In the summer of 1992, at night, a billboard suddenly appeared on the side wall of an art gallery in Sydney, Australia. Five and a half meters long, it contained a strange mixture of images:spherical DNA fragments, vaginal wedges of color, and a pair of mirror images of women with unicorn horns flexing their muscles and emerging from their shells.
There was a ball of text in the center, raised as if it fit on a drop of water. "We are the virus of the new world disorder," the inscription said, "distorting the symbolic from within. Saboteurs of the central unit of the great dad. The clitoris is a direct link to the matrix. ”
Cyberfeminism is just in time
This billboard, a work of art entitled Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century , was created by the art collective of four women from Adelaide:Josephine Starrs, Julianne Pierce, Franceska da Rimini and Virginia Barratt, known together as the VNS Matrix. Their "blasphemous text" had been written one evening a few years earlier as free associations about "new ways of portraying women, gender and sexuality in a technological space, whether primal, ancient or futuristic, fantastic and active," Barratt explained to me several years ago.
In 1991, VNS Matrix put its manifesto on the town and faxed it to tech magazines and feminist artists around the world, heralding the dawn of a new era - A century and a half after Ada Lovelace first drew a computer program on paper, it is time for women to become the virus, the signal and the heartbeat of the network.
The article is an excerpt from the book Pioneers of the Internet Claire L. Evans Publishing House of the Jagiellonian University
When the manifesto took the form of a billboard, a UK student took a picture of it and, on her return, showed it to her professor, cultural theorist Sadie Plant, who was preparing the curriculum in a similar vein. In his book Zeroes + Ones [Zera + Jedynki], published in 1997, Plant explains that when VNS Matrix wrote that "the clitoris is a direct connection to the matrix", they meant both the uterus (matrix in Latin) and "abstract networks. communication (…) creating an ever denser system ”in the world around them.
To overthrow the patriarchy
It was a suggestive vision of physically connecting women to networked computers, a connection that had arrived before technology itself, beginning with Ada Lovelace and countless female computers - the lineage that Plant follows in his book and I do in this one.
Sadie Plant and the VNS Matrix are considered the matrons of cyberfeminism, a wild, bewilderingly utopian, very short-lived art movement which flourished in the mid-nineties as the web began to transform the world. Cyberfeminism conjures up, in many ways, the countercultural technoutopian atmosphere of the early Internet culture and inherits the spirit of those West Coast cyber-hippers who believed that computer-mediated communication would create a free civilization of the mind.
A menagerie of artists, programmers, game designers, and writers who proclaimed themselves cyberfeminists, gleefully challenged what the VNS Matrix called the "big dad's central unit" - a patriarchy encoded on the technological foundations of the world, a framework built by men. "The technological landscape was very boring, Cartesian, religious," says Barratt. “He was uncritical and overwhelmingly male dominated. It was a masculine space, programmed to be such, and the keepers of that code kept control of the production of the technology. "
After the technological advances of so many generations of women had been buried by time, indifference, and the changing protocols of the network itself, cyberfeminists were eager to take their place in the technological present, and with a bang. Cyber-feminist thinkers and artists treated the Internet as an unprecedented platform for freedom of opinion and expression, as a virus dormant in the headquarters. He was called by the prefix "cyber." Ubiquitous at that time - cyberculture, cyberdelic drugs, cybersex, cyberpunk and of course also CyberSlacker - "cyber" evoked a collective hallucination of digital space and a placeless, intangible world of electronic networks.
Cyberfeminists were fascinated by the idea of a web space without geography, with no pre-defined conventions, and believed that a new kind of feminism could spread sails on the ocean of fiber optics and bits. "The internet was much less regulated, much less commodified," says Francesca da Rimini of VNS Matrix.
Pixels like clenched fists
“More of a ruthless fight and a bottomless bag than a mall. The possibilities seemed endless.
In the eyes of many of the women who surfaced in the early 1990s, cyberfeminism looked exactly like the next big wave of feminism:since the previous generation thought globally but acted locally by organizing awareness-raising sessions in its lounges, the Internet could close that difference by creating a global lounge where pixels and code did the same thing as pickets and clenched fists.
Indeed, the first generation of feminists on the World Wide Web understood that access was a matter of equality, and learned to translate the organizational and campaigning experiences of Second Wave feminism into a new medium. Among their first activities on the Web were information sites for victims of violence, feminist forums and a night vigil by an animated candle in protest against domestic violence. "As people get better
familiar with new communication technologies," wrote Scarlett Pollock and Jo Sutton, editors of the Canadian feminist magazine Women'space, "Feminists are faced with the challenge of being online and going there at wait for them. ”
Cyberfeminist artists made revolutionary CDs, created web-based multimedia works of art, built virtual worlds, and took many forms as they floated around the web in search of pleasure and knowledge. They wrote emphatic propaganda, like the Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century . They formed coalitions, mailing lists, and newsgroups like the Old Boys' Network, a group that announced that cyberfeminism is, first and foremost, "a matter of survival, power and fun."
VNS Matrix even prepared a computer game, All New Gen, in which the player had to hack into the databases of the Big Daddy's Central Unit, the Oedipal personification of the techno-industrial complex, and cover him and his cohort ("Circuit Boy, Streetfighter and other complete dicks") with slime, that they would fall into oblivion, sow the seeds of the New World Disorder, and put an end to the reign of phallic power on Earth.
