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. I'm coming with it just still. Don't be thought of it. 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, lots of you probably saw her presentation. and next to her we have Pat Cadigan 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 widely acknowledge should 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 I have 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. Partly set in Coventry, I guess. I suppose entirely we'd be asking. And we also have added Camilla Griegans from 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 Liana Borahee from Florence University, who again, the beginning people have seen her talking about that policy, cyborgs and things yesterday. Without setting an agenda, if I could just sort of say a few things, just sort 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
there's a few things to say about cyber feminism. 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 cyber 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 from 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 cliche, but nevertheless is very well worth making as a significant point, women often arguably 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 cyber ethics, 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, 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 of looking at issues of anti-sex and gender that have little in common often with older versions of second wave feminism. So just to put those on the table as some of the themes 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 for us 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 in their at work or what your feelings are about any of these issues as you've confronted them. I don't mind where we start, it's obviously we get to have a say. Do you want to go first, Fran, if I should go to the... No. Quite early. No, I think. Well, a volunteer then. I'll volunteer. Thank you. Is this for me? Yeah. Myself, I have been working more and more with the organic in relation to electronic 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 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. 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 feminism does say what you just said, but there's no difference between what we're doing. One of the projects that the NS Matrix has done is we do work with the internet and we did a hybrid space called Cyber...
It's a... Oh, Pop was fantastic, the Mu. And it wasn't a real Mu, but each space in the Mu was based on the body. So you could go to the eye, you could go to the Mu, 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 of it is on the CD-ROM. The other thing that Francesca and I are doing is we're making a video about women in madness and we're working with the videos made up of black and white photographs and the visuals are put to Francesca's poetic prose on madness. So we're dealing in a lot of different, dabbling in a lot of different areas.
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 quoted the media a lot in Australia. Australia we have had lots and lots of media and it's true that when you you know if you want to if you want the media to be interested in you know just just get a few girls together and make her and call them such when it's also took all the tables or whatever because it seems to be very sexy at the moment but at the same time we caught the media but 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 on the side of the feminist manifesto and we talk about how we say that we are the virus for people of disorder. Now, we've released our virus four years ago and it has its vectors are many wide and they've definitely reached the mainstream, the mainstream president had stories about it in our computer pages and the national papers of that kind and the computer magazines and the rock magazines. So it's sort of appearing in all sorts of areas, but I've just noticed recently that in the style magazines,
computer magazines, newspapers, there are all these stories just as either feminism, I guess, internationally it's getting kind of cashier, that's the right word, credibility. There are all these stories that are coming out about what a bad, spooky, horrible place in the net, the internet is, and how it's, you know, the whole thing about pornography on the net, and women getting harassed on the net. And so I thought that just as this time when the notion is being developed that women are involved in technology, there's a really big thing in Bush saying, get off the street, get some help from there, just the street and say, get back to your house, it's really nasty to go out there, it's going to be harassed.
So that's what's been provided, and which seems to be coming at the same time with the horizon of cyber feminism. And I guess I think also, and I think cyber feminism still has a role to play about making access more equitable to the groups that we don't have to say. I mean, I'm one of the artists in Australia, doing work I do on the internet as an artist, and I work on this really cracky, I mean, it does the job, but it's, you know, why I got this really shit computer. And that's aligned with, I guess, my position as a woman, you know, the financial status, I guess. So, I mean, as long as there's inequities, there's a smile, you know, that would be more of less money.
We're not going to have some of the toys, boys and and we have got some pretty good software and we have got some pretty good software and we've looked through our email and turned up and said we haven't got jobs but we get our technology yeah um it's one of the things that aside so the cyberbembers project still you know it still needs to be there in terms of access to them. But we need to kind of hold them because there's also some really interesting
lawyers doing work and we want to work, and we do work for them because they're working for them and we're working for them. Just sort of, I think we need a new kind of term or feeling of other communities that are working as practitioners and there is in the area but it's more inclusive or that recognizes that we are many people towards our trans children where I think it's my response. Thank you. 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. I'd like to be better than someone else.
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 since he was able to sort of sit up and unassisted he sat up at my computer. It was interesting It's 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 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 a 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 kid will go out and bring them back and you haven't covered what they mean you can hear it in a very untimely way but um the girls in the class tend to be divided you know into you know the ones that aren't afraid of the computer and the ones that are and generally they're not not a hard and 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 of the computer and I thought that's you know I
wonder if I can follow up that statistic but I'm really busy all the time so yeah 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 long-term complications, it's like I can't be as long-sighted as I would like to be because I'm really busy all the time.
