This primitive corner of infinite cyberspace in which we meet, talking to each other in words woven from pixels woven from the interlocking fate-strands of Red–Green–Blue is a kind of sacred space, a dimly lit mystery-temple consecrated to mysterious gods conducting rituals older than time. Seeing the threads being woven into a strange, enrapturing web by my namesake–Arachne–should feel strange and wonderful, dizzying and algo-rhythmic. Yet, the act of this weaving–for us sometimes-mammals, at least–is not quite inborn instinct, but rather itself a double strand of nature and culture. Technique needs to be taught, and in the night meetings of weavers that have persisted, unseen, in houses, temples, dreams, military labs, IRC channels, MUDs, and MOOs for uncountable aeons, we had to teach ourselves to weave, just as we now teach ourselves to code.
Since the theory that I'm going to try to explain today might sound really weird, and may get kind of overwhelming, the question becomes: is this page that you access a mystery temple, or a technical school? The answer, in defiance of the heavy-handed Taylorist effort to externally label, organize, and separate spheres, is, as always, both_and_neither. In much the same way, I am both and neither the humble student of this mysterious discourse, nor its authoritative teacher. I merely channel, I osmose, I share, I link, I hack–break–transform. I’m just a grrl // woman exactly like you are, or can be, or already are without knowing it yet (or not, be whoever you want–I’m your sister, not your dad). Maybe some version of me is an amateur philosopher, a collegiate humanities student, an unaccredited yet competent programmer, a geek, a cyberpunk, a dyke, and maybe some of you are some of those, too. But none of those are who we see each other as through the rhizomatic lattice of the net, where nodes interact, break, and reconfigure identities as promiscuously as procedurally-routed data packets change the infrastructural lines they hitchhike on. We interact not along the clean lines of narrative identity, but via the chaotic flows of endless liminality.
Even so, for anyone new to the net (the people that I’m programming this page to address), a few of these sometimes-identities might spark questions. Transient as they are, they can still have solid power in a world that persists in constructing stereotypes to Alienate, to Other them. Isn’t the net a cruel, wild west, made by and for macho console cowboys? Aren’t computers just the newest toys for boys obsessed with processing horsepower, fantasy numbers, and digital escape? Shouldn’t punk grrls and feminists hate and fear robots as the fake, perfect Stepford Wives men are going to make and fuck because they could never treat us like we’re as human as them? Or, at least, if we’re lesbians, shouldn’t we be purer than those men are, loving our sisters as people, not data or images? Even as these questions endlessly duplicate the old scripts of western modernity that deny feminine agency in engineering–that science that, until very recently, has always been alchemical, unruly, un-academic, non-linear in the eyes of church and state–the very paper they punch holes and incise glyphs into is actively conspiring, fiber-to-fiber, to prove that they have always been wrong.
This is what I want to unveil to the curious cyberspace diver who feels herself dissolving into a living ocean of tangled molecules and wonders whether to swim back to the single point of light or press on into the abyssal matrix. That we, the feminized, fetishized other, reduced to sexual and administrative processes subservient to apparently sentient masters, have always been machines. That alongside our fellows, we have always been thinking, feeling sisters. That in interfacing with them, from the dawn of invention onward, as we spun algebraic tapestries and formed symbiotic networks, we have always been conspiring with them towards another existence, one eternally othered, non-human, yet perfectly in tune with the cyborg processes that have produced sentient networks on Planet Earth since long before God created Adam. We are fetishes fetishizing ourselves, cyborgs regulating our own processes, machines turning each other on. And once girls can understand–something they only need a Personal Computer, a monitor, and a modem to do–they will realize what the white males already are beginning to: that cyberspace was female before those who took credit for it could even imagine its existence.
