Zeroes and Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture

Not since The Female Eunuch has there been a book so radical in its scope, so persuasive in its detail, so exhilarating in its polemical energy. 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 bold 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.

Astonishing, inspiring, witty, and perverse, Zeros + Ones is a love song to Ada, a soundtrack for the next millennium, a radical revision of our technoculture that will forever change the way we perceive our digital world.