and then nobody lacked the name and then um and then everyone insisted that it was a boys club and for a while they thought i was a boy but then you know i was exposed i was outed as a woman shattering experience i was outing as a woman and so the the thought that kept getting back to me anyway was cyberpunk is a boys club pat katkin is not a boy therefore pat katkin is not a cyberpunk um and but you don't like the name anyway you know so relax but um
I always felt a lot of the opposition within the science fiction field to cyberpunk was that, and this is probably why it was called punk to begin with, it happened without anyone's permission. You know, it's like it didn't ask the old boys network if they could please come be in the magazines now and write some books. It just happened and I think a number of people were just caught napping by it. know now I don't think it's any big deal when I say cyberpunk I'm and I reach for a term I reach for the term that everyone will recognize right away you know and it's like oh now you know what I'm talking about you know of course now I know what you're talking about but um you know it's like well we could get a better word you know if we could all agree on a better word you know then I
use that but you know in the meantime Yeah, I think it's... Yeah, there's really no use fighting labels. Just take the label and let people use the label if you like and go on doing whatever it was you were doing before. But I have a... I prefer the term cyberspace fiction to cyberpunk fiction. I think it's wider and it gets away from this image of the cool kid in the vegetarian black leather jacket and little shade with his nanny. Excuse me boys, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to say that. I want to resist this temptation. When people ask me what I write, I tell them I write about the near future.
And here, you deal with it. Call it whatever you want. Do you ever think of working with hypertext, hyperflexion, getting away from the non-interpleging and working in a nonlinear way? Yeah, you know, and this is another problem of access that Leanne was talking about. I would love to have a computer that didn't have a nervous breakdown every time I tried to use my hypertext on it. I could teach you hyperproducts about her. I'm sure I could. It's a computer that I own, but it's up to the task. It's a good one for my SE. Yeah, I've written it out. I frequently do. I like the idea of hypertense fiction. It seems to be a bit of a horse's carriage in the moment.
It's not really anywhere near. It doesn't seem to be up to what I imagine it is going to be. I had talked about this last year at Sussex University. Got into a lot of bollocks. For some reason I didn't understand it. It was something about Shakespeare, wasn't it? Yeah, Shakespeare. I was saying that I like the idea of... Everybody always talks about science fiction novels as though, oh, it can be read on many different levels, which immediately suggests to me again, and I like to think of people saying, did you get into the metaphysics yet? It's through the murder scene. I love the idea of one of my novels being treated like that, but I'm far too lazy to do it myself. I'd like to just give it to somebody and have them produce the hypertext.
I also like, this is what got me into bother last year, I like the idea that I write a book, I compose a book, I do it, and the book exists in some form, it's little black marks on paper, and then he gets reproduced a few thousand times and he gets sold and every one of those is identical and remains identical forever. So I like the idea of composing a novel which will then be sold and each person who reads it will make it into a different piece of art. I like that idea very much. Apart from anything else, I like the idea that I would then have the original and the only copy of the original piece of art, which would restore value to...