I was going to get you at some point to talk about your fiction as well. 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, a possible version, a possible version of
the future. They are immortal in a way, they recognize their own immortality, or they recognize 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 budge and they don't really know why. Stress. I think that stress probably doesn't and they can what we call sex they 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 superorganism I'd rather call it a heterarchy passes around this society of different versions they look on themselves as different versions of 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 yesterday I don't really have any in immediate connection with it with the
term side of feminism except in the sense that I'm looking at organically futures which are seem to have some relation to the agenda that I am the side of them and then this is very very sense of this to have a single agenda that's well maybe my heterography is somehow related to that I wanted to start speaking in Italian I share spare you the experience the 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, a very sport 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 with technology. And the day when, for some reasons, that I hadn't been able to figure out yet, and probably never were, 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 cyberfeminism, 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 del Guattari on the one hand, 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 of the cyber manifesto, as well as other essays, just came out in Italy, And if you've read the Manifest of Church, I'm sure you all have, you 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, 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 in Florence. For instance, I belong to Riomando, 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 Europe. 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 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 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. And the other one is a question of accountability. Now how the three things intersect and again forgive their old 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 in 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. If anybody here does have an immediate question or statement or... So, yeah. Yes, I've got an immediate comment tonight to what you said, the Piennese matrix, that cyber-feminism 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 is calling it cyber-feminism. The vast majority of people still, if you look at the Internet, there are certainly more than 90% of all Internet people are still male. 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 who did the research, but that's what we were talking about, the propaganda, that only 5% of people on the internet are women. It's not true. The figure out is too wide. Yes, but let's say among the people who are putting up websites,
I think feminists want to protect women or want to make women's voice heard on that, they will have to introduce gender-based websites. Go to GeekGirl website. Exactly. Things like GeekGirl, magazines like that. There have to be more of these. I think also it's important to recognize it's not just about saving 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 in the views of the internet, but it's the broader cultural shift, which obviously everybody's involved in.
I mean, nobody, no person touched by that. I mean, any angle you take, the cuts 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 similar urgency. I just wanted to ask the panel, as regards to fiction, there's this opposition between cyberpunk and the rest of the fiction, and whether they've read any of Marge Pearce's stuff or Taylor Butler, and whether there are better ways to be found in fiction as maybe Octavia Butler as regards to breaking down typical sort of family values and blood lineage and affinity rather than filiation
rather than reiterating a sort of cyberpunk and mental tough. So I sort of want to ask if anyone was interested in that. 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
almost 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 No, 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 it must be strange for people coming to this experience without a context and there's a lot a lot more to science fiction than neuromancer or to um a lot more science fiction than cyberpunk I have a kind of a weird relation with cyberpunk because well it came out and nobody liked the name and then 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 out as a woman and so
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. But you don't like the name anyway, you know, so relax. But 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.
You know, now I don't think it's any big deal. When I say cyberpunk, 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, you know, it's like, well, if we could get a better word, you know, if we could all agree on a better word, you know, then I'd use that. But, you know, in the meantime, I think it's... Yeah, there's really no use fighting labels. Yeah. 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 prefer the term cyberspace fiction to cyberspace 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 shades with his nanny.
Excuse me, boys. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to say that. I've got 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, hyperfiction, rather than getting away from the novel completely 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 program on it. I could teach you hypertext about it. It's a computer that I own.
It's up to the chance. I think it works in my essay. Yeah, I've printed out. I frequently do. I like the idea of hyper-sense fiction. It seems to be a bit of a horseman's courage at the moment. It's not really anywhere near. It doesn't seem to be up to what I imagine it's going to be. I had talked about this last year at Sussex University. It got into a lot of bothersome. 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 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.
That's a very muscle. I was really wondering if you were raised in academic history about research as materialism. It seems to me that it's been light and that men have tried to transcend the body. The issue of the body is 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 do that. But the researchers have got such a serious approach. I'm wondering what the implications are essentially the human beings. I would say collectively.
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
others example Babylon Rocker Gibson's depiction of who do shit okay well I think So this book comes together in a conviction in the audience in general, whether it's about the death of the social reality or the death of itself. And there's a lot of questions about alternative feminism and the sexism goes on, and then some of the authors on the court It's called a question about materialism and the verbatim and being away from essentialism and it always stood more isomotically replaced. So, can you look at the question in the back of this question?
