The Net is “a network which… host[s] galleries, libraries, shopping malls, company showcases S&M dungeons, university departments, personal diaries, fan zines” where “every page is linked to at least one other, sometimes hundreds, and always proliferating” (20). This description may or may not seem apt to describe the current state of the Net, a space very different from when Plant wrote her analysis of women and technology, Zeros + Ones, in 1995. The Net has moved largely to the phone and into apps which still utilize the same effervescent waves of the internet to facilitate communication and creativity, but on new and limited terms. Instagram, X, Youtube, and TikTok are emblematic examples of Gen Z oriented apps that facilitate the space of our communications. Secondary examples perhaps less used by Gen Z are Tumblr, Pinterest, and Facebook. These spaces share many of the same features, such as hashtags and, most centrally, the ability to create a virtual identity through the facilitation of an account and posting. The virtual self in the present day is highly contested, subject to limitations, and forced into boxes. Has the virtual avatar always manifested in this way, or was cyberfeminism’s dream of “re-embodiment and liberation from the gender binary” alongside other forms of oppression along racial and class based lines merely a hallucination of cyberspace (21)? What virtual space can exist in cyberspace today that can hold virtual identities free from delineation or alienation?
Audre Lorde in her biomythography Zami speaks about the Bagatelle, a popular spot for Black lesbians, and what it represented to her and others at times:
In times of need and great instability, the place sometimes became more a definition than the substance of why you needed it to begin with. Sometimes the retreat became the reality. (26)
This physical spot in the novel functions much like social media spaces in the present day; these social media cyberspaces exist created by others, some would say our capitalist overlords, yet are co opted by us to create communities, protests, and purpose (simultaneously, social media creates empty debate). I return to Sadie Plant’s description of the web, and the potential held within her words. “Just as individuated texts have become filaments of infinitely tangled webs, so the digital machines of the late twentieth century weave new networks from what were once isolated words, numbers, music, shapes, smells, tactics textures, architectures” (20). In the twenty-first century, we must once again become digital weavers like Ada Lovelace and many others, synthesizing new forms of media, thoughts, and forms of expression to create our own manifestos for a new future.