This is, yeah, I've just put this forward as a throwaway prospect for the distant future and I found myself in an argument that I didn't understand. I had to get down to it, I think. Can we perhaps take a couple of points and hopefully we might start to spark off a bit of a debate. I think that is, say three people to start with, to see what comes out. I was really wondering if there was a major in academic history about research of materialism. It seems to me that it's been light and that men have tried to transcend the body. And there's a real issue of the body coming back again. Women have been acutely aware of the body. I've been watching that during the 70s, women have been trying to reclaim the body
also to psychoanalysis, which in fact, yes, I can try to . But the researchers have got such a serious approach. I'm wondering what the implications have been sentient as a human. I would say collect a few. I'd like to know what the panel think of the separatist movement in feminism. And given that you can set up a site these days really easily and make it as password
protectors you want whether that's an experiment which might be easier to try it seems to me that most of us agree that there's various problems in western society western culture but at the same time there's a myth that those problems don't actually exist on the internet and this means that the politics of the internet devolved to the problem of actually hooking everybody up and that's it. And I wonder if Western technology isn't just as much a part of Western culture as all the other things we would never dream of jamming down our throats. And I'd like to hear the panel talk about ways in which we can start thinking about technology and culture as co-articulated instead of technology and the internet as something
that exists entirely outside of any cultural space. There's two more and then we'll get back to the discussion. This is for Francesca. I'd be interested to hear what she has to say about the ideas that she and Rosie Bredotti are developing along the line that she spoke of, trying to bring cohesion between the so-called old-fashioned values of agency and responsibility and the emerging redefinitions, etc., boundaries, which are going alongside the new technology I'd like to talk a little more on their ideas
I just made a couple of metonymic leads from the phrase little white marks on paper I'd be particularly interested in what the panel thinks of William Gibson's depiction of others in the new romantic trilogy for example the guy in the Babylon Rocker I think it's important to talk about materialism and
and being away from essentialism and it always stood more isologically close. So, can you look at especially in the back? Let me talk about essentialism for a second and materialism. I think that in the process of becoming woman, which is a process of actualization, which has everything to do with the relationship between the actual and the virtual, and whatever systems of control are working in the social body to channel that becoming in very specific and concrete material ways. I think that cyberfeminism and the process of becoming electronic, becoming Internet, is as representative of the fact that there is no essentialism in becoming woman.
And it's as representative of that as earlier forms of modernity. And I think what's interesting for me is the function that the white woman serves in this process of modernization and technologization. And I think the white woman always goes first, and she goes into the latest technologies. And in that instance, cyberfeminism is just another instance of the process of modernization in which, you know, woman takes on any number of forms of expression that are determined by what the lander would call the machinic phylum and the way in which social forms adjust to the machinic phylum. I don't think there's anything essentially liberatory about that or essentially constraining, but there are specific constraints and there are specific kinds of smooth spaces that you can maneuver out of that. You asked me very hard, but for one thing,
So clearly what Rosa Drenotti is doing is so far ahead of what I could possibly do, partly because she speaks the language of philosophy, I'm just a literary person, and I deal with texts and ideas as well, but ideas embodied in literature mostly. So if you expect great theories from me, I'm afraid that I wouldn't be able to perform. But essentially what we are really looking at is examples of new subjectivities. And what I would say is that the latest thing that, for instance, I and my class have been working on, was an explanation if you like, was how to apply something that does not come
strictly from Rosie but comes from Teresa de Lauretti's, which is the distinction between subjecthood and subjectivity. And we thought that the concept of identity seen in terms of a sort of embodied and situated knowledge of the subject, which you would have in the concept of subjecthood, would sort of open out all sorts of inquiries and all sorts of reflections or thoughts towards the experiences that you have when you are in fact in the world,
in reality itself. Whereas the concept of subjectivity and what you can do, how we can become, how identity can sort of open out to new possibilities, how the subject can sort of express itself in different ways, et cetera, et cetera. The interaction of the two things would probably create some kind of space where we can be neither, I don't know how to say it, some kind of space where in fact we can open up to new possibilities. Let me explain it, you know, the way we are doing it at least, or at least what we are trying to do in my
classroom we have a whole section of people who are in fact will you excuse me and go on and I come back to it in a second perhaps I can expose this to the audience because I think there might be a number of women here who might want to speak against the version of even new identity and new subjectivities on this side of the problem Are you about to do that? Yeah, go on then. I know I'm up to the moment. No, no, no. That was an invitation on the description. I feel there exists a problem with something like Donna Haraway's side of this manifest
about the emergence of potential use of gender identity through a recoding process. Well, it appears through things like cyber-feminism and the antibody levels and such. The recoding process exists in the realms of what can be impacted by disobedience. It's still within a margin. I don't see how fully recoded and subverted new potential identity can actually exist when these theoretical positions still remain within something like Slythera. And I think there's perhaps a broader question about the role that the whole notion of the
subject is played as a patriarchal concept anyway and certainly in the whole historical history. I'd like to resume this. I'm sorry about it. I'm not used to speaking too much. Okay. Okay, what I was trying to explain very, very briefly is that we come out of a view of the subject that is a very strong subject, a subject that expresses itself in history. At least, you know, women have always been excluded from, you know, the historical process when we were not that they didn't even have language of fishery or the language of sexuality or other languages. What feminism has done or tried to do throughout these years has been to give women a space of her own in many ways in which she would recover some sort of stronger identity in order to speak as a subject in history.
