Seduced & Abandoned The Body in the Virtual World - The Feminine Cyberspace

Provenance

Self-transcribed from the recording's audio/video with Whisper ASR, then drawn from the frozen curation of the CCRU oral archive. The identifiers below fingerprint the exact source transcript files.

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Adjudicated APPROVED 2026-07-11 (basis: stage-1 acceptance ruling — lane unclear approved for opus-only hosting; mp3 tier deferred pending a disk volume). Series: standalone. Source: video original (.mp4).

Timestamped map

These jump targets come from timestamps preserved in the source transcript, so they work as navigational anchors rather than editorially invented section labels. Timings are approximate — they mark where a passage begins, not exact word timing.

• 00:00:30

  Too many pieces of paper and not enough time, so I'm going to go for the information density approach and throw lots of things out, but as people know, I will be here all weekend, so I hope there'll be lots of time for discussion both after I've finished just now and also over the rest of the weekend. There's a couple…

• 00:09:56

  a third phase where it gets far more complicated just as of course we could expect an age of complexity to get more complicated and it seems that it is with digitization with which all the gaps in the material Freud is famous for calling women gaps in the material all the gaps in the material begin to replicate…

• 00:18:35

  I just want to throw out a few quotes, first of all from Marshall McLuhan, who made this point, many years obviously before it was widely taken up. Again on the theme of drugs, particularly psychedelics, it is not, he says, uncommon for people on these trips, especially with new chemical drugs as opposed to organic…

• 00:24:33

  Because she dreamed cyberspace as though the neon grid lines of the matrix waited for her behind her eyelids. If this was the case, if indeed woman does have some implicit prior connection to the matrix, then it would be hardly surprising that women have so quickly become such advanced and fearless practitioners…

• 00:29:17

  It seemed to me that we started with a history of women's exclusion from technology and ended up with a claim that the history of cybernetics was in fact a history of feminization and a marking out of the history of women's exclusion from technology. A marking out of women's affinity with the machine. And I wanted…

• 00:34:29

  It's like, do they think we're going to come in and say, you know, this place needs a few plants? And then, you know, but see, like when I get up in the morning, I don't think, well, here I am, it's morning, and here I am, Pat Cadigan, woman. I'm getting up. You know, it's depending on how hungover I am. You know…

• 00:38:35

  The point now that's happening is that all matter that has been really previously excluded from that notion of identity is itself effectively having a say. It's itself turning on. Self-organising systems don't actually ask man for permission. They don't say, is it desirable for this to happen? That is precisely…

• 00:43:25

  It's like the white that contains a little seed of the dark, and the dark that contains a little seed of the light. You know, it's like that's us, you know. It's like we're hard-headed realists on this side, and we are, you know, worshippers of all the gods and whatever on the other side. So we'll be spiritual robots.