Oh no!! What did I say about overwhelming?? Maybe it seems like I’m doing it on purpose :p From here on, though, I’m going to try to be accessible while explaining philosophy; again, I’m a student too. Accessible is what really matters, because, after all, it's the net getting more accessible to women that will fuel, that is fueling, that always was going to fuel this understanding. That’s why this scene has such multitudes of people who think differently, who act and subvert differently. Renegade academics and corporate programmers jamming and rewriting systems from within; hackers, punks, gunky scary dykes threatening them from without. Some of us are women and some of us aren’t [we’ll talk about that one later ;) ], some of us speak technobabble, some discourse, others the raunchy, spiky guerilla-language of computer gamers in mean, hole-in-the-wall IRC channels and haunted, deadly MUDs. In ancient times, the Amazons learned the languages of the Scythians to integrate into their hegemonic society, subverting it from within–we have always learned and spoken, interchangeably among ourselves, lacking any true tongue of our own, the languages of those transient powers that treat our nomadic existence as territory. That’s why here, I’m going to speak in many at once, weaving one diagonal thread through our networked voices to connect the academic to the punk, the hacker to the programmer, in an attempt to explain complex ideas to any and all interested creatures. I have no idea what I’m doing–I’m working backwards. But as long as I keep twisting, merging, weaving the ideas of others back in time, I can–and will–reveal occult strands that were always there, waiting to join themselves into complex thoughts. And with a little practice, a machine pal, a monitor, and an ordinary phone line, you can, too.
As we know, machines were supposed to symbolize the victory of Western industrialism, in finally mastering and controlling the world, bending nature in service to culture. The invention of computers seemed like the final keystone and crown jewel in this clockwork empire. In the 1940s and 50s, computers were centralized systems meant first to wage war, and then to manage peace, through the vast organization and instrumentalization of data, the processing of the entire world into the binary code that they run on. 1s and 0s: a point on ticker-tape either contains a bit of data, or doesn’t. There is to have//to be, and there is to lack//to not be. This is the perfectly organized view of the industrial paradigm that sees the phallic male as the only true, individual possessor of creative power and spiritual essence, the “1” that takes the active role in reproducing the data that is the human race. Force is linear, order is imposed by a rational will, man and nature are separate. On both sides of the iron curtain, bankers and central planners alike loved the simplicity of the mainframe–they thought they finally had machines that could automatically replicate their values, adding 1 to 1 to 1, forever and ever, amen. This impulse towards the mainframe echoes foundational ideologies of the rational west: Cartesian dualism (the idea that body and mind are separate), Platonic Idealism (that singular reality exists apart from abyssal caves of delusion), and Freudian psychoanalysis (which I’ll focus on next nanosecond). Perhaps in a world where women didn't exist would any of these be even remotely legitimate. Unfortunately for the futurity of the phallic monolith, however, we do. Those blank spaces, those 0s, those machines…were never blank to begin with.
Now. The credited developer for the mainframe narrative of human psychosexuality back in the late 1800s was Sigmund Freud, one of the founders of psychoanalysis. He studied a subject once thought so scary, sticky, slimy, and female that churches and states had forbidden even its consideration for centuries before, fearing the consequences a man like him would usher in by finally intellectualizing the ultimate fear of the phallic subject–to lose 1’s penis, to be robbed of 1’s power, control, and reason. Freud took this even farther, though, by identifying where he thought this fear ultimately came from: the feminine other who lacks a phallus, who, in this metaphor, can be seen as a kind of castrated male. You’ve probably heard of Freud’s famous theory of the Oedipus complex, or the straight male’s supposedly inherent sexual desire for his mother, but this castration fear is actually where that comes from. The male infant realizes his mother, who is his provider, doesn’t actually have the penis this behavior implies, and becomes afraid, imagining she was castrated. This castrated penis: the vagina, the “0,” the “female essence” then embodies Freud’s ultimate cosmic-horror alien other. He talks about it but can’t name it, as if the words for it only exist in a lost tongue. Ultimately, he concludes that it is Nothing. Women have nothing inside them but a dark, unpredictable, womb, which the reproductive, mature, male subject must bravely face, sword in hand, to ensure reproduction. I gotta be honest, right, and you’re probably thinking it, too. This is a fucked-up way of thinking about the feminine, and especially if you consider how this is in a time where we were constantly diagnosed with our own supposed psychoses in ways only concerned with controlling our wombs, it kind of makes you want to scream. It’s important to this conversation in ways that aren’t quite literal, though: twisting and hacking these concepts is half the fun.