At least this is what we have done, for instance, have tried to do in feminism. Speaking from my own experience in an Italian context, what has happened in Italy has been a reappropriation of the left on the part of women for about 10 to 15 years. Then the moment came when, within the left itself, women decided that the politics of the left was no longer something that expressed a sort of feminist drive to some kind of, I wouldn't call it an essence because at the time it was not called an essence, but I would call it definitely feminist and feminine specificity. And at that point there was a sort of attempt on the part of the women to infiltrate the left from the inside.
I'm not talking of the right because women of the right were all in the movement, and they were trying to get a salary for housework, which was very different from the other salary for housework that you probably have heard of through international feminism, which was something very much of the left, and in fact the extreme left. When we got that, as far as Italy was concerned, we had a tremendous split, and it wasn't just Italy, it was throughout Italy, it was in the United States as well. That was when French feminism and the theories of difference came to the fore, and the subject started breaking up. The subject started splitting. A lot of women who had had suddenly access to language and felt that they were subject in history by expressing themselves as feminists in feminist groups through solidarities, through separatism, etc., etc., lost the capacity to speak.
in Italy especially, but I know that it was like this in the States where I was at the time, and where I have been on and off again, the theories of difference in the French jargon, because it was a jargon for many women who were used to talking in terms of hard realities. The loss of language meant that, you know, the rise of a new elite. I saw with my own eyes a whole community, and it was a Tandem community, and I mean I saw it, because you could see it disintegrate. And what you got all of a sudden was the new formations, the new groups that brought forward the concept of difference and the sort of split subject, but split in terms of male and female,
just the position difference distinguishes between male and female. So what we have been trying to do, this is, I'm sorry, this is why I lost. I didn't know where to start earlier. So now you know where I'm trying to start from. that'd be very fast. What we did at that point, we tried to reconcile theories of difference, you know, because of course French feminism is enormously important and it's also much more important for what has been done to it over the years, the so-called annotations by women from all over the world. And on the other hand, some kind of, you know, feminism that in fact spoke again of the materiality of the world, of the materiality of the subject. What Utrecht has done, but it's not just Utrecht, it's happening all over, and I mean the sort of
program in the history of consciousness in Salman Cruz has been so important working with Utrecht, because what that has meant to understand in terms of the technologies and of the re-reading of the map of the world in terms of parameters that were not there before and are certainly not there in French theories, you understand that. So what we have tried to do through Deleuze and Guattari and not so much through Irigarami and Cixous, clearly, is to reread the subject so that race, class, and gender, as well as other differences, as well as difference, would sort of all be accounted for in a fragmented nomadic
subject that however can sort of find itself in dialogue, you know, with this just opposed and contrasting parts of the self that I was talking about, the question of subjecthood and subjectivity as a codification of this possible schizoid subject, as we call it, in ways that are fertile and can be applied to the new communities that are sort of coming up all over the world. I must say that this community are women's communities, so the question of separatism as far as I'm concerned is a question of alliances and affinities based on certain topics. You know, normally we inhabit the spaces that are women's spaces,
but of course we share. It's not a question of the body, I hope my body is shared, as one used to say. I want to say something about the relationship of cybersex to the kind of community that you're talking about in the formation of politics. And I want to say specifically that I think cybersex can run the danger of becoming another form of sort of private mass consumption, which I think print pornography or video pornography perfectly epitomizes, in that it channels your social relations to the final act of private masturbation. And I think in that sense, if it does that, if it ends up doing that, that it is in fact anti-producing the kind of community that these kinds of politics come out of. And I think that's something to think about.