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 cyber feminism 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 suppose it's actually honest 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... Can I just... I'd like to resume this. I'm sorry about... I'm not used to speaking to much of it. 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, women have always been excluded from the historical process. One way or another, they didn't even have language of history, 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, Fritz, or 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 the 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, et cetera, et cetera, 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 on the side 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, I mean, the sort of program in the history of consciousness in San Juan Cruz has been so important working with Utrecht, because what that has meant, do you 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 Zixou, 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 the 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, 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, in fact what you can do is try to analyze a couple of the next material in a I think in the way that people talk about their work here, perhaps it's been a little over and it's considered exclusively as a religious project. I think it's very important to note the subtitle of the Sovereign Manifesto
is that this is an attempt to formulate social extremism in the 1980s. So to the point that Stephanie heard, she's looking at materialism in the social extremism. And why is it a marvelous concept of materialism to apply to a number of things which are marked with tradition in the movement, to look at questions of gender and sexuality and age, as well as questions of gender and material sexuality. But we have to remember that we can do that with the net as well. Just because we are interacting through a community does not mean that we are not political animals and that what we create through interactions through our communities is something that is materialised and so-called. I completely agree with you.
Perhaps somebody in the audience would like to jump into this discussion, because you haven't got much time left. Can I say something? You said that cyber sex is a way to think of cyber fairness and making it cyber sex. 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 the VR which are more like putting mild vibrators on different parts of your body really. And I don't know if cyber feminists are working with that sort of technology. So I just don't know about that, whether that is the association or not.
I don't know, does the audience have that association? I think maybe more when you're talking about, I'm sorry I forgot your name, not that much but you, no no no, the woman, the woman, yeah, virtual sex, not cyber sex. Okay, virtual sex. I think, you know, that's why we get people to throw out any, or craving some sort of arguments, It's like it's all brewing, it must not happen. Okay, yeah.
in areas where they can't bust the hill in the middle of the world, and children will die. And I chose it because it's the same, trying to call themselves a G-rate, or I need to do service with people who are just in the comfortable, and they're not really women, they want that service. And I know they have a relationship with technology, which you do now in a specific seminar towards progressive and perhaps a few of them are progressive or a good relationship with technology. What they do have is a problem to them is men on their neck. And the problem they have is that they're not free to play for gender. A lot of the time what you're talking about is gender defence, they choose to be gender neutral, places that they feel harassed on their neck.
And that's just not what I would do with it, but it is what a lot of people do with it, so they don't find it. Their experience online is... I think that you have to write that into what you're talking about. I'd like to know that where all these women are that have such a terrible time being harassed. All the women I know have, you know, seem to not experience that.
I don't think that's it. I think it may be the ease of, you know, never going to be that. I think the difficulties of my acknowledge, yeah. I live in popular. Oh, sorry, not you, sorry. I'd like to just, I know, it's a black and argument, so I'd like to just throw in, I'd like to challenge the assumption that going on the net as a woman, or being part of, say, a cyber feminist, a 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, but especially when there's something new and exciting. It needs tools, and I use that in a non-general, like tools, men and women, or just women if that's what you're interested in. And gaining tools and new skills isn't 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. It seems to be madness to suppose people are doing something different.
And I think that I'm very wary of any idea that I should stay off the streets. I do think it's a public place. It's a public place unless you take precautions and make sure that 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, you want prohibitions like women will only sit at the front end of the bus and men will sit at the back end I think that's what 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?
I mean, a lot 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, and the actual scariness of something that is genuinely new and has a possibility. I think there's two rather different things, which is hers. Do 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 what it is? 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 them, but 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 fun for you. Or you can call it excitement and say well I better see what's happening, this is weird and strange. I say that women tend, possibly women, tend to bear towards the fear interpretation of an adrenaline factor.
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 gender 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 they'd say, 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 always seemed 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 Boo 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, but I'm actually just about that.
I'm really interested in having a talk with them. Well, you're 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. You're talking about the news? Yes, sir. 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 a search engine on the World Wide Web, you're just like, oh, I really want to know about a conspiracy theory or something like that. I mean, you don't have a problem 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 come across it and you don't have to be thinking of yourself. I just think we want to talk about what we have in the world on the net. Because it's going to happen. Yes, I agree, I agree. And the magazines seem to really love writing about it too. We have problems on the net.