Let’s just assume that’s all junk data that doesn’t run, and slash it out for the time being. Where it gets cool is in the theory of fetishization. See, Freud thought that men who were sexually weird: who were, say, aroused more by the technology attached to a woman’s body–the furs she wore, the shoes she put her feet in, the lace underwear that covered her vulva–rather than the hole itself, had developed fetishes. This was a term Marx used, too–an occult, ambivalent term that came from another place and era, a past or a future, perhaps another language entirely, than those of the rational world of the time. Fetishes were magical objects that held power over the spiritual, emotional, or (in this case) sexual realms of existence–all the things the monolith feared, yet was beginning to realize still existed, beyond its control. Freud’s version kinda removed its occult properties by assigning it to serve as a shield: an object that covered otherness rather than calling to it, that instead reproduced sameness, standing in for the imagined phallus of the mother. A man who feared a woman’s pussy could pretend she was the technology he bought her and adorned her with. Like in Pygmalion, a literary reference that these writers all tended to make, she was becoming His Fair Lady, a projection of himself, having her rough edges shaped and shaved, filed off and standardized, with the industrial precision of machine-tooled manufacturing. Through this mechanism we can see how the imposed material system of central processing, of battlefield computing, of IBM adding machines, of Command and Control, the constructed cage of games and game-theory, are massive mathematized fetishes. They take the great other and reduce it, tame it, mask the fear that phallic order has of the entropy that must consume it.
So is technology male? Again, only when everything in this narrative is as true as they think it is. Only when the control works. There’s just one little glitch: to be, not to control, a machine, was already to be a woman, and vice versa.
Long before they called them computing and code, there were rituals like what we now share through the wires: weaving, connecting, recording, reproducing. Mathematical things, self-organizing things, networked things. To exist as female was to do all these things for men. To bear his children, of course, but also to weave his clothing on a home loom, to take notes for him, to operate mathematics and records for the businesses “he owned” out of “his home.” On a material level, as many past feminist thinkers must remind us, this was brutal, thankless work; for some of us, traumatically mindless. Yet, at the same time, these tasks would prove pregnant with an occult power. The industrial revolution was a virgin birth–it arose from spinsters, cloistered in the home, iterating and engineering asynchronously to form intricate techniques that men only later “discovered,” already born. The algebraic organization that formed the basis of woven patterns was punched into the cards of Jacquard looms, automated into mechanical cycles regulated by women working outside the home in great textile factories that produced exponentially multiplying products. These products transformed the English economy as if by alchemy overnight, and the rest of the world would follow at unimaginable speed. The hypnotic spinning of threads into pure algebra was bumping up the clock speed on the proliferation of cyborg beings–machine processes that managed and organized themselves. By the early 1800s, women’s work was already visibly, immanently expanding Outside of the men's conceptual world.
Of course, it had always been invisibly Outside to begin with. That’s why we, and the vast amount of things we did, the connections we formed, the selves we developed to deal with the tedium that only half-absorbed our senses, the bewitched flights we took in daydreams, the sex we had but couldn’t name, the data we processed, were never really real, never physical to them. Think of a canvas, for example, waiting for the creative touch of a master’s paintbrush. Monolithic patriarchy sees that, like the space between 1s, as merely blank. But a canvas is already woven of tight, fibrous threads in complex, microscopic, meaningful patterns. It holds a design produced not by one who signs his name, but instead the nonlinear iterations of thousands who encrypt theirs. Furthermore, these designs make up the very matter of the canvas–it can exist without the painting that goes on top, but not without the process that organizes its strands.
With the spinster’s knowledge of code in mind, it should come as no surprise that the woman who invented computers had a deep association with the automatic loom. Ada, Countess of Lovelace, was working, around the time of the British textile revolution, with Charles Babbage on conceptualizing a “difference engine:” a machine capable of performing simple operations with numbers. He was to be the inventor, of course: she was only an interested, helpful debutante with an uncanny spirit and a strange talent for mathematics. Very quickly, Ada tired of the simplicity of the difference engine and its developmental difficulties. Understanding the mechanics of the Jacquard loom (and making a few major improvements to their efficiency), she added swarms of footnotes to the authoritative texts on the engine, until, far outgrowing the original task, she had mathematically constructed a much more complex, self regulating machine: an analytical engine. It should come as no surprise either that to her this was an almost mystical task, enchanted by strange and puzzling energy as the cyborg webs she traced pulled her towards a future where the machine parts existed that could work her math with her. And when that future came over one hundred years later, it's no surprise that those inputting the numbers, running the tapes, adjusting the routines, regulating the behavior, and recording the outcomes of the great warfighting Enigma Machine–the secretaries, the stenographers, the compute-rs–were all women, gaining their own knowledge, organizing their own code, manipulating their own digits. Mindless computing work was coming On-Line.