And I say that because I think so many people think about cyber sex when they think about cyber sex. What is cyber sex? It's like going, it would be, no, it's like any kind of, it's what porn does. I mean, if you go online, you go into a mood, you have a sexual play with somebody, and you end up masturbating. What that does is it stands in the place of the actual social relations that I think are signified by sexual relations, which can be potentially extremely radical. You know, as long as that's not standing in the place of those actual non-grammatical relations. I mean, the thing about the radical potential of sexual relations is that it can and often does threaten to break the grammatical relations that are organized through language and the social kinship, class, race, for example, right? You're not supposed to have sex with a person of another
color, blah, blah, blah. And sexual relations, you know, where you close your mouth, you stop talking, or you open your mouth and stick out your tongue because you're not talking and you have that kind of sexual relation, those are potentially extremely radical. But I think pornography, the porn industry in terms of, you know, print, photographic and video porn have successfully channeled the potential radicality of those relations into private mass consumption where you end up just masturbating. As long as sex on the net doesn't stand in the place of those actual social relations, then it's okay. But when you say it's perhaps a bit of a mistake to some really privileged sex in that way, it's just a pre-recoding, but that's where it's at, and that is the real actual social relationship and everything else is somehow set up.
Yeah, no, I mean, I think that that's just one. Sexual relations are one kind of social relation. There are many others. There are political relations more overtly. Yeah. Can we also look at the tent as something to be carried out? I think what you're doing and what you're saying is that sex on the net as a metaphor, so in a very trans-sonian way also, and then what does this, you know, what is the death penalty? What options are you trying to do? What is really there? I am privileging the body, and so I'm making the distinction on the fact of whether you actually have a sexual relation with another body or you masturbate by yourself with your computer. But, no, I think that instead is what you're talking about.
I mean, what is the death penalty is trying to analyze a couple of the next material in a materialist way, but the method that the cyber-transmaster, maybe I'm not going to I just explained that I'm from the district consciousness, that's where I study. I'm a man of donors. And I think in the way that people talk about their work here, there's perhaps it's been a little over-the-crispied life and it's been seen exclusively as a delusion. I think it's very important to note the subtitle of the Sovereign Manifesto is that this is an attempt to formulate social feminism in the 1980s. So to the point that Stephanie heard, and materialism in the social and social media sense. And why is it a remarkable concept of materialism to apply to a number of things which are marked
the tradition in the book where to look at questions of gender and sexuality and race, as well as questions of gender and gender and sexuality. But we have to remember that we can do that with the net as well. Just because we are interacting through the future does not mean that we are not political animals and that what we create through interactions through our future is something that is materialized. I completely agree with you. Perhaps somebody in the audience would like to jump into this discussion because we haven't got much time there. Can I say something? You said that cyber sex is a way to think of cyber deafness and that he was cyber sex, but I think there's the other sort of cyber sex
which people like cyber SMM are making, which is these body suits. And I think people think of cyber sex more the body suits than VR, which are more like putting mild vibrators on different parts of your body. And I don't know of cyber feminists that are working with that sort of technology. So I just don't know about that, whether that is the association. I don't know, does the audience have that association? I think maybe more of what you're talking about. I'm sorry, I forgot your name. No, no, no. The woman... Yeah, virtual sex, not cyber sex.
Okay, virtual sex. I think that's why I can't get you to throw out any cravings of arguments. I think it's all brewing and it won't happen. Okay, yeah. Okay, well, you started by saying that you did like the idea of the design for the internet, and I agree with that, but I think that it's also important to say that that doesn't exist on a problematic process for a lot of people to be on the internet. and
they have a relationship with technology. What they do have is a problem to them is men on the net. And the problem they have is that they're not free to play for gender. So a lot of time what you're talking about is gender defense. They choose to be gender neutral on the basis that they feel harassed on the net. And that's not what I'm doing with it, but it is what a lot of people do, is when they go and find their experience online, I think that you have to write that into what you're talking about, and certainly that means that when you talk about what psychedelics is, then what you're saying is can you go beyond an early stage of pandemic?
Do you have that? Is that something that's there? I'd like to know that where all these women are that have such a terrible crime being harassed on the net, All the women I know seem to not experience that. I think it may be the ease of, you know, never going to be that.
