Broad Band

by Claire L. Evans

  Not a moment too soon, the Cyberfeminists had arrived.

  The billboard, an artwork called A Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century, was produced by a four-woman art collective from Adelaide: Josephine Starrs, Julianne Pierce, Francesca da Rimini, and Virginia Barratt, known together as VNS Matrix. Their “blasphemous text” was written in one night a few years previous, as a free-association about “new representations of women, gender, and sexuality in technospace, both primordial, ancient and futuristic, fantastic and active,” as Barratt explained to me several years ago. In 1991, VNS Matrix wheat-pasted their manifesto onto city walls and faxed it to tech magazines and feminist artists around the world, proclaiming the dawn of a new age: a century and a half after Ada Lovelace first scratched a computer program onto paper, it was time for women to become the virus, the signal, and the pulse of the network.

  When the manifesto took billboard form, a student from Britain photographed it and brought the photo home to her professor, the cultural theorist Sadie Plant, who was designing a curriculum in a similar spirit. In her 1997 book, Zeroes + Ones, Plant explains that when VNS Matrix wrote “the clitoris is a direct line to the matrix,” they meant both the womb (matrix is Latin) and “the abstract networks of communication . . . increasingly assembling themselves” in the world around them. It was an evocative vision of women’s bodily connection to networked computing, a connection that emerged before the technology itself, beginning with Ada Lovelace and the countless uncounted female computers—a lineage Plant traces in her book, much as I have in mine.

  Sadie Plant and VNS Matrix are considered the matriarchs of cyberfeminism, a wild, breathlessly utopian, very brief art movement that flourished in the mid-1990s, as the Web began to reshape the world. Cyberfeminism conjures, in many ways, the countercultural, techno-utopian feeling of early Internet culture, and inherits the spirit of those West Coast cyberhippies who believed that computer-mediated communication would create a free civilization of the mind. The motley crew of artists, coders, game designers, and writers who pronounced themselves cyberfeminists joyfully subverted what VNS Matrix called “big daddy mainframe”: the patriarchy hard coded to the technological underpinnings of the world, a backbone built by men. “The technological landscape was very dry, Cartesian, reverent,” Barratt says. “It was uncritical and overwhelmingly male-dominated. It was a masculinist space, coded as such, and the gatekeepers of the code maintained control of the productions of technology.”

  After so many generations of women’s technological accomplishments being buried by time, indifference, and the shifting protocols of the network itself, the cyberfeminists were hungry to claim their place in the technological now, and loudly. Cyberfeminist thinkers and artists understood the Internet as an unprecedented platform for free thought and expression, like a dormant virus in the mainframe. The prefix “cyber” summoned it. Ubiquitous at the time—with cyberculture, cyberdelics, cybersex, cyberpunk, and CyberSlacker, too, of course—“cyber” evoked the collective hallucination of digital space and the placeless, incorporeal world of electronic networks. The cyberfeminists were fascinated by the idea of online space without geography, without predefined conventions, and believed a new kind of feminism might set sail there, afloat and untethered on an ocean of fiber and bits. “The Internet was far less regulated, far less commodified,” VNS Matrix’s Francesca da Rimini says. “More of a maul and a maw than a mall. There seemed to be endless possibilities.”

  To the many women coming online in the early 1990s, cyberfeminism looked for all the world like the next big wave of feminism: if the previous generation had thought globally but acted locally, holding their consciousness-raising sessions in each other’s living rooms, then the Internet could collapse the difference, creating a global living room where pixels and code did the work of pickets and fists.

  Indeed, the first generation of feminists to the Web understood that access was an equality issue, and they learned to translate the organizing and campaigning experience of second-wave feminism to the new medium. Some of their earliest efforts on the Web include informational Web sites for victims of abuse, feminist forums, and an animated GIF candlelight vigil for domestic violence. “As the population becomes widely familiar with the new communications technologies,” wrote Scarlet Pollock and Jo Sutton, editors of the Canadian feminist magazine Women’space, “the challenge to feminists is whether we’ll be online and ready to greet them.”

