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Plant - Information War in The Age of Dangerous Substances (Lecture 1998)
A Plant lecture that links information war, chemical danger, and networked conflict to a cyberfeminist account of contagion, media, and technical power.
Archive condition
The page uses the canonical extracted text as its reading layer while preserving the original file paths as the archival source of record.
Core idea
The page matters because it makes cyberfeminism infectious rather than representational. Technical culture appears as a field of propagation, contamination, and uncontrolled spread.
The argument works by shifting attention from stable identities to vectors and carriers. Viruses, information systems, and cultural transmission become the basic units of analysis.
That matters because the section's account of technical subjects depends on abandoning the fantasy of sovereign control. Subjectivity is networked, porous, and exposed to what moves through it.
How to read this text
Read for where information and contagion stop being metaphors and become the actual operational vocabulary of the page.
Track how positivity is detached from optimism and turned into propagation, mutation, or viral relay. That inversion is the conceptual hinge.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 1
Information War in the Age of Dangerous Substances by Sadie Plant Lecture delivered at Public Netbase Media~Space on 22nd of April, 1998 I am working on a book on the subject of drugs. It is a very difficult subject to tackle and, obviously, it is very controversial.
Definition · paragraph 6
As I say, we can speