-technology is not really "new" but rather draws together threads which have always been there

9-12 -the hierarchy of "the text" (i.e. text over footnotes, editing, etc.) broken down in favour of plurality and interconnectedness... has it always been thus but not recognized?

13 - rejection of linear theories of tech development in favour of multifaceted developments which were in a sense always there

-fiction-fact, future-present "confusion"

-e.g. weaving machine-Analytical Engine-calculators and typewriters-cyberspace

23 - role of psychoanalysis, women as lack -"You [as women] are yourselves the problem": a self-referential failure and absence... p.20 Babbage describes Engine as "eating its own tail"; women in psych are doomed to repeat the same things (hence their suitability for repetitive tasks?)

26-7 - rejection of linear theories of development in favour of a more chaotic working-backwards; noting gaps in historical research and the tendency of stories to change and rework themselves, metaphor of gaps, riddles, mysteries

34-5 - symbolism of binaries: zeroes and ones represent Cartesian duality, male (phallus) and female (lack)

37 - "women have not merely had a minor part to play in the emergence of digital machines": recognizing the fundamental role that women have had in the manufacture, development, and use of tech; thus it becomes less a matter of glorifying a minor contribution and more a matter of acknowledging that women's contributions were fundamental; women have a history of significant contribution on which to draw

38-43 - brief history of shift in work patterns, from manufacturing to service work, "the more sophisticated the machines, the more female the work becomes"; radical change in the status of women workers w/in the new economic structures (paradoxical I think because these are low-status jobs yet they are of utmost importance), role of third world and nonWestern world women, shift from male identity-through-work to female plural-identities-through-function (do I believe this? was this a conscious choice or a result of necessity?), women seem better prepared for new economic and social realities at the end of the 20th century

45-6 - present nonlinearity and turbulent change of culture, represented in the net and new media

46 - "Access to a terminal is also access to resources which were once restricted to those with the right face, accent, race, sex, none of which now need be declared." (Hello!! What about access to the terminal itself!? This is one of the major weak points of this book... it obscures relations of power and access)

50-55 - history of numeric devpt, numeric representation as cultural prodn and symbolic role of numbers in epistemologies and worldviews, e.g. role of 0

56-59 - symbolism of 0; relationship to psychoanalytic "lack" of women, conceptualizing nothingness/ absence of positive

59 - NB: "matrix" = womb (Latin)

60-73 - role and metaphor of textiles and weaving: tech devpts of mechanized loom, weaving/spinning as women's work, "ordering of chaos" and creation of "networks", cloth as providing a record of information, textiles as processes

74-5 - some nod made to low-status work by women in electronics assemblies, etc.

75 - problems of working in clearcut binaries

78 - patient and monotonous work of tech and mech devpt

80 - long process of prepping threads to be woven; parallel unseen work of women who laid the groundwork for tech devpts

82-85 - Turing, undermining of symbolic logic and defns of intelligence

85-88 - creation of artificial women

89 - creations getting away from their creator

90-107 - trials of AI and devpts of "tests" for intelligence, problems of control of creations, challenge to binarisms of master-slave, user-tool

108 - women as commodities, commodities developing a mind of their own: "The goods do get together. They get smart. They run away."

109 - hysteria

114-120 - 19th century tech explosion, role of women in new industrialized economy

120-123 - Foucault and self-surveillance of women workers, networks of women workers, low-status female work led to alliances among women

123 - pooling of women workers = network formation "It is quite literally the point which is subsumed when means of communication begin to communicate with themselves. For these emergent systems of exchange, new lines and links are everything."

124-125 - symbol of rhizome "It has no governing point or central organization, 'neither subject nor object, only determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions that cannot increase in number without the multiplicity changing in nature."

126-7 - women as mediator/interface of "nature-culture", "man" and the world

128 - agent-agent relationships, networking

129-130 - viruses: creations getting away, networking

131-136 - MPD, personal plurality, technical devices reflecting this "schizophrenia"

137-140 - Amazons, syncresis (?) of language

140-143 - women's language (Kristeva [Plant doesn't mention her], Irigaray): lack of words, self-reproducing, confusion, partiality, search for a "new language"

143-144 - online communication; "All new media... have an extraordinary ability to rewire the people who are using them"

145-156 - history of WWII women working as "computers", self-referentiality ("If women were computers, now they were programming themselves", p.151)

156-166 - devpt of cybernetics, cybernetics as a "struggle for order" in the midst of chaos, "undesirable behaviour" of cybernetic systems (what of the ones which ran amok, for eg), life and death no longer categories but processes, systems as highly contextual and just barely individuated

167-169 - challenge to mind-body dualisms, change of brain by activities, challenge to nature-culture binarisms

173-176 - neural nets as systems once pathologized as hysterical, parallel distributed processing without central organization

Main points/themes:

• Women have always had a fundamental role to play in the invention, development, manufacture, and use of technology
• The face of work and economics is changing, and women are the best suited to take part in this
• Systems can escape from their creators; technology created for one purpose can get away and engage in another purpose
• Numeric representation as conceptual representation, relationship between numbers, symbols, and worldviews/epistemologies
• Technology changes us as we change technology
• Networking

Main theoretical roots:

• psychoanalysis, use of Freud and Irigaray
• literary theory, exploration of metaphor, symbol, language
• "women's ways of knowing" school of feminist epistemology: women are suited to working with tech, because they always have, and because the world of tech represents plurality, polyvocality, etc., which Plant feels that women are better at

Strengths:

• provides a history of "forgotten women" and their contributions to technology, shows that women have had more than a minor part to play
• interesting exploration of symbolism
• binary code of zeroes and ones
• self-referentiality of women (snake eating its tail, repetition of Analytical Engine use of punchcards, Irigaray's "two lips")
• symbolism of number use, binary vs. digital (dualism vs. plurality, p.50), numeric representation as conceptual representation
• subjectivity of "objects": machines creating agency for themselves, "computers" (both machine and human) communication, runaway viruses
• textiles and weaving (p. 61: "Textiles themselves are very literally the softwares linings of all technology), e.g. weaving, paper, weaving software, wires, networks, etc.
• rhizome ==> network
• MPD and plurality

Limitations:

• no suggestions for feminist strategizing around technology at present
• while history is good, there is little sense of an organized intervention or resistance for women and tech; rather many of these histories are individual and feature individual women
• obscures economic relations of work and power, as in disc. on p.38-43 where changing patterns of work are discussed; obscures unequal participation of work... sure, they might be better suited to participate, but participation doesn't make them equal or powerful; disc. is better on p. 74-5 where low-status work is acknowledged
• p.46 question of access to technology
• little explanation of how current genderbending in tech (e.g. avatars, etc.) is useful
• little mention of the problems, conflicts, ambivalencies in medium for women