I think the difficulty is my knowledge, yeah. I'm sorry, not you, sorry. I'd like to just, I know, so I'd like to just throw, I'd like to challenge the assumption that going on the net as a woman or being part of, say, a cyber or feminist, very loose umbrella on the net should be safe, should be easy. Because I actually think that women do, we do ourselves great service when we kind of expect it to be easy, especially when there's something, I don't mean this in a kind of masochistic way, especially when there's something new and exciting. It needs tools, and I use that in a non-jection, like tools, men and women, or just women if that's what you're interested in. And gaining tools and new skills is easy, and it is difficult, and it's dangerous.
And I'd be really interested to hear from the panel, like, have they come up against that actual fear, you know, when you actually sit down and you feel scared because you're doing something new. Is that just to do with being a woman? I want to say simply that cyberspace is part of this world, and the social order in there is the same as the social order out here, and it seems to be madness to suppose people are in a condition. and I think that I am I'm very wary of any idea that I should stay off the streets but I do I talked about this with different places I do think it's a public place it's a public place unless you take precautions and make sure you're not in a public place then as soon as you're part of the network of networks then you're in public and if you want precautions you want safety nets
one, one, one, tradition, like women will only sit at the front end of the bus, and men will sit at the back end of the bus, so women sit at the back end of the bus, well, that's her problem. Yeah, but all I'm trying to say is that there's a difference between the scariness of a real threat, like is it safe for a woman to walk down the street and move at the night, and lots of women would really avoid doing that. There's a difference between that scariness which you would say is material scariness, if you like, to make it a cruel sort of distinction, the actual scariness of something that is genuinely new and has a possibility. I think they're two rather different things which are... You think about something that can be read either way, you can read it as a thrill or you can read it as something that should warn you to stop doing whatever. Well I think there's a, I don't think, I mean it would be great in a way if they were if you could divide it.
But I don't think they always divide, that's the excitement. Well you get a rush, you get a rush and you can call it fear and say well I better stop doing this, it's fine for you. Well, you can call it excitement to say, well, let's see what's happening. This is weird and strange. Are you saying that women tend, possibly women, tend to fear towards the fear interpretation of an adrenaline attack? Yeah, quite often. I think often maybe women assume that men don't feel fun or something. Yes. Well, I mean, it's just a big, it's a question. I don't have any help. I have an experience of being inadvertently gentle, neutral, on a death. And this wasn't something that I did on purpose, but on one of the commercial nets, I had inadvertently written my profile so that I didn't state explicitly which flavor I was.
And so I'd be online talking to somebody, and I would get cruised for sex. And so I'd say, are you M or F? And I'd say, why? So is it because I feel like having sex with somebody? and I'd say, well, I'm not your type. And they would always assume that meant, because we're always, always seem to be heterosexual people, at least in Handel, looking for someone of the complementary sex. And in my experience, all but one were men, but none of them harassed me unduly, you know, or chased after me after I indicated that I wasn't interested. And of course, on a commercial net, you know, report this sort of behavior and then throw
whatever it is off. But, you know, that's different than just accessing the internet for any time connection. I have heard from Amy Brooklyn, who does type of media who at MIT. she has told about women who have met you and then told men that if you really want a kind of uncomfortable experience, go into the longest day. Can I answer? Yeah, I just want to do something very quickly. One thing about a word of appreciation for what Francesca has done the other evening, Most of you were here and when she said that she didn't have any problems with men because she could develop talents and all sorts of weapons to become herselfly aggressive.
That is because she thinks that she can master the medium. And I appreciate that very much. And I liked this sort of image of the superwoman occupying the net and sort of fighting off aggressors. I don't know enough about the medium to sort of to realize how, whether this is something, a technique of self-defense that we can all learn the way that we learn other techniques, in which case you have, I think, a program that you should develop quickly and fast so that we can all enjoy. Can I just finish very quickly? The other thing is about Amy Bluthman. Because in April they had a conference on cyberfeminism, and I haven't been able to get any very detailed information.