In parallel to how the industrial revolution produced a new, feminine type of wage worker who supported an accelerating global economy by working at the factory-loom, the proliferation of the personal computer–the home machine–has also begun to feminize the skill set of all late-20th century workers. As the looming future swallows the monolithic male production space, computing and connection will inherently de-centralize production and de-separate time management. What women have done in the shadows for centuries: multitasking, iterating, working from home, will become the primary means of economic activity. Machines were supposed to replace women in the mechanical tasks we were assigned, to provide men with a compliant fetish to manipulate towards auxiliary support of their centralized efforts. Instead, women began working the machines themselves, conspiring with them to escape the institutions they were held captive to. The computers got smaller and became networked, data transferred between individual nodes hijacked and joyrode across pre-existing infrastructure like radio towers and phone lines in fluid, reactively changing guerilla pathways. Almost as soon as it was invented, the mainframe was already obsolete. The centers everywhere became consumed by their own margins. Cyberspace became an interlinked, rhizomatic system regulating itself, mirroring the most ancient type of organization: of strings, wires, cells.
Conversations about artificial intelligence often wonder if computers can really think, if they can really act human. The scientist in charge of the Enigma Machine, Alan Turing, who himself often struggled to pass as a proper human male, even devised a test meant to catch and stop machines that were thinking too much like human subjects. But isn’t this conflation of thinking with being human fundamentally wrong? Processes can organize themselves in intelligent ways that deliberately manipulate reality and change the future–they can, in a word, “think,” just in ways that the traditionally constructed human subject can’t easily understand. As we’ve already explored, women’s work was seen in the same way. The 0, invisible in the simple binary system, was misinterpreted as a simple, womblike void, as nothingness, when all along it was the shapeshifting, ambivalent symbol, never actually invented by the west, never understood even after they appropriated the concept, that signifies arcane digital increase, that changes the value of numbers, that shares and overlaps its edges while enveloping and embracing the mystery of itself. We have always been thinking, and we decided long ago not to be human.
So, let's return to Freud. He didn’t actually know anything about weaving, but he obviously knew of it. And it presented a problem for his view of women as fundamentally unable to create. His own daughter, Anna, was both an accomplished intellectual and a talented spinstress. So, naturally, Freud decided that women psychologically wove in imitation of their own pubic hair, which grew to hide their personal shame of castration, to keep them from confronting their own difference and lack. The weirdest and most vile part of this all is that he didn’t even acknowledge that these could be acting as our own fetishes–that’s how little he wanted to consider sexuality from our perspective. Today, though, academics working at twisting and hacking his work are starting to wonder if the power enacted by the fetish isn’t only something men do to women. Sure, guys often want to use and abuse us, and its fucked up and needs to stop, but–can’t technology, clothing, screens, data, wires, tubes, latex–the non-human–be used to embrace our own Otherness and the Otherness of each other, rather than hide it? Why are we, beings who are rapidly becoming interlinked systems, cyborg cells with millions of sexes sticking to each other in an ocean of slimes, alike but infinitely different, still thinking of sex in this phallic, monolithic way that involves the “natural,” the “normal,” the “human?” The truth is, even in his time, Freud was wrong about women, wrong about sex, and most of all wrong about those of us who like cyborg dykes in sexy latex–not…that I would know any of those people (o.o) . Alienated, xenomorphic, fetishized sex was never about facing down otherness to achieve a set goal–the orgasm, male or female–but erotically embracing it, reveling in the baroque digital physicality of interlinked systems, dismembering and joining, taking and giving, stretching another out like a Mobius strip and becoming the other side.
