 I'm Jean, I'm a developer from the South Side of Chicago. I'm not gonna talk today about a strictly computing topic, but instead it's a computing related genre of text that I think everyone should know about, which is the cyber feminist manifesto. I wanna talk about it because for one thing, it brings me joy, but also I think that the writers in this tradition have lessons to teach us about the kind of emergent techno dystopia that we call the present right now. So I'm just gonna jump right in. If the title ring a bell for you at all, you're probably familiar with number five. Oh, and that's not gonna go, I'm sorry, I'm on the wrong view here. Okay, number five is a cyborg manifesto, which is by Donna Haraway, she's a philosopher. She wrote it in 1984 and has revised it a bunch of times since then. The basic gist of it is that Haraway wants to abolish gender, which is a pretty cool thing. She's convinced that Western culture is built on like these binary taxonomies like man and woman and like human and animal. And for her technological progress is the way that we're gonna get rid of those harmful categories. It's really cool that Karen spoke this morning, I think. This paper provides a lot of cool context for that because Haraway actually argues that we're all cyborgs and that if we approach to reality as the cyborgs we are, we'd be able to acknowledge the kind of like fundamental messiness of the categories that define our reality. So in essence, the cyborg manifesto is a response to ideas in mainstream feminism in the 1970s that Haraway doesn't like. Mainly she doesn't like that identity politics is what we might call a centralist. Like it assumes that men and women are these coherent descriptive categories that correlate with people's genitals. And this taking on mainstream feminism in the 70s from this kind of like technological progress viewpoint makes Haraway one of the most influential critiques of that tradition. It's number five because I think it gets really low marks for readability. It's long and dense in the way that only queer theory can be. But it's really influential and it's practically the first in the genre. It lays the groundwork for a whole tradition of writers and artists that come after her. Like number four, which is B&S Matrix's cyber feminist manifesto for the 21st century. They were an Australian artist collective in the early 90s. You can see them here with their manifesto. It's the blue orb that's kind of floating between the Narwhal humans. This is the manifesto as a billboard but they released it as a lot of different kinds of mediums. They posted it online, they mailed it and they faxed it around. I would count it more as a happening than a literal manifesto because of this. For one thing it's like super short, you can see it in there. It's also largely just an assemblage of little poetic quips in kind of a style of 90s feminism that we might call third wave now. It's phrases like the clitoris is a direct line to the matrix and we are the future cunt which was one of their big like slogans. You can see another one of the groups posters here which claims that the future is unmanned. So while it was super short, I think this work was really important. They were one of the first groups to actively label themselves as cyber feminist and while they owe a lot to Haraway, they're not really in conversation with her at the same time. It's not political, it's an artistic statement and it's rooted in the same kind of sex essentialism that Haraway was fighting against. It's really about like women are gonna take over, they're gonna kind of be the inheritors of this masculine computing culture and they're gonna do it through their genitals and their gender genitals. So in the mid 1990s cyber feminism along with a lot of other exciting feminisms like Riot Girl is picking up steam and that creates the climate for manifesto number three which is the hundred anti-theses what cyber feminism is not. It was a document that came out of the first cyber feminist international which took place in Germany in 1997. It's a conference of about 40 people, mostly artists and amazingly the website is still online. It looks like this and I think Bang Bang Con really needs to up their game in terms of web design. You can go through the website now and see the program, you can see the people who are involved. One hundred anti-theses was one of the reports that came out of the conference and the manifesto itself is a long list of everything that they think cyber feminism isn't. So that's including it's not tradition, it's not theory, it's not practice and it's not an ism at all. So really in summary cyber feminism is just a provocation to them. It's kind of like an empty signifier. It can be whatever you want it to be as long as you fit this kind of angry 90s feminism attitude. That's a common thread that cuts through a lot of these early 90s texts and in that sense it's responding to a similar cultural moment as VNS matrix and putting forward a similar kind of aesthetics first politics of anger but not really in conversation with anything that Haraway was saying at the same time. So now I'm gonna jump ahead almost 20 years to 2014 and introduce my number two which is the cyber twee manifesto. It's by a collective of young women artists that's also called cyber twee. Gabriella Heelman Violet Forest in Mayweaver. They've done a lot of stuff including physical and virtual exhibitions and a really cool zine about the dark web but to me this manifesto stands as their defining text. Like VNS matrix they released it in a lot of forms. There's