  Cyberfeminist artists made revolutionary CD-ROMs, created Web-based multimedia artworks, and built virtual worlds, taking many forms as they swam through the network seeking pleasure and knowledge. They wrote howling agitprop like the Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century. They formed coalitions, mailing lists, and discussion groups, like the Old Boys’ Network, a group that proclaimed cyberfeminism to be, above all, “a question of survival and power and fun.” VNS Matrix even made a video game, All New Gen, in which the player must hack into the databanks of Big Daddy Mainframe, the Oedipal embodiment of the techno-industrial complex, and slime him and his cohort (“Circuit Boy, Streetfighter, and other total dicks”) into oblivion, sowing the seeds of the New World Disorder and ending the rule of phallic power on Earth.

  Like the network itself, the movement was expansive and multifarious. “Cyberfeminism only exists in the plural,” pronounced the Swiss art critic Yvonne Volkart in 1999. Even at the height of the word’s usage, it could never be trusted to mean any single, specific approach to feminism at the dawn of the Web revolution. Instead, the word “cyberfeminism” granted currency to an array of positions, some of which were mutually exclusive. At the First Cyberfeminist International, a 1997 gathering in Kassel, Germany, attendees settled against defining the term, instead collectively authoring one hundred “Anti-Theses,” a laundry list of things cyberfeminism was not. That list includes the following: not for sale, not postmodern, not a fashion statement, not a picnic, not a media hoax, not nice, not Lacanian, not science fiction, and—my personal favorite—“not about boring toys for boring boys.”

  Privately, however, the cyberfeminists worried that what was being hailed as “the virtual techno-paradise of the new millennium,” as the social scientist Renate Klein wrote in 1999, might eventually become as “woman-hating as . . . much of real life at the end of the twentieth century.” To cut off that eventuality, they hoped to move quickly, establishing an online presence colorful, confident, and vivid enough to create a permanent association between women and technological culture, which is their birthright.

  But being a woman online today comes with the same anxieties that have always followed women and minorities, and fears of being silenced, excluded, and bullied remain as palpably real in the digital realm as they are IRL. Our dense net of connective technologies, and the increasing facility by which we are surveilled within them, has led to new forms of violence: doxxing, cyberstalking, trolling, revenge porn. And anonymity, which the cyberfeminists, along with many early cyberculture thinkers, championed as a method for transcending gender and difference, enables violently misogynistic language all over the Web: in YouTube comments, on forums, on Reddit and 4chan, and in the in-boxes and @replies of women with public opinions. The incorporeal newness that so intoxicated the earliest women online has morphed; it has become what the games critic Katherine Cross aptly calls a “Möbius strip of reality and unreality,” in which Internet culture “becomes real when it is convenient and unreal when it is not; real enough to hurt people in, unreal enough to justify doing so.”

  As a movement, cyberfeminism disappeared with the popping of the dot-com bubble. “We did what we had to do at the time,” Barratt explains. “Our job as female-identified people, and as feminists, was to overthrow the gatekeepers in order to access a powerful new technology which had huge implications for domination and control by the patriarchy and by capitalist systems.” As the Web commercialized, it became clear that the Internet was not going to liberate anyone fr
om sexism, or for that matter from divisions of class, race, ability, and age. Instead, it often perpetuated the same patterns and dynamics of the meatspace world. Capitalist systems have won, the personal brand is king, and, as ongoing battles for net neutrality have revealed, the gatekeepers still hold tightly to the keys.

  It’s not that the cyberfeminists, or any of their predecessors, have failed. It’s that as digital and real life edge into near-complete overlap, the digital world inherits the problems of the real. Trace a pen across the Möbius strip and it leads you right back to where you started. In this continuous surface, it’s harder and harder to draw distinctions. The computers are smaller now, and they come with us to bed; they measure our breathing as we sleep; they listen and track us as we navigate 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 have become the network, bodies and all.

  But that can be a good thing, too. Because as we map our society ever more closely to the screen, we create an increasingly powerful tool for changing it. Lies online can become truth if they are propagated widely enough, and social media has remade the way we travel, eat, and start revolutions: every decision made in the design of our most intimate technologies affects our lives, our cities, our social structures, and our collective experience of what is right, real, and true. When we create technologies, we don’t just mirror the world. We actually make it. And we can remake it, so long as we understand the awesome nature of the responsibility.

