Reflections on Zeros
and Ones
Sadie Plant’s take on Digital
Women and The New Technology
A contribution from
Marcia Braundy, Technology Studies, UBC
Eclectic
by nature
Sadie
Plant draws from the widest possible range of disciplines: history,
psychoanalysis, computer science, storytelling, the history and political
economy of women’s work, mechanics, science fiction, medicine, engineering,
socio/economic analysis, computer programming and hacking, philosophy, magic,
mathematics, religion, feminist scholarship, weaving, social structure
analysis, electronics, information technologies, communication theory and more.
She
takes us on a journey to many lands and places in the mind, heart and soul. The
images she uses are rich, striking and subtle, and they reverberate deeply. Her
language is thoughtfully chosen and mellifluously metaphoric. Each page brings
new thoughts and new challenges of old constructs. The threads of metaphors throughout
the book ensure that we engage with the material on many levels.
Weaving
as a metaphor is used in myriad ways; weaving with thread, with thoughts, with
cards, with images, with voices, with fibre optics, with ways of thinking and
inventing. Without damaging egos, she enlarges our view of where, how, why, and
what needs to be considered and included as contributions from both women and
men to our technological adventures. The story and journal entries of Ada Byron
Lovelace, who, “[a] hundred years before the hardware had been built…produced
the first example of what was later called computer programming”1,
thread through the book. There is a continual flow of thought-provoking
quotations from multivariant sources which enrich, exhaust and amaze the
reader. Plant shows us how Ada’s visions, imagination and ideas laid down in
words, project the future we live in today more clearly than anyone of her
time, or maybe our own: “Any such development, she writes, will have various
collateral influences, besides the main and primary object attained”2.
With few
words, Plant demonstrates the desecrational utility of Freud and his misogyny,
again using the weaving metaphor so well embedded in her text, while
at the same time promoting the innovations of invention developed by his
daughter, Anna. Rather than following simplistic logical progressions of
reasoning, cause and effect, the notion of complexity is introduced. “Only by
‘criss-crossing the complex topical landscape’ can the ‘twin goals of
highlighting multifacetedness and establishing multiple connections’ even begin
to be attained”3. The hysteria of her times
was well documented
in the doctor’s
analysis of
Plant’s
succinct and poetic description of historic socially constructed gender roles
is quickly contrasted with the reality of women’s actual activities in the
creation of digital machines. It forces a smile to my eyes as I imagine the
dedication with which these women pursued their interests.
The
“Genderquake”5, created by computers, as they forced their impact on every
industry, almost overnight changed the physical, mental and communication
requirements of work in almost every sector of the economy.
In the West, the decline of heavy industry, the automation of manufacturing, the emergence of the service sector, and the rise of a vast range of new manufacturing and information-processing industries have combined to reduce the importance of the muscular strength and hormonal energies which were once given such high economic rewards. In their place come demands for speed, intelligence, and transferable, interpersonal, and communication skills. At the same time, all the structures, ladders, and securities with which careers and particular jobs once came equipped have been subsumed by patterns of part-time and discontinuous work which privilege independence, flexibility, and adaptability. These tendencies have affected skilled, unskilled, and professional workers alike. And since the bulk of the old full-time, lifelong workforce was until recently male, it is men who have found themselves most disturbed and disrupted by these shifts, and by the same token, women who benefit.6
Talentsnurtured in the multifaceted roles of family infrastructure, working women,
mother and homemaker, trouble-shooter and problem solver, became the
prerequisites for surviving in the new economy. Flexibility and adaptability
were not skills honed in technical blue-collar environments Men are at
a loss, violence against women is up and religious fundamentalists are creating
a
backlash all over the world. The images of “machines [that] multiply [and] push
them little by little beyond the limits of the their nature...”7 strike into
the heart of the matter, and women have received the brunt of the frustration
created by the loss of technology as a means of control, as the free flow of
information
runs amok.
Simply
stated, the Internet is the democratization of information, and the possibility
of interconnectivity across the world. The Military/Industrial Complex has lost
the reins and can no longer reign over what they saw as theirs to control, much
like what happened to Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein’s monster.
The
metaphor of technology as logic, as skills, together as a “nomad… without
property, enclosure or measure”8, is an image
of computer language, thinking and display, running free of its masters. The
United States Military named
their
High Order Working Group programming language Ada, “in honor of an obscure but
talented mathematician, Ada, Countess of Lovelace”9,
“a countess in name as well
as in deed”
The richness of Plant’s depiction of the arithmetic imperialism of the West has been lost
in the arrogance of Eurocentric transmission-based curricula for its
dissemination. Civilization might benefit from a more interdisciplinary
approach to the historical, cultural, economic and religious implications of
how western cultures came to use of the Sanskrit model as opposed to the Roman
numeral system.