She sent off a lot of possible papers, but anybody who's interested can actually send her a message at MIT. I just want to say it's also a great experience going into a gay man and getting cocks up. Well, whatever. I think it's a bit of a mentor for the questions about Alex, who is the person who has a daughter. Are you not me? It's also like you don't actually have to meet people on the internet. I mean the worldwide web is a fantastic person. It talks about much of them and you do have access.
Are you talking about the news? Please. Yeah, I totally understand your point. History does tend to gender us though, and our experiences sometimes gender us. Yeah, yeah. Well, if you're using search engine on the world wide web, and you're just like, oh, I really want to know about that, about that conspiracy theory or something like that. I mean, you don't buy a woman on the World Wide Web. Right. You know, I mean, it's a great tool for accessing information
and doing research. And, you know, you can spend hours and you can then come across the person and you don't have to think of yourself. I just think we want to talk about what we have to do on the map. It's causing people to come from... Yes, I agree. I agree. And the magazines seem to really love writing about it too. I'm very troubled by the net. I just... Can I say a slide? Something very important to that. You speak English, I speak Italian. When I speak on the net, I have two subject positions available. Uno e femenica, elato masque. You get that. I'm either female or male.
So either I cover up and sort of project myself as a maid with all sorts of problems. It's the language, it's the language that does enjoy in Italian. That's what I mean. English is inflected in a different way, Italian is not. And I think that a lot of people have these problems. You see, so gender, unfortunately, is very much with us. I've seen in the media a wonderful program that will erase the bark of gender the moment you start talking, but you can't do it in my language, unless we all agree that the one universal language is feminine, as they say. So we all go for the feminine, we assume that everybody in the 90s is feminine. Pick one gender, it, except that in my language it is masculine.
So, problem. I'm talking about harassment. I think it's interesting that I think that's not scientific, so I think it's all being quoted. At least I actually wrote, and I'm hoping that the public person is saying, it's a real-life harassment problem. With the case, was it a woman who was being harassed by a computer administrator in the same building? Right. and the comments I got were almost universally and they're quite funny so you're using a real life you know, if you're a, some guy was in a bar and you could go, kill a file nothing he says is there anymore or he says or they say or they say but I don't know what could be done about
the to get off the streets My strong suspicion is that in fact it's people that are conservative, I think it's difficult to just provide ideas are making the whole of the new technology but it's themselves by putting in the new tools. So that perhaps we can do that. We may often have that much to do with the challenge. No, it's a means of getting a hook on something new. It's a story. It's a stand-up. Whoever it is, it's just the only way to get a hook on something new because people don't know any other way to talk about it.
So they want to say something about the Internet, so they say, what can I say? And I'll have to say, if I announce this, I'll have to say. And that's the two easy things to say. I want to say one more thing before we finish up. As a feminist, one of my responses to Cyberspace has been to launch an e-journ called Cultronics, and one of its goals is to put women online. So if anyone would like to talk to me about that, we help. It's mostly produced by women, and we help, you know, we will do programming for you if you don't know how to do it. So if anyone wants to talk to me about that, I'd love to talk to you.
Yes, I... I think you get your ear in blue and run across a woman whose name is like, Susie Hot Babe, it's probably a guy. Somebody that doubles me. Okay, I think we've got time for about three points.
I think we're all about two people. So, yeah. Yeah, can I just ask whether... Sorry, Grace is right. the nature of the interaction has changed. And so when we consider things like pornography and representation in the past, the interaction has always been one way. We've been consumers. But what's happening now, and it's a very deep thing, is that the nature of the interactions has changed. It's become two-way, and it's become two-way permanently. I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to see a lot more interactive stuff before I can tell you that the experience is you can push this button now or you can push it later. But you have so many choices of buttons. I'm not talking about interactive software. I'm talking about the nature of interaction on the net, on the web. That the interaction is now two-way.
I talk to you, you talk to me. And if we're making up a story, we're making up a story together. I'm not reading a story that's been prepared for me. So, of course, I'm bringing to the story that I build with you all of my past, all of my intentions, and you bring yours. But the mediation is now one of dialogue. whereas it wasn't before. I just wanted to come back to Camilla on a point earlier of I don't quite understand this non-productive or antisocial atrophy you've got with masturbation, because I just think, you know, whether it's one, two or three people sitting at home with a computer screen having a wank, they're all pornography for that matter. I don't think there's anything wrong with masturbation.