  The more diversity there is at the table, the more interesting the result onscreen, the more human, as Stacy Horn would say, bite me, the better. There’s no right kind of engineer, no special plane of thought that must be reached to make a worthwhile contribution. There’s no right education, no right career path. Sometimes there isn’t even a plan. The Internet is made of people, as it was made for people, and it does what we tell it to do.

  We can remake the world.

  The first step is to see it clearly, seeing who was really there at the most pivotal points in our technological history, without taking for granted the prevailing myths of garages and riches, of alpha nerds and brogrammers. The second step is to learn all the strategies of triumph and survival we can from our forebears, and I hope this book has unearthed a few: Ada Lovelace’s refusal of propriety, Grace Hopper’s forward-thinking tenacity, and the support the women of Resource One gave one another. Jake Feinler’s clarity of vision in the chaos of a changing network. A draft of Jaime Levy’s punk rock spirit for courage, and a healthy helping of VNS Matrix’s bodily self-assurance that the Internet is our place, wild and weird and mind-bending, as it has always been.

  The final step is the hardest: we get to work.

  Acknowledgments

  Writing a book is the ultimate life hack; I know of no better way to meet your heroes. I am deeply indebted to the people who opened up their calendars, their hard drives, and their memories for me. Not everyone made it into the final version of this book, but you have all had an immeasurable influence on my thinking: Pat Wilcox, Pamela Hardt-English, Sherry Reson, Joan Lefkowitz, Mya Shone, Chris Macie, Lee Felsenstein, Elizabeth “Jake” Feinler, Mary Stahl, Radia Perlman, Aliza Sherman, Ellen Pack, Nancy Rhine, Naomi Pearce, Stacy Horn, Marisa Bowe, Jaime Levy, Howard Mittelmark, Dame Wendy Hall, Annette Wagner, Cathy Marshall, Judy Malloy, Karen Catlin, Nicole Yankelovich, Gina Garrubbo, Laurie Kretchmar, Marleen McDaniel, Naomi Clark, Brenda Laurel, Adriene Jenik, Amy Bruckman, Antoinette LaFarge, Cynthia DuVal, Helen Varley Jamieson, Judy (yduJ) Anderson, Juli Burk, Lisa Brenneis, Lynn Finch, Pavel Curtis, Jim Bumgardner, and Yib. I’ve been an awed and grateful witness, but this is only the beginning. There are more fascinating stories about women in technology than I could ever have fit in these pages, and I sincerely hope to read many, many more books on the subject in the years to come.

  Thanks are due, also, to those who helped along the way: to Robert Kett and Martina Haidvogl at SFMOMA, who helped me to consult the CD-ROM archive of Word magazine in the museum’s permanent collection; Wende Cover at the Internet Hall of Fame, who connected me with early networking pioneers; Sydney Gulbronson Olson at the Computer History Museum, who handled my queries about Community Memory; and the saintly people of the Internet Archive, without whose Wayback Machine the dot-com-era chapters would have been impossible to write. Give them all your money. I’m not a trained historian, and I am deeply appreciative of the work done by the scholars of computing history cited throughout this book, particularly in the early chapters. They’re doing world-changing work, in many cases righting egregious exclusions. When the document overwhelmed me, I turned to the best writers I know. Brian Merchant shared war stories, software strategies, and essential insights on early chapters and drafts; Corrina Laughlin was always deft with an e-mail full of research leads, PDFs, and feedback. Kathryn Borel Jr. was an invaluable sounding board, and Addie Wagenknecht, the ultimate cyberfeminist, gave the book a thorough technical read.

