Page 200 - Cyberculture and New Media

Maria Bäcke 191
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culture.... Feminist cyborg stories have the task of recoding
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communication ... to subvert command and control.

The primary aim of feminist cyborg writing is thus to decolonize
pre-existing control, which can be easily transferred to the works of female
cyberfiction authors.
But what pre-existing control is there to decolonize? Cyberspace is
usually considered a smooth space where anything is possible, but by now it
can be argued that both the Internet and Cyberspace already have been
colonized. We know how it “works”. In his book The Internet Galaxy,
Manuel Castells discusses the cultures he sees on the Internet today and
divides them into four layers: the techno-meritocratic, the hacker, the virtual
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communitarian and the entrepreneurial culture.
The techno-elites focus on the technical solutions. They build the
systems and networks, and formulate rules, protocols, that govern how
information is sent and packaged. With its root in academia and science, this
culture promotes openness, and technological discovery is usually subject to
peer review. “This is a culture of belief in the inherent good of scientific and
technological development as a key component in the progress of
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humankind”. It is also a fairly hierarchic culture, where a few authority
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figures assign projects and control the resources. One of the novels, Ellen
Ullman’s Close to the Machine, highlights a computer programmer view on
Internet and its impacts. The narrator, a middle-aged female programmer,
works with her younger male colleagues on different projects. All of them are
focussed on the code, the beauty and elegance of the syntax, and regardless of
employer, their aim is to deliver software as free of bugs as possible. They
hardly ever think of the end-user, and if they do, it is in abstract terms. They
are completely focussed on a technology that seems to develop at the speed
of light. The Internet is new and not even the narrator understands it fully.
Her colleague Brian does, though:

And his vision of the Internet had the same quality of
bizarre hyperreality – all the hallucinatory detail of a
dream.... For as ‘technical’ as I might appear to my clients,
as close to the machine as I was from their point of view,
that’s as far away as I was from Brian. He exploded the Net
for me.... a complicated sea of intelligent devices, where
the distinction between hardware and software began to
blur and few people knew how to navigate. Brian knew
how to navigate. And because he knew, he would control
the routes. He was quite straightforward about this: he
wanted influence, and he wanted influence because he
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knew more than most people and because he was right.