Having just joined this List, I've been frankly surprised and a little
disappointed by the focus on all manner of stuff other than ecofeminism.
Then I remembered a quote that appeared in the Winter 1995 issue of THE
FIFTH ESTATE, an anarchist journal out of Detroit. The quote headed an
article entitled "A Treatise on Electronic Anarchy and the Net: Arguments
for Elimination of the Information Age":
"Every year of her life...the Net had been growing more expansive and
seamless. Computers did it. Computers melted other machines, fusing them
together. Television-telephone-telex. Tape recorder-VCR-laser disk.
Broadcast tower linked to microwave dish linked to satellite. Phone line,
cable TV, fiber-optic cords hissing out words and pictures in torrents of pure
light. All netted together in a web over the world, a global nervous system,
an octopus of data. There'd been plenty of hype about it. It was easy to
amke it sound transcendentally incredible.
"...The Net was a lot like television, another former wonder of the age. The
Net was a vast glass mirror. It reflected what it was shown. Mostly human
banality."
- Bruce Sterling
ISLANDS IN THE NET
