Zeros and Ones
Beginning with Ada Lovelace and her unheralded contributions to Charles Babbage and his development of the Difference Engine, Sadie Plant traces the critical contributions women have made to the progress of computing. Shattering the myth that women are victims of technological change, Zeros + Ones shows how women and women's work in particular - weaving and typing, computing and telecommunicating - have been tending the machinery of the digital age for generations, the very technologies that are now revolutionizing the Western world. In this manifesto on the relationship between women and machines, Sadie Plant explores the networks and connections implicit in nonlinear systems and digital machines. Steering a course beyond the old feminist dichotomies, Zeros + Ones is populated by a diverse chorus of voices - Anna Freud, Mary Shelley, Alan Turing - conceived as exploratory bundles of intelligent matter, emergent entities hacking through the constraints of their old programming and envisioning a postpatriarchal future.