"Zeros + Ones : Digital Women + The New Technoculture" Sadie Plant (1997)

"Those were the days, when we were all at sea. It seems like yesterday to me. Species, sex, race, class: in those days none of this meant anything at all. No parents, no children, just ourselves, strings of inseparable sisters, warm and wet, indistinguishable one from the other, gloriously indiscriminate, promiscuous and fused. No generations. No future, no past. An endless geographic plane of micromeshing pulsing quanta, limitless webs of interacting blendings, leakings, mergings, weaving through ourselves, running rings around each other, heedless, needless, aimless, careless, thoughtless, amok. Folds and foldings, plying and multiplying, plicating and replicating. We had no definition, no meaning, no way of telling each other apart. We were whatever we were up to at the time. Free exchanges, microprocesses finely tuned, polymorphous transfers without regard for borders and boundaries. There was nothing to hang on to, nothing to be grasped, nothing to protect or be protected from. Insides and outsides did not count. We gave no thought to any such things. We.gave no thought to anything at all. Everything was there for the taking then. We paid no attention: it was all for free. It had been this way for tens, thousands, millions, billions of what were later defined as years. If we had thought about it, we would have said it would go on forever, this fluent, fluid world. 

And then something occurred to us. The climate changed. We couldn't breathe. It grew terribly cold. Far too cold for us. Everything we touched was poisonous. Noxious gases and thin toxic airs flooded our oceanic zone. Some said we had brought it on ourselves, that all our activity had backfired, that we had destroyed our environment by an accident we had provoked. There were rumors of betrayal and sabotage, whisperings of alien invasion and mutant beings from another ship.

Only a few of us survived the break. Conditions were so terrible that many of those who did pull through wished they had died. We mutated to such an extent that we were unrecognizable to ourselves, banding together in units of a kind which, like everything, had been unthinkable before. We found ourselves working as slave components of systems whose scales and complexities we could not comprehend. Were we their parasites? Were they ours? Either way we became components of our own imprisonment. To all intents and purposes, we disappeared."

-- Sadie Plant, 1997

I adore cyberfeminism. I implore anyone who considers themselves a feminist on the internet to read Sadie Plant's work. Even her texts in the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit/Ccru were great, however I find her book Zeros + Ones : Digital Women + The New Technoculture to be an incredibly undermined reading in feminist internet history. The snippet above is the preamble found on the first two pages of the book.