And it's... Can I say 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 maschile. Do you get that? I'm either female or male. So either I cover up, buy, and sort of project myself as a male with all sorts of problems. It's the language, it's the language that does Italian. 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 net is feminine. You know, If you pick one gender, it, except that in my language, it is masculine. So, problem. Can I feel good? Yeah, please. I'm talking about harassment. I think it's interesting that I think that's not scientific, so I think that you're being quoted. At least I actually wrote, and I'm hoping that the public person is saying... It's the real life harassment.
The case was of a woman who was being harassed by a computer administration in the same building. Right. And the comments I got on is universally. Quite easy in real life. You know, if you're a tough guy who's in a bar and you can go, kill a file, nothing he says of this anymore. Or he says, or they say, or they say. They harassed him. But I don't know what could be done about it. I get off the streets. My strong suspicion is that in fact, people who are conservative, I mean, they're going to be just five years are making the whole of the new technology
better to themselves by putting it in the new rules. So that perhaps we'll be able to do it. We may often have that much to do with It's a means of getting a hook on something new. 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, aha, the line of Nazis open up. 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, it's mostly produced by women, and 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'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.
I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I think you get your ear in blue and run across a woman whose name is like, Susie Hot Babe, it's probably a tie. Somebody that doubles me. Okay, I think we've got time for my, probably about 3.5 minutes or about 2.5 minutes. Yeah, can I just ask whether, sorry, right, that's 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. Okay, well, yeah.
I am at home reading my time. I don't really want to see the fact that we're just making time. But that's what they recommend doing here now. Okay, what if I could get everybody on the panel just to respond to the last wave of questions. Why don't we actually make this happen? Actually, all I really wanted to say about women on the net is I think it's going to be more often with women who are 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, I wouldn't say, oh, don't get on the internet, but someone would say something dirty to you.
I'd be like, don't go outside because someone says I'm dirty to you. But I think that whoever I had on the net, because women are not the only people who've been harassed. There's been a lot of ugly stories about kids who get on the net with their parents' accounts and get sucked into some rather unsavory situations. or maybe they don't really exist in the real world, but something happens to a child in the mind, and it becomes a very real and disturbing experience. But I think that just like you're trying to thrive, you're trying to have a avoidance, and I don't know about looking younger than myself,
but at my age, at least in American, grew up with a whole extra set of caveats you know for for conduct and and I don't know that we'll 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 and it costs money to maintain connections you know and often times it comes down I'm not afraid, I'm broke. I'm a woman at home on the net, and I take my daughters on to moose 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, the internet does turn into the big information superpower, it does become Western society, probably a main form of 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 start making really interesting interactive works. And I'm talking now about interactive CD-roms and things like that, because they're usually, you know, there's a dearth of interesting CD-roms out there, and the CD-rom is supposed to be just a phase before that those interactive cultural products will be you know part of the so-called 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 an interactive cultural product and actually being on the internet and I didn't I can tell you that I've got this user-unfriendly interface so that anyone hasn't played yet. Thank you. Um, being on the internet. Well, I think one thing that I kept thinking about is getting a modem. It's like when they advise you to join clubs on the back page of the magazine if you want to have a social life. Getting a modem will not make you a different person. And what we're dealing with now, what we're talking about is an emerging technology, an
emerging hobby. It's kind of like skiing. Thirty years ago, people of my caste 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 in Etzings. And that was it. That was leisure. Now, people of my caste and kind go in droves. I mean it's a problem, there are too many droves. People of my custom kind go and climb up, they go up to the snow alps and they know that it's terrific fun to sort of scoot 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. You can go and look at this volcano in Hawaii. You can get right down into the rim, and people are talking about this. More 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 to kind of graduate over the past 10 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 cablewares if they don't. wire up schools and hospitals and residences of various kinds that are on the same track. 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. The first one is very quickly about the issue of reproductive technologies. Just a tiny I think you might explain where I meant it, please. The same weekend in March, in Italy,
in the city of Florence, 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 don't acknowledge it and blah blah blah. It really passed to all the media, it was publicized, I think all over the world, whether the doctors said that they were going to bar gays and married women, etc.
from artificial intelligence and men's issues. That was the what passed. So, I mean, if it's a, if reproductive technologies are very much a picture of control, I mean, this is, I think, an example of who has the control in Italy 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 or 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 for anything. 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 the potentiality in any way is going to fully explore. Okay, well, I think we need to end here. I just thank our panellists. And just to say that I think, you know, in spite of our perhaps hopes that we have very wide-ranging 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 run somewhere else. So if I can thank the panel and thank you for coming.