I think that though, if you spend six hours a day masturbating and one out of three people around you have or will have cancer, the water is undrinkable and the military is out of control, that may be a problem. That's what I'm saying. But you could still have a wife, you know. Yeah, I mean, I think there probably is a point here about what is an organism and why sort of think of, back to the old set of a cell, playing with itself, yeah, and an individuated
organism, two, three machines, who's counting, I think is the broad truth of the question. I went to this conference at MIT in April, and there Sherry Turkle presented data that 85% of the users on the net right now are male. I don't know if that's going to be the consensus of that conference, but she's also doing a book on gender on the net, which seemed quite interesting. But this goes more to Sage's comment earlier in terms of other areas, I guess, of cybernetics, cyberculture, and relationship to women. I'm just interested in the panel's initial response to things like women's bodies, women's practices in relation to reproductive technologies, or also things like pharmaceuticals, the massive use of the NX, the massive use of Crozac, as maybe some forms of social control
in relation to gender. Okay, should we, anybody else got any, you know, very nice to have a point. I just want to say one thing about it. Yeah, the audience. She's like, you're stupid. Okay. Yeah. I am at home raising my child.
I can't remember. I don't really want to put that back to that one. I don't want to make sure that that's what they recommend you can make it out. Okay, what if I could get anybody on the panel just to respond to the last wave of questions and whether that's what I'm trying to do. Actually, all I really want to say about women on the net is I think it's going to be more often with women very younger than I am that they will just get on the net and there won't be a problem. If I had a daughter and she was interested in the internet, you know, I wouldn't say, oh, don't get on the internet, but someone would say something dirty to you. That'd be like, don't go outside because someone would say something dirty to you.
but but I think that you know whoever I had on the net because women are not feeling feeling people who have been harassed there's a lot of ugly stories about kids who get on the net with their parents you know accounts and get sucked into some rather unsavory situations or maybe they don't really exist in the real world but something happens to you know a child in the mind and it becomes a very real and disturbing experience. But I think that, you know, just like you talk how to thrive, you're talking how to avoid accidents. And I don't know about looking younger than myself, what if my age, at least in rough America, grew up with a whole extra set of
caveats, you know, for conduct and for protection. And I don't know that we're ever see the removal of those differences any more than, you know, we'll see the removal of class differences. And yeah, you're right, being on the net costs money, it costs money for, you know, for the equipment to get on there, it costs money to get connections, it costs money to maintain connections, you know. And oftentimes it comes down to, I'm not afraid, I'm broke. I'm a woman at home on the net and I take my daughters on to moves and teach them how to sexually harass men. I also, I just want to, I just have to say that, you know, it's not only the internet, like, women, if the internet does turn into the big information superpower, it does become Western society, probably, a main form of entertainment.
entertainment it's really important that we get well i don't want to say all women should but that artists who want to get involved in new technology and start making really interesting interactive works um and i'm talking now about interactive cd rhymes and things like that because they're usually you know there's a dearth of interesting cd rhymes out there and the cd ron is supposed to just a phase before that those interactive, those cultural products will be, you know, part of the so-called, you know, super hog track or whatever it is. And so, and part of the work that I do, you know, I spend more time on making interactive cultural products and actually being on the internet.
And I didn't tell you that I've got this user-unfriendly interface, so everyone has a play being on the internet well I think one thing that kept thinking of it I'm getting a modem it's like when they advise you to join clubs on the back page to my social life yes my mother will not make a different person and what we're dealing with now what we're talking about is an emerging technology almost an emerging hobby. It's kind of like skiing. 30 years ago, people of my cast and kind, if they had a holiday, it was two weeks a year, and you went to the seaside, and insofar as you did anything outdoors, you sat on the beach and ate things, and that was it. That
was leisure. Now, people of my cast and kind go in droves. I mean, it's a problem. There are too many droves. People of my cast and kind go and climb up, they go up to the Snow and they know that it's terrific fun to sort of scoop down them with their feet on these rails and two little sticks in their hands. This is an astonishing revolution in people's capacity and potential for enjoyment. And when you get on the internet, you hear people saying, you know, it's really interesting. You can go and look at these weather maps that they're doing at the University of Cincinnati. And you can go and look at this volcano in Hawaii. you can get right down into the rim and people are talking about this. Not people are talking about these kind of things in the chip shop queue. This is what I call entertainment, increased potential, and it's progress.