  Without my exceedingly thoughtful and ambitious literary agent, Sarah Levitt, this book would still be a three-page document in a folder labeled “someday.” She saw something bigger than I had hoped to imagine, and she brought me there. Thank you to my editor, Stephanie Frerich, for her eagerness to tell women’s stories, for helping to pull this book from the weeds, and for backing me up. Thank you to Olivia Peluso and everyone at Portfolio for walking me through this process with so much care; thank you to my copy editor, Juliann Barbato, and to my production editor, Ryan Boyle, for taking time to clarify even the thorniest stuff. Thank you to my parents, Colin and Rosine Evans, for the Dell and for their unending and unquestioning support, and to Jona Bechtolt, who draws me out of myself: thank you for heading fearlessly into the darkest caves with me. You’re the light.

  Notes

  CHAPTER ONE: A COMPUTER WANTED

  “A Computer Wanted,” it says: “A Computer Wanted,” New York Times, May 2, 1892.

  original cottage industry: James Gleick, The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood (New York: Vintage Books, 2012), 84.

  offices of his time did “mental labor”: Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures (London: Charles Knight, Pall Mall East, 1832), 153.

  mathematicians would guesstimate their horsepower: David Alan Grier, When Computers Were Human (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 276.

  “the visible pattern” of any cloth: Sadie Plant, Zeroes + Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture (London: Fourth Estate, 1998), 66.

  “half a framebreaker”: George Gordon Byron, Lord Byron: Selected Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 58.

  “It is a known fact,” Babbage proclaimed: Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 116–17.

  writing of a “store” to hold the numbers: Ibid., 117.

  “very costly toy”: Gleick, The Information, 101–5.

  “mad, bad, and dangerous to know”: Betty Alexander Toole, Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers: Prophet of the Computer Age (Mill Valley, CA: Strawberry Press, 1992), 6.

  “Oh, my poor dear child!”: Ibid., 21.

  “I do not believe that my father was”: Ibid., 156–57.

  “aptitude for grasping the strong points”: B. V. Bowden, “A Brief History of Computation,” in Faster Than Thought: A Symposium on Digital Computing Machines, ed. B. V. Bowden (London: Pitman and Sons, 1953), 22.

  He was an “old monkey”: Toole, Ada, the Enchantress, 33.

  “While other visitors gazed”: Sophia Elizabeth De Morgan, Memoir of Augustus De Morgan (London: Longmans, 1882), 89.

  “I hope you are bearing me in mind”: Toole, Ada, the Enchantress, 83.

  “intuitive perception of hidden things”: Ibid., 101.

 
“My dear and much admired Interpretress”: Ibid., 172.

  “The Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns”: Ibid.,182.

  “That brain of mine”: Ibid., 147.

  “He is an uncommonly fine baby”: Ibid., 155.

  “Not even countesses”: Plant, Zeroes + Ones, 32.

  One biographer has suggested: Benjamin Wooley, The Bride of Science: Romance, Reason, and Byron’s Daughter (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1999), 340–41.

  “I do dread that horrible struggle”: Toole, Ada, the Enchantress, 290.

  “her ideas are so modern”: B. V. Bowden, preface to Faster Than Thought, xi.

  the astronomer Edward Charles Pickering: The going legend here, although there is some evidence to the contrary, is that Pickering hired Fleming after growing frustrated with a group of male assistants hired to inspect photographic plates of stellar spectra. Storming out of his office, he vowed that even his Scottish maid could do a better job. He was more right than he knew.

  “The Harvard Computers are mostly women”: Grier, When Computers Were Human, 83.

  Known to history as “Pickering’s Harem”: Gabriele Kass-Simon, Women of Science: Righting the Record (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 100.

  “the talented daughters of loving fathers”: Grier, When Computers Were Human, 81.

  ballparked a unit of “kilogirl” energy: Ibid., 276.

  kept its own pool of “girls”: Beverly E. Golemba, Human Computers: The Women in Aeronautical Research (unpublished manuscript, 1994), 43, https://crgis.ndc.nasa.gov/crgis/images/c/c7/Golemba.pdf.

  Of these, the mathematician Katherine Johnson: Sarah McLennan and Mary Gainer, “When the Computer Wore a Skirt: Langley’s Computers, 1935–1970,” NASA News & Notes 29, no. 1 (2012), https://crgis.ndc.nasa.gov/crgis/images/c/c3/Nltr29-1.pdf.