source: zeros and ones by Sadie Plant (1997)

Hi! This is the real Aria Kohut from the future here. I didn't wanna bother with linking footnotes to the same page over and over again, even though it seems relatively easy, and I wanted to throw a few extra pages onto this site so that I can show that the internet is, in fact, composed of hypertext links. If you think about it, that alone is still at least a little bit as cool as it was back in 1998. So, this is how I'm doing all sources that aren't other websites. I'm creating a separate page for each major book source and explaining briefly what that book is all about.

First and greatest we have this pop-scientific, part-theory / part-scifi book from 1997 by probably the most influential figure on the philosophical side of the loosely defined cyberfeminist movement, Sadie Plant. Plant was a Philosophy doctorate who taught in the cultural studies department of the University of Birmingham (in the UK), and later the University of Warwick, where she was part of this weird and infamous little collective called the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit where she and some other writers on this theoretical sub-discipline of Marxism, called Situationism, did drugs and wrote psychic stuff about computers and the emerging technoculture. So as you can imagine, this book is really crazy, but it's also surprisingly down-to-earth and a very fun read that gets its history mostly right, and has a lot of stuff about Slimegirls. It's the source for most of the computing history narratives I share on this site, most of the stuff about weaving, some of the general vibe of the predictions for the future, and the remarkably ahead-of-its-time commentary on transfemininity or feminization in general being a positive outcome of networked life. The stuff about chemicals in the water making you gay, and that being a good thing, is also from this book, too, for that matter. Of course, she didn't come up with all of this herself: she sites the work of Deleuze and Guattari (who notably wrote about similar stuff as she does, but in a much more insane way), Michel Foucault (for the cool queer sex stuff), Luce Irigaray, and Monique Witting.

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