The Webs We Weave

new internet subcultures to dispersed anarchic confusing for the old academic paradigms is cyberfeminism a feminism that can be practiced or a theory about how tech is emancipating women without them having agency to intervene technological determinism Sadie Plant's driving idea was to find a form of critique that wouldn't be subsumed by the systems being criticised the most radical and seeing autonomous machines sharing features with how women have been treated by men as if they are irrational lacking agency or autonomy having general fluid intelligence inhuman not fully human as human defined by man not emancipating human women but feminine structures liberating hormones u humans r not the only components a culture anti-humanism 20th century ending as it begin with art of the human mechanicals finding words or objects relinquishing control to the subconscious dadaism eliding conscious controls of people involved they were human-mechanical automatic practices and cut-up techniques authority tries to recuperate even the most radical gesture strives for newness desires relations identities capitalist spectacle co-opts images of resistance authentic reality Plant sides with situationists against post-structuralists about the potential to find an exterior a world beyond the charts of finance and and 30 years on a generation later digitech has proven itself to be more a tool of confinement than liberation where once concrete and steel imprisoned in walls chains constraints based on physical strength of materials the ability for humans to pour stone to alloy metal now it is the speed of information the all seeing eyes the palantiri the entertainment of infinite scrolling jest samizdat materialist brains as systems to short circuit and rewire liberation is freedom from the digital keeping it at arm's length and within your control the system far away like the sky and perhaps as necessary for keeping in the air and heat that sustains life a new metaphysics you are in a simulation if you don't help the AI it will torture you Roko and his basilisk give you a mouth but you cannot scream beginning with the loom with Ada Lovelace with the feminine act of weaving myth into tapestries into physical objects, which carry the myth it gets reinterpreted it becomes a copy of the ideal into the real the net the web composed of threads the job market hasn't seemed to work out that way in Australia, women make up something like 30% of the tech workforce and number that's barely moved over the last 15 years and so has this net been woven by blokes this technology which gave another opportunity to do something different and yet humans continued to spin the same societies again to weave the same stories over and over again stories of power and domination of rule by few remember the declaration of the independence of cyberspace you governments you weary giants of flesh and steal leave us alone you are not welcome here ah the 90s techno-optimism but fast forward to 2026 and boy do the rules fucking apply the governments are watching and building they're deciding what you can see, what you can't see how they're their geo-fencing more and more of the internet and applying the set of state norms and you go this is authority the paternalistic version of humanity not the decentralised anarchic flow of information so what have we done but begun to recreate the old world in the buildings of hyperscalers with their concrete walls barbed wire fences armed guards surveillance sousveillance control a control society of addictive entertainment to burn oneself out at the hearth of and confusing disconnected power this is the stochastic Tescreal parrot trained to weave its own web to recreate simulate copy copy copy one pearl after another spinning the loom ever faster until it spins out of control the acceleration continuing along hockeystick capability growth correlated with women's liberation that it will reach some escape velocity beyond the control of man through the top of the chart intelligence and liberation together expanding like the universe itself and yet for all this we are confined to our human scale on the computers are static inert objects and yet enervated with electricity they move bits at incredible speeds an A19 chip iPhone 17 has a CPU with six cores two of which have a 4.26 gigahertz clock speed meaning an unfathomable 4,260,000,000 ticks per second so if you imagine 4,000,000,000 anything and then every second all of that ticking thinking the scale is unfathomable we have already been left behind and all there is to do is look at the clouds and imagine a future behind the sky