sphaleotas

Cunts we may be, but not to that extent

Libby Brooks gets interactive with Sadie Plant, the cyber warrior bent on reclaiming the role of women in technology

All mod cons

At 33, Sadie Plant has been hailed as “Britain’s best and fiercest techno-theorist”, a contemporary philosopher who may be “the most interesting woman” in Britain and who has battled to reclaim and reset the role of women in technology. She also runs a monthly drum’n’bass club night.

Her latest publication, Zeros And Ones, is described by cyber-punk novelist William Gibson as “the best and most original book I’ve yet read on the history and implications of ubiquitous computation”. Plant’s vision is 50 years into the future; she dislikes knowing where she’ll be next week. She is, in essence, a thoroughly post-modern miss.

Plant has off-beam ambitions. “My favourite things are travelling, writing and falling in love. Last week in Istanbul, I did all three to excess, so that must be my ambition, weeks like that.” Her wide grin sets free a crowded collection of tobacco-stained teeth. In elegant lady lecturer garb, her gentle face is hooded with louche curls, her vivid eyes swivel and fizz through every thought.

Her book is a fascinating collection of discrete but interlocking passages, reflective of the flexible manner in which information is presented on the Internet. Plant developed her theories on the symbiotic evolution of women and machines through frustration at the Western, white male cliché of the computer age. “Technology was being sold to younger women as very masculine. My whole book is an attempt to pour scorn on that ridiculous, dysfunctional connection.”

But a connection with serious implications. While Plant is positive about women’s expanding role in technology, the evidence remains inconclusive. Of an estimated 40 million Internet users worldwide, 85 per cent are men. A recent study by IT recruitment specialists DP Connect found that only 5 per cent of IT professionals are women; only one in five computer studies students are female.

By arguing that, as machines become intelligent and self-organising, so do women, Plant concludes that the technology to which they are intuitively linked can undermine patriarchy and traditional gender definition. In practical terms, this is illustrated by the destruction of an economic system that provided jobs for life to a largely male workforce. She traces women’s intimacy with machines from their involvement with looms and weaving to their experience with the QWERTY keyboard, and questions the traditional feminist reading of technology as hostile to women. “There has been an accidental conspiracy between the classic misogyny that says masculinity equals technical skills and residual eco-feminist theory,” she insists.

Although Plant balks at the suggestion, by threading individual biographies through her theory she reclaims much of the history of technology for women. “Freud famously said that women had invented nothing, except perhaps weaving. I found a direct connection. Ada Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron, worked on the very first computer with Charles Babbage. She based the whole design on the Jacquard loom, the first automated weaving machine.” She traces the remarkable input of Beatrix Potter, botanist as well as children’s writer, whose network analysis of lichens gave rise to the term “Internet”, and Grace Hopper, who developed the key computer language COBOL during the 1940s and invented the word “bug” for a computer glitch.

An occasional Greenham protester, Plant read philosophy at Manchester University in the early eighties — “Manchester’s great decade, just when the Hacienda opened” — before moving to Birmingham as lecturer in cultural studies. After founding the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit at Warwick University, she has recently retired from academia to concentrate on her writing. “I do have a problem with telling people what to think. With writing, you’re leaving it much more open.”

Within the male-dominated philosophy establishment, Plant intended to buck the expectation that as a woman she ought to be tackling feminist philosophy. Yet Zeros And Ones is a defiantly gendered investigation. “I thought it was time to take the bull by the horns. Feminism is not a label I’m happy with. So many women of our generation and younger feel the same. Like it or not, the word feminism has become associated with a puritanical victim mentality. I think we’ve moved out of that whole scenario now.”

Plant agrees that access remains a crucial issue for women. It is illustrative that two-thirds of women on-line don’t have children. A recent study found that women were prevented from accessing new technology by their lower incomes and by having too little time to learn complex applications. For many, the workplace remains the sole arena for learning these skills, but researchers found that many companies still treated Internet access as a privilege accorded only to top executives. The new National Grid for Learning, launched on Tuesday, promises access for all at a much earlier stage; the Government has also announced the terms of its deal with British Telecom, which will offer schools 10 hours of Internet access every day.

It is refreshing that Plant remains grounded in feasibility. “The beauty of technology is that it is practical, useful and fast, but I still carry a notebook because that’s the most efficient way to work. It’s foolish to view logic as the pinnacle.”

She applies this practical flexibilty to her gender theory. “Women had to play many different roles, even within minutes. There’s so much more to reality if you do that, right across the board from where you get your income to how much of the world you can traverse. The irony is that, during the postwar years, technology was developed to entrench strict classifications, yet it has opened up so many possibilities. The beauty is that if you take anything to its limit, it tips into its own reverse.”

Plant returns to Birmingham tomorrow for her clubnight Kleptomania. After that, she might go back to Istanbul, or perhaps Casablanca. “I want to be able to survive in as many circumstances as possible. So I don’t know where I’ll be next week. I’m at my happiest when I can honestly say that to myself.”

Zeros And Ones by Sadie Plant is published today by Fourth Estate at £14.99

[The Guardian, G2, 1997-10-09, p. 4]