Plant - People To Watch (Time Europe 2000)

Sadie Plant 36, British writer Please don't call Sadie Plant a cyberfeminist. And if you try to call her — as a writer for British daily the Guardian did — the "most interesting woman in Britain," you'll provoke only giggles. Plant, the author of Zeros + Ones: Digital Women + the New Technoculture (Fourth Estate; 320 pages), a book arguing that women laid the foundation for modern technology and that distinctions like "man and machine" and "man and woman" will become meaningless, doesn't like labels. If you must call her something, call her writer. The daughter of a mechanical engineer and a secretary, Plant grew up in the largely industrial city of Birmingham, where she still lives. The first in her family to go to university, she chose to study philosophy "out of sheer naiveté. I read a syllabus that asked, 'Have you ever wondered about the meaning of life?' and I thought, 'Yes, I have.'" Next came a doctorate on the Situationists, a French philosophical group, which became the basis of her first book in 1992. That launched her "accidental" career in academia, where, she says, she was too philosophical for the cultural studies people and too cultural for the philosophers. She found her niche when Warwick University offered her a prestigious fellowship to set up a research unit to explore culture and technology. In 1997, in the midst of online mania, she published Zeros + Ones. That's when the press came up with the "cyberfeminist" and "the most interesting woman in Britain" tags. It also brought her a good deal of fame, particularly in cybercircles. "It was a good moment for that book," Plant says now. It was such a good moment that she quit her job at Warwick to write full­time. "There's a perverse pleasure in leaving a good job," she says. "I realized I had to leave there and then, or I would stay forever." Her next and most recent book, Writing on Drugs (Faber and Faber; 276 pages), is a survey of literature on and about drugs as well as an exploration of the role drugs have had in modern history. It has little to do with technology, at least digital technology. "Drugs are a form of technology," Plant says. "They're a way of changing the wiring of the brain." Though Plant's books may seem unrelated — philosophy, technology and drugs — she says they are connected in that "they're all cultural histories told through repressed details of mainstream culture." And in each, Plant has found herself less repressed — less constricted by the defined positions academia requires. What will she tackle next? Plant says she's most likely to produce a work containing elements of fiction, possibly stemming from her recent travels in Islamic countries. But don't count on it. "Now I have a great freedom to change my mind," she says. — By Lauren Goldstein/Birmingham PHOTO: SARAH TURTON FOR TIME No. 2 of 4 close window