What is cybereminism not?
Like the web itself, this traffic was expansive and varied. "Cyberfeminism only exists in the plural," Swedish art critic Yvonne Volkart announced in 1999. Even at its peak at the dawn of the WWW revolution, you could never be sure that it meant any one particular approach to feminism. On the contrary, the word "cyberfeminism" gave prominence to a range of attitudes, some of which were mutually exclusive.
As the network grows, women play an increasingly important role
At the First Cyberfeminist International, a meeting held in 1997 in Kassel, Germany, participants argued against defining the term, and instead jointly edited one hundred "Anti-Theses", a litany of what cyberfeminism is. It included items such as the fact that it is not for sale, is not postmodern, is not a fashionable extravagance, is not a picnic, is not a media invention, is not nice, is not Lacanian, is not science fiction and - my favorite - "It's not about boring toys for boring boys."
Deep down, cyberfeminists worried that what was considered "the virtual technoray of the new millennium," as social science Renate Klein wrote in 1999, could eventually become "as hateful towards women as ... a large part of life in reality. the end of the 20th century ". To prevent this from happening, they hoped to act quickly, making their presence on the web colorful, trusting and suggestive enough to create a permanent association between women and the technological culture they are entitled to .
Women on the Internet
Today, being a woman on the Internet is associated with the same fears that have always accompanied women and minorities, and the fear of silence, exclusion and intimidation remains as real in the digital realm as it is in the real world. Our dense web of technologies to connect with others, and the increasing ease with which we are under surveillance within them, has led to new forms of violence:doxing, cyberstalking, trolling, porn-revenge. And the anonymity that cyberfeminists, along with many early cyberculture thinkers, defended as a method of transcending gender and difference, allows for a rapidly misogynistic language across the web:in comments under YouTube videos, in forums such as Reddit and 4chan, in mailboxes. and responses aimed at women expressing their beliefs in public.
The immaterial freshness that the first women on the Internet were so intoxicated with has been transformed - has become what game reviewer Katherine Cross aptly calls "the Möbius ribbon of reality and unreality," in which internet culture "becomes real when it's convenient and unreal, when it's not convenient:real enough to hurt people and enough unreal to justify it. ”
As a movement, cyberfeminism disappeared with the bursting of the Internet bubble. "We did what we had to do then," explains Barratt.
"Our task - people identifying as women and feminists - was to overthrow the watchmen in order to gain access to a powerful new technology that had enormous implications for the domination and control exercised by patriarchy and capitalist systems." As the Web became commercialized, it became clear that the Internet would not liberate anyone from sexism or divisions caused by class, race, abilities and age. On the contrary, it often duplicates the same patterns and forces that operate in real life. Capitalist systems have won, the personal brand reigns supreme, and - as the ongoing battles for net neutrality show - the watchmen are still holding the keys tight.
It is not that the cyberfeminists, or any of their predecessors, have failed. The point is that as the digital worlds and the real world overlap and almost fully overlap, the digital world inherits the problems of the real world. If you run the stylus across the surface of the Möbius ribbon, you will go back to where you started. On this continuous surface, it is increasingly difficult to make a distinction. Computers are now smaller and we take them to bed with us - they measure our breathing when we sleep, they listen and follow us as we move around the world.
Social networks have built empires by selling us what we already want, and our opinions are formed in bubbles, in a continuous loop of algorithmic feedback. For better or worse, we've become the web, the bodies, and the rest. However, this has its advantages. As we map our society more and more clearly, we create an ever more powerful tool to change it. Online lies can become true if they spread widely enough and social media has changed the way we travel, eat and start revolutions - every decision made through the most personal technologies affects our lives, our cities, our social structures and our collective experience what is right, real and true. When we create technologies, we do more than reflect the world. We actually do it. And we can rewrite it as long as we understand the wonderful nature of such responsibility.
The more variety, the more interesting the effect on the screen, the more human - as Stacy Horn would say, chase you - the better. There is no right kind of engineer, no special intellectual level that needs to be attained in order to contribute something interesting. There is no proper education or a proper career path. Sometimes there isn't even a plan. People create the Internet because it was made for people, and it does what we tell it to do.
We can change the world.
The article is an excerpt from the book Pioneers of the Internet Claire L. Evans Publishing House of the Jagiellonian University
The first step is to see it clearly, see who was really present at the most pivotal points in our technological history, without taking for granted common myths about garages and wealth, about alpha nerds and programming brothers. The second step is to learn as many triumph and survival strategies as possible from our ancestors, and I hope this book has brought out a few of them:the failure of Ada Lovelace's good upbringing, Grace Hopper's long-term persistence, and the support of women from Resource One. The clarity of vision Jake Feinler in the chaos of a changing web. A sip of Jaime Levy's punk rock spirit for courage and a decent portion of VNS Matrix's physical confidence that the Internet is our place, crazy, weird and complicated - just the way it has always been.
The last step is the hardest:let's get to work.
The article is an excerpt from the book Pioneers of the Internet Claire L. Evans Publishing House of the Jagiellonian University