At that time, she was writing her PhD at Manchester on the Situationists: the French surreal-political sect whose visionary slogans enlivened the cobblestones of Paris in May 1968. It was published as The Most Radical Gesture in 1992, and has since become the standard work in its field.Then Sadie’s ideas started to change. I first met her at a conference in Glasgow in 1990 and remember a radiantly kind and friendly woman in a male-dominated intellectual-anarchist scene. She had a battered old red van in which she would ferry all comers up and down the country to curious lectures and conferences. And they stand, if Plant is accurate, to lose an awful lot more.Sadie Plant – yes, it’s a great name, but also the one she was born with – is 33.
She was born in Birmingham, where she was educated at state school, then studied philosophy at Manchester University. Every time a useful new technology is invented, brute testosterone strength becomes less significant to the ways in which the world is run. Already, men have lost a lot of their traditional power to computers and reproductive technology. The point of Plant’s writing – which can move from fluid dynamics to algebra to neurology within a page – is that you can never quite tell.Intercut among all the drum-and-bass prose there nestles a nugget of historical insight so obvious, it seems almost banal. It’s a book, as Plant writes, for an age in which “everything normal became peculiar”.Zeros and Ones begins with a scarily millenarian preamble. “Species, sex, race, class: in those days none of this meant anything at all.
No parents, no children, just ourselves, strings of inseparable sisters, warm and wet, indistinguishable one from the other…” She could be writing about cells or machines or women in a projected state of primordial chaos. The so-called “genderquake” of the 1990s, Plant suggests, forms just one tiny slice of a far bigger historical movement: the story of how technology liberates women into economic and so sexual power, leaving the men accustomed to subordinating them puzzled and without a place. William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, founders of cyberpunk, dedicated a novel, The Difference Engine, to her. However, Plant, pushes the implications of the story further than ever before.She develops a new theory about men and women and all the other potential genders between them.
How can such a piece of technology be invented and then forgotten? Surely not because the only user to understand its import was a young Victorian girl?
Sadie Plant is not the first contemporary writer to have picked up on Ada Byron’s story, which she tells in Zeros and Ones: digital women + the new technoculture (Fourth Estate, pounds 14.99). The “thinking machine” was Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine, which established the principle of the computer and was then forgotten The anecdote is completely true, its sources verifiable Yet it still has the air of science fiction. In 1833, a teenage girl met a machine which she came to regard “as a friend”. It was a futuristic device which seemed to have dropped into her world a century before its time. “We both went to see the thinking machine (for such it seems) last Monday,” the girl’s mother wrote in her diary.
“It raised several Nos to the 2nd and 3rd powers, and extracted the root of a quadratic Equation… Ada, young as she was, understood its working, and saw the great beauty of the invention.”
The teenage girl was Ada Byron, later Lovelace, daughter of the poet and his sometime wife, Annabella. “We’re slowly building,” says Miller.Many small companies unit or investment trusts include a few AIM shares. The SMP shares held by Framlington, for example, form part of the company’s Framlington 1,000 Smallest Companies investment trust, which shows growth of 952 per cent over the past five years, placing it at number 19 in a sector of 43 trusts.. Like other forms of venture capital investment, AIM’s potentially higher returns come only at the cost of higher risk.SMP’s major shareholder is its parent group, which owns 60 per cent of the company. Institutions such as Invesco and Framlington also have a holding.