Not Now? Feminism, Technology, Postdigital

Abstract

‘Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live’ — so said John Perry Barlow in the 1990s Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, which diagnosed and made demands around a new reality. A quarter of a century later, in the era of the quantified self, in which computational devices and bodies intertwine to measure the human day and co-constitute the world in which we live, it is clear that something has changed. This change concerns the materialization of bodies, a classic feminist preoccupation, as well as the materials of technology — ours is a world that is everywhere and nowhere, in which bodies are redistributed through a technological economy. But the sense of distance this change engenders applies not only to the matter-free and invulnerable lives Barlow glimpsed in the 20th-century net,¹ but to the early 21st-century web (pre/post-9/ll) and later; even voices celebrating the social in the Web 2.0, or the pre-Snowden era, sound distant now.