Of Weaving and Machines: Sadie Plant's Zeros and Ones

Sadie Plant's Zeros and Ones (1997) is a fascinating look at the history of computing that places women and women's work at the center of the evolution of machine technologies, beginning with the story of Ada Lovelace.

I haven't finished it, but the insight that I really enjoyed early on is the connection Sadie Plant makes between the technologies developed for tapestry making, weaving, and early computation devices (punch card systems). Despite tech's current lack of diversity, women's work has been there all along.

I also love the style of the book, which is laid out as a tapestry of quotes and stories form the history of computing. Interestingly, her words enact the very process she is describing. In other words, the picture that Sadie Plant is trying to paint emerges from the tapestry of her words, as she doesn't make any direct arguments or present any thesis. She explains how images emerge form the weaving together of threads in a tapestry below - it's one of the keenest philosophical observations of this work:

When images are later painted, or written in the form of words on a page, patterns are imposed on the passive backdrop provided by the canvas or the page. But textile images are never imposed on the surface of the cloth; their patterns are always emergent from an active matrix, implicit in a web which makes them immanent to the processes from which they emerge (pg.67).
This "emerging from an active matrix" well describes the reality that is being birthed in virtual realms, realities that absorb our consciousnesses more and more. We are not creating a copy of a more original reality that we call the physical world, but new kinds of worlds and realities are emerging.

This is a problem if you begin from the idea that we all live in the same physical world, and therefore inhabit the same realities. But these emergent worlds point us back to the ways in which we already inhabit different, often overlapping realities, despite sharing a physical world.

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Read more about Sadie Plant's Zeros and Ones on Goodreads or at Powell's Books.