A review by dylan2219
Zeros and Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture by Sadie Plant

adventurous informative medium-paced

4.25

Hugely underrated - I never see anyone talk about this book today, yet its influence is so widespread and its an absolute banger. Back in the 90s, lots of theorists in the UK were taking lots of drugs and fascinated by psychoanalysis and technology. Sadie Plant made two huge innovations: she reframes all that narrative around women, and she is actually good at making predictions and arguments. While a lot of the writing on tech from this period seems dated and very misguidedly utopian now (think shit like CyberH4cking.... Motherboard Megadrive... Net-O-Sphere.... W3bP1ugging.. and a lot of proselytising about our post-human digital liberation) Plant writes with a reluctant prescience, studying history carefully to make connections and inferences, rather than dramatic predictions, and she retains a healthy scepticism throughout, even though her writing overflows with an almost erotic thrust of desire for the world of technology. Zeroes and Ones is a kind of theory-narrative, an alternative history of computation that begins with the prophet Ada Lovelace, taking us through the world of weaving, electrical engineering, cyborgs, culminating in the ocean, cellular mitosis, and DNA itself. Plant uses a mosaic-like, hyperlink approach to her arguments, juxtaposing various scraps of historical evidence with contemporary trends and theoretical innovations. My biggest problem with this is her massive overreliance on quotation, which sometimes feels a bit lazy and repetitive (some chapters are easily 50-70% quotes juxtaposed together, feeling more like a research scrapbook than an original work). It also makes the occasional bizarre inference or counterpoint (as one is wont to find in older theory) and occasionally struggles to bring its many tangential threads into the weave and weft of its broader construction. The general thrust of the book though is profound, highly prescient and relevant, and has aged remarkably well. This book's underrated status does not belie the bang-on nature of a lot of her predictions and analysis. It's a blast, a mind-bender, and a real refreshing innovation on thinking about tech, which feels incredibly rare given the present abysmal state of our Web 3.0 futures (not even to touch upon our Stockholm Syndrome with Web 2.0)