Weaving
as industry - Textiles as software.
Sophisticated
textile production has been documented as early as 6,000 B.C. Egypt and
a
bit later in Europe.
Why is it that some history tells us that it was men who were the weavers? Yet we know from Greek tales that women wove the long stories into cloth to save the world. There is no question that women were the spinners of yarn, but how did these words come to mean the telling of salty tales by male sailors? Any why was it first women’s work that was automated by men? Spinning, weaving, lace making... Baudrillard’s concern that “they weave amongst themselves a collusive web of seduction”12 seems a clear connotation of an underlying theme. Perhaps it was this fear of weaving as a multimedia and social construct event that urged men on to create automated, isolated machines which require little communication and group participation, less able to pass on individually identifiable messages and historical records or magic spells.
To keep women from passing on, through widespread commerce, patterns of
messages emergent, embedded and implicit, we are removed from the magic of
production, encouraged only to emulate or reproduce the patterns determined by
whoever programmed the cards. The process of creation and production is lost.
We come full circle, as information becomes reproduction; technology is
representation rather than innovation.
Plant
illustrates how even those men skilled at using their hands with their minds
were seen to be warlocks. It is an interesting notion: the Army Corps of
Engineers as renegade technicians...seeking new problems to solve. And yet, one
of the elements stressed in “Women in Trades and Technology” (WITT) exploratory
programs13 is the importance of bricolage -
tinkering, trying out and exploring the impacts and uses of tools and techniques...to
become “intuition
in action”14. As a weaver, I know that it is in the choosing of the yarns and
the development of the pattern that the messages of the cloth will be found.
It is
in the programming of the loom that the work is already complete, and the rest
is meditation.
Male
control and birth fantasies produce the future Eve
”Walking,
talking, clockwork dolls had fascinated a late eighteenth century obsessed with
anything and everything mechanical”15.
From John Merlin to Thomas Edison, from Villiers de l'Isle-Adam
to Fritz Lang and
Adam Turing, there is a fascination
with another kind of reproduction. “Why not build a woman who should be just
the thing we want her to be?”
There seems
to be a connection between the efforts to introduce robotics that reproduce
and yet control the bodies and personalities of females. There is
also an indication of the desire to become another creature entirely in
interactive engagements on the Web in MUDs and MOOs. Particularly disturbing
are the descriptions of “Eve8”17, and the
male fantasies of woman out of control. The enthralling counterpoint was Mary
Shelly and the Frankenstein monster
haunting modern man. The 1891 fictional Thomas Edison is noteworthy in suggesting,
“From now on, the snag to be avoided is the facsimile physically surpassing the
model”18. But the reality is that “elements
are now added to a world which their
engineering do not leave unchanged”19.
Historical notations
abound in print in which women’s role as a tool of man is
“to breed and nurse their children in their
tender years, to mind household affairs, and to obey, serve, and please our
masters…”20 “taking all
the care and trouble of his education, to preserve his name and family. One whose
beauty, wit or good
humour and agreeable
conversation will entertain him at home…soothe his pride and flatter his
vanity…one who he can entirely govern, and consequently may form her to his
will and liking…”
And
what of the women who have been locked out of practicing the construction
crafts? Those who “follow [our] own impulses without regard to what is due…”22. We
become the new witches, to be sought out and burned or drowned, the “virtual
aliens”23. Capitalist or Marxist, the male
production model is the one that is
assumed.
It has long been assumed in the Western World
that technologies are basically tools, means to ends decided in advance by
those who make them and put them to use. Whatever the particular purposes for
which they are designed and employed, the overriding rationale has always been
the effort to secure and extend the powers of those who interests they are
supposed to serve. And their interests have in turn been defined as the
exercise of control over something variously defined as nature, the natural,
the rest of the world. This crude model of the user and the used has
legitimized the scientific projects, colonial adventure, sexual relations, and
even the artistic endeavors of the modern world. It continues to inform the
deployment of even the most complex machines.
But both man and his tools exist “only in
relation to the interminglings they make possible or that make them possible”25.