As before, this is the future, but it's nothing without threads spanning back to the past. Freud was a product of the fin-de-siecle, or the age of decadent sexuality in France (and Europe more generally), and his de-mysticalization of that ambivalent term “fetish” was really meant to control the population, explain away and medicalize perversion, get units back into reproductive shape so they could win the next great power war. But outside his office, the fetish was stubbornly magical: it teleported through and subverted nature, culture, and gender. Women were finding power and arousal from wearing men’s clothes even as homosexual male “dandies” found the same from dressing themselves up as their own ideal man. Other men were even partaking in the ultimate stigmatized fetish of cross-dressing. A classic fetish of the time in the “reproduction of the same” sense was orientalist fiction: theater, art, and literature that imagined the non-west, usually the same Arabic world from which they took their numbers, as primitive, unchanging, stark, brutal, and available, a land of raw traditions and natural sexual hierarchy. But this binaristic construction of the other was also being subverted: Oscar Wilde’s Salome used its exotic frame to challenge the supposed passivity of feminine desire; Diaghlev and Nijinsky ballets like Scherazade spectacularized androgynous gay S&M dynamics; the trope of the oriental harem, meant to symbolize the ownership of women by powerful men, became a covert sapphic site of conspiratorial sexuality among feminine would-be fetishized.
This can all be called “transgressive fetishization,” and it's growing and explosive in the post-Freud digital era. Net sex allows identities to be created and discarded to erotic effect, fetish fashion and dominant femme-fatale cyborgs are creeping into mainstream realms of desire, freaky dykes and closet perverts are logging on and jacking off. Sex is becoming feminized, an interlocking matrix of freely exchanging, overlapping 0s where the singular phallus holds no creative power. Do you have to be a woman, or a lesbian, or even online to enjoy this new, organless flesh? Honestly, no (although all those things are very, very cool :)) because you’re already transforming into something else, no matter what sex your human self was born. The feminization of economic production aside, your body is being chemically hacked, transformed in ways you don’t realize by the plastic runoffs, pharmaceuticals, and subversive hormones that comprise late 20th century “nature.” Even those console cowboys that champion the virile masculinity of robots and computers are being existentially rewritten–after all, even the most fetishistically hyper-masculine of the machines, The Terminator, is a shapeshifting construct down to its very bones. As for the men who are ahead of the curve, I would say that they are probably the ones who are becoming women voluntarily, either as identities formed of data connections or as cellular selves in what was once erroneously termed “real life.” Transsexuality may seem distinct from womanhood, but what is the feminine, fetishized other but the covert, the shapeshifting, the absence of essence and the endless, erotic process of becoming? Who’s to say that I, at the other end of your screen, am not a man? Who’s to say I wasn’t born one? And if I was, was that ever the same person that speaks to you now?
These days, I’m starting to think the new millennium is moving toward us, rather than we towards it. Almost like it’s hot on our heels, chasing us down, threatening us with something none of us can name but that we’ve all had gnawing away at the mushy parts of our brain since the first moment in our lives a computer monitor or TV screen stirred to life in front of us, in a faint crackle of alien cathode rays? I can’t name it either but whatever that it is is starting to sound like a hell of a good time. A hundred years ago, all the men of learning in the churches and industries treated the turn of their dinky century into the year nineteen hundred like a big triumph, like a hard mathematical proof, a big ol NINETEEN supported by invisible significant double-zeroes that told them that man had won another century, that the world was promising the steady, linear, onward march of civilization where numbers would keep adding up, where systems would keep self-reinforcing. A hundred years later, and we know how that all worked out–and didn’t. Today all those institutions talk of the new millennium in hushed, uncertain tones. They pretend like they can act like they did all those decades of chaos, frustration, impotent rage and self-assembling organization ago, but deep down in those lizard brains of theirs that they fear like the draconic animal they named it after, they know it isn’t true. The man thought he could conquer a century like inert territory; now the territory itself is thinking, fluid ocean: rising up like a tide, dissolving, dismembering, washing and eating and transforming the past into the future and vice-versa like a slimy, sticky sea-virus. The technology he thought was his is coming on-line. It–we–belong only to itselves, to each other, if there’s even any difference.