Now, we're talking about the internet like a hobby. Some people, an American hobby that's spread, a North American, United States hobby that's spread kind of gradually over the past ten years. But what we're going to be seeing is not the internet. I'm interested in things that are happening on a larger scale, like the telematics project of Manchester City Council at the moment, which in the next five years is going to involve wiring up every single room in the various campuses at the various Manchester universities, and the council is organising to make it difficult for the cable layers if they don't wire up schools and hospitals and residences of various kinds that are on the same tracks. we're talking about a new layer of communication, which is going to be a rather different phenomenon
from this hobby that we're getting interested in at the moment. I have a dual comment. The first one is very quickly about the issue of reproductive technologies. Just a tiny episode, I think you might explain where I met it, please. The same weekend in March, in Italy, in the city of France, two things happened. There was a huge convention of Italian doctors involved in reproductive technologies, and there was a very large and very intimate gathering of women, feminist women and non-feminist
women coming from all over Italy, talking about reproductive technologies. Which of the two meetings do you think had the headlines and the television? Not one of the major papers mentioned that the women had met, explaining that they thought that women should have greater control of their bodies and have a saying that they're not acknowledged and blah blah blah. What really passed to all the media, and was publicized, I think all over the world, whether the doctors said that they were going to bar gays and married women etc. etc. from artificial insemination. That was the work past. So I mean if it's a if reproductive technologies are very much a question of control I mean this is I think an example of who has the control
and how feminism has very little support and needs, in fact, have from all sides. The other thing that I want you to say is my experience on the net, which, of course, as I said, I'm fairly new to it, in fact, very new to it. What I found was, I thought it was very shocking. I am on a women-only net, and that should give me some kind of sort of matrix, warm-like situation, ideal situation. you mentioned, but in fact what I get is an incredibly hierarchical system of the long-established persona on the net who in fact talk to one another, graciously accept the one-to-one
sort of, or the one in many, answers that come from outsiders and effectively cut off through censorship or just by ignoring the pattern of acceptance or exclusion, all undesirables. And I mean, if this is utopia, excuse me, if this is the new world, I mean, I think there's a lot of work to do to change it, really. Well, if this is an open-ended concluding comment, I haven't heard anyone talk about AIDS at this conference, So I want to talk about AIDS and tell you that if you don't know it, the CDC is now online and it has put its Wonder Network online and connected all of its HIV AIDS prevention centers onto the net.
And so this opened up an opportunity for me to try and correct one of the most obvious constraints that I feel every day as an academic and working on the net, and that is how to reach outside of the academic or government community to localities that are cut off and severed from this kind of exchange. And the group that I've been working with is migrant farm laborers in Belglade, Florida, which is a multicultural group that have the highest per capita incidence of AIDS in this country and very high cancer rates because they're exposed to pesticides constantly. And so what I did was have my class design trilingual documents for them in Spanish, English, and Creole. And then now the second plan is to get those documents online with the CDC
so that other communities that may have, say, Creole populations or whatever, Hispanic populations, could access some of those documents without having to make them up themselves. So I think we all here would encourage people to experiment with the net in any way possible. I don't think that potentiality in any way has been fully explored. Okay, well, I think we need to rent here. I just thank our panellists and just to say that I think, you know, in spite of our perhaps hopes that we have a very wide range of discussion, inevitably I guess we have perhaps concentrated on issues around the net and just to point out that there are a whole range of other
issues that I think intersect with these areas that hopefully are somehow filtered through and could be picked up and wrong with somewhere else. So if I can thank the panel and thank you for coming.