Women
adapt and communicate
Interestingly, in this age of “people being replaced by technology”26 it is women who have adapted to the new workstyles most easily. Women have been playing the many roles that prepared them for the flexibility required by new office and employment practices. (I particularly appreciated the information about the rise in female literacy that came from women entering the typewriting field.) As technologies reproduce themselves and develop beyond their inventors’ directions, many blue-collar jobs are being replaced. I disagree with Plant when she says, “like Foucault’s prisoners, [woman] was ‘the object of information, never the subject in communication’”27. More clearly, in all of these activities, she was the communicator in communications, laying the groundwork for future adaptability as the work changed, becoming weavers in the web of information technology.
When the downturn came in the economy in 1982 in British Columbia, and things stayed down for several years, many of my union brothers ended up on social assistance, not being able to imagine themselves doing other than Carpentry. I, on the other hand, soon went into other areas: teaching technical courses, small renovations, curriculum development, political organizing, until the work picture turned around again. Because we already are an “infrastructure”28 we do not have to go far to expand our repertoires.
In
traditional high-paying blue-collar construction work, men feared women’s entry
would lower their wages. But it is more than fear of lower wages that has led
women’s behaviour to be characterized as peculiar. When women show up using
tools, at the controls, something else is going on to produce inductive
impedance. In situations where women are not frequently seen, they are
perceived to be duplicitous and are defined as aberrant. Often, their ability to
accomplish their tasks is circumscribed by others.
Plant’s
descriptions of the late days of the Second World War and the early 1950’s
developments in computing hardware and software fascinated.
There is always a point at which technologies
geared towards regulation, containment, command, and control, can turn out to
be feeding into the collapse of everything they once supported. All
individuated notions of organized selves and unified lives are thrown into
question on a Net whose connectivities do not merely extend between people as
subjects with individual faces names, identities. The terminology of
computer-mediated communications implies an increasing sense of distance and
alienating isolation, and the corporate hype enthuses about a new sense of interpersonal
interaction….All new media, as Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, have
an extraordinary ability to rewire people who are using them and the cultures
in which they circulate.29
Perhaps this may account for the proliferation of MUDs and MOOs, computer environments where each individual can be many facets of, or try on, new characters. I do wonder what is it about the Internet that increases the potential for Multiple Personality activities. I find the intensity of everyday life quite invigorating.
Couch
grass as the Internet
The
rhizome metaphor reflects the imagery used to talk about the Second Wave of
Feminism and the ways in which grassroots women’s consciousness raising groups
created outgrowths and connections for women in communities throughout the
world. The multiplicity and current proliferation of women using the Internet
for communications and activism gives credence to concerns being generated by
those who thought “cybernetics was supposed to be introducing unprecedented opportunities
to regulate, anticipate, and feed all unwelcome effects back into its loops”30.
The potential weaknesses of “all attempts to predict and control” may be seen
as severe. “Cybernetic systems could run into ‘several possible sorts of
behaviour considered undesirable by those in search of equilibrium’”31.
It is the potential oscillation of step changes that could be to “the detriment
of
the
stability of the whole”32. As Plant explores
the fears, so she leads the reader through Amazonian mythology to pose a different
relationship between men and
women, one of a more egalitarian character, where associative collegial lives
are threaded through with mutual respect and inspiration.
The
context for this is already engaged. The similarities of the actual operations
of the human brain, with all of its physio-neural connections, and the
potential of the cybernetic systems of today with “a literally endless list of
components working together at an equally endless variety of interlocking and
connecting scales…a myriad of components too complex and numerous to name”33,
set the stage for a self-governing human/tool interface that continues to
“mutate
as it learns, grows, and explores its own potentiality”34.
But,
if tools are “more or less sophisticated variations on the simple theme of the
stick, ‘ the weapon which lay nearest to hand…an instrument to create
distance’”35 then the new cybernetic environment with its emphasis on connection
could well challenge those with more traditional skill sets.
In
binary numbers, zeros and ones represent a hole and something. But when coded
onto a card, the zero becomes not a hole, but a flat space, and the one becomes
a hole. “…holes themselves are never simply absences of positive things.
This is a purely psychoanalytical myth”36.
The space that is created enables the machine “arbitrarily to change its process
at any moment, on the occurrence
of
any specified contingency”37. This exchange serves the production of weaving
as
it does information processing.
As
we being to reflect upon the changes which engineering has produced, both
intentional and unintentional, we see that there is mutation, changes we did
not expect and were not able to control for. Some changes are chemically
induced, and impact the environment and therefore the weather in strange ways.