a website and a video piece. The GIF is here which I think communicates the sensibility of the manifesto in the best way. The thesis of it is that on the contemporary internet they want vulnerability and softness to be radical forms of critique. The solipsism that you might call like selfie culture to them is a justifiable defense against the digital world that commodifies and violates young women's bodily autonomy. So immediately it's like aesthetically a huge break from what VNS matrix was doing in the early 90s. It's much softer. It's kind of all about gentleness instead of like the masculine cyberpunk of the 90s. And at the same time I think it's kind of linked to them in that you can see a really strong nostalgia for the third wave here. In the form there's like stickers. It's a zine like typewriter font that kind of looks like they made it themselves in their bedroom the way that riot girls would. And the content really mirrors like the early 90s riot girl manifestos. This one's Kathleen Hannah's trust flyer. They think is one of the best. She defines in this one like the revolution is about resisting capitalism through vulnerability. So there's that huge crying in public as like one of her instructions for resisting capitalism. And I think it's easy to see the lineage between something like this and Cybertwee who are saying that quote being too soft should not be seen as a weakness. But at the same time I think that buried in the softness of Cybertwee and I'll go back to that slide here is a similar kind of violent rage. Like they say at the bottom that our nectar is not just a lure or a trap for passing flies but a self-indulgent interpersonal biofeedback mechanism spelled in emoji and gentle selfies. And that's like violent. It's aggressive and it's defensive in the same way that I think the early 90s cyber feminists were. So it's cool that we can see a pretty direct link between them and the work that Cybertwee is doing. But at this point I think that the cyber feminist tradition has really lost most of its connection to material politics. It's kind of just about art. And that's why I have to give the number one slot to Xenofeminism, a politics of alienation which is a 2015 manifesto by the anonymous European collective Laboria Cubonics. And the text survives a lot of the most compelling lines of thought from Haraway's work and puts it in a contemporary context. So I see it as a response to the intermarriage between surveillance and kind of like big data practices on the contemporary internet as well as the extreme severity of global inequality and access to computing power. This is the opening paragraph which features some of my favorite texts. You can see it's also long and dense in the way that queer theory is which I'm kind of biased, I like that kind of thing. But the gist of the argument here is that they think feminism and feminist aligned politics need to stop using nature or naturalness as the basic moral claim. And instead acknowledge that unnatural corruption unites all of us, especially the trans-disabled and queer among us. I think Xenofeminism is also a call to reappropriate rationalism and science as scalable tools of knowledge power that can kind of like resist global oppression and to recognize that we really need to bet on the long game of history instead of calling for like an instantaneous revolution in the tradition of 20th century Marxism. So here you can kind of see it's a return to gender abolitionism. It's a return to the critiques of feminism that motivated Donna Haraway. They're both arguing for better forms of corruption. It's really complicated and dense stuff, but it's also really cool and I would encourage you to read it online. So what's the point of all this? Like why do we care? I think the good news is that there's a really strong tradition of queer and feminist critique of hacker communities. Two of these texts are older than I am and as a queer girl working with computers that's really cool to see. But I think the bad news is that if you're like me and your goal is that queer feminist hacker utopia then we're losing right now. If you're invested in the dreams of these manifestos if you care about gender abolition, about a turning vulnerability into power on the internet I think we're still a long way away from those goals. I think the platforms that are the bedrock of everyday life for the vast majority of our users are trending towards centralization, towards proprietary software and towards like a quasi-authoritarian surveillance just by the sheer force of perverse incentive alone. So I do personally believe that the liberatory potential of networked computing is still there like that thing that all of these artists and academics we're fighting for is there. And I don't think we would be here if it wasn't but at the same time I don't think we're ever gonna get anywhere unless we come to the terms with the fact that many of us build tools of domination for a living and that those tools need to be reappropriated against power. So who's gonna do it? I think you can see budding examples of this kind of politics and groups like the Gynapunk Collective who are working on open source gynecology in Catalonia or Deep Lab which operates kind of out of everywhere and brings together artists, academics and the unaffiliated to do collaborative research in a cyber feminist tradition. But so far these are only whispers and I think that the challenges that we're up against in the 21st century are like incredibly daunting. So if anyone's gonna do it I think it's gonna have to be us. Thanks very much.