“By disrupting hormones and development, these synthetic chemicals may be
changing who we become…”38. Plant gives us
a wide-ranging description of the variety of mutations currently possible related
to sex chromosomes. Even
without chemical interference, the spectrum for difference is wide. After this
comes a lesson in natural and sexual selection, which leaves one aware that
both males and females have significant roles to play in the circuitry of
self-monitoring, “self-governing” and “self-regulating”39 continually emerging
systems. Technology as tools, techniques, processes and materials in the
production of products and services gives wider potential for acknowledgement
of all of the elements and implications of work that contribute to society.
When the ecosystem is subjected to disturbances
that go beyond a certain THRESHOLD, the stability of the ecosystems can no
longer be maintained within the context of the norms available to it. At this
point the oscillations of the ecosystem can be controlled only by second-order
negative feedback:the destruction of the system or its emergence as a
metasystem40.
Notes:
Page
numbers refer to comments and quotes in Sadie Plant’s Zeros + Ones: digital
women + the new technoculture (1997). London: Fourth Estate
1 “[a] hundred years
before the
hardware had been built…” p. 9.
2 “Any such development…” p.
21. Ada Lovelace, Notes to Sketch of the Analytical Engine invented
by
Charles Babbage Esq. By L.F. Menabrea, of Turin, Officer of the Military
Engineers, Note A.
3 “Only by ‘criss-crossing
the complex topical landscape’…” p. 11. Ada Lovelace, Notes to Sketch
of the Analytical Engine invented by Charles Babbage Esq. By L.F. Menabrea,
of Turin, Officer of the Military Engineers, Note D.
5 “Genderquake” is described
by
Plant on pp. 37-44.
6 “In the West, the decline of
heavy industry…” p. 38-39.
9 “in
honor of an obscure but talented mathematician…” p. 60. Carol L. James and
Duncan E. Morrill, “The Real
10 “…a
countess in name as well
as in deed.” p. 28.
11 “at
least two and half thousand years before such machines were developed in
the West.” P. 62.
12 “they
weave amongst
themselves a collusive web of seduction…” Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories,
p. 102.
13 “Women
in Trades and Technology…” This concept does not appear in Zeros and Ones,
but is in answer to many of the
points raised. Marcia Braundy’s Orientation to Trades and Technology
Curriculum Guide and Resource Book, and edited Surviving and Thriving
–
Women in Trades and Technology and Employment Equity respond to many of the
issues addressed by Plant.
14 “intuition
in action.” p. 80. Ibid,
p. 409.
15 “Walking, talking, clockwork dolls had fascinated a late eighteenth century obsessed with anything and everything mechanical”(Go Back)
16 “Why not build a woman…” p. 86. Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, L’eve future, p. 77. (Go Back)
17 “Eve8,”
p. 95-97. From Eve of
Destruction, directed by Duncan Gibbons, 1991.
19 “elements
are now added to a world which their engineering do not leave unchanged…”
p. 89.
20 “to
breed and nurse their children…” p. 104. Mary Montagu, quoted in
Dale Spender, Women of
Ideas and what Men Have Done to Them, p. 76.
21
“taking all the care and trouble of his education…” p. 105. Mary Astell,
quoted in ibid., p. 63.
22 “follow
[our] own impulses without regard to what is due…” p. 71. Henrich Kramer
and James Sprenger, Malleus
Maleficarum, p. 119.
23 “virtual
aliens” (Go
Back)
24 “It
has long been assumed in the Western World…” p. 77.
25 “only in relation to the
interminglings they make possible…” p. 77, Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 90.
29 “There
is always a point at which technologies…” p. 143-144.
30 “cybernetics
was supposed to be introducing unprecedented opportunities to regulate…”
p. 159, while
engaging
with Norbert Wiener’s theories in The Human Use of Human Beings.
31 “Cybernetic
systems could run into ‘several possible sorts of behaviour…” p. 160.
33 “a
literally endless list of components working together…” p. 164.
34 “mutate
as it learns, grows…” p. 169.
35 “the
weapon which lay nearest to hand…an instrument to create distance” p. 186.
Elias Canetti, Crowds and
Power, p. 15.
36 “…holes
themselves are never simply absences…” p. 57.
37 ‘arbitrarily
to change its process at any moment…’ p. 56. Menabrea Sketch of
the Analytical Engine invented by Charles Babbage Esq. By L.F. Menabrea, of
38 “By disrupting hormones and development, these synthetic chemicals may be changing who we become…” (Go Back)
39 “self-governing” and “self-regulating” (Go Back)
40 “
When the ecosystem is subjected to disturbances…” p. 163. Anthony Wilden
(1980) System and structure:
essays in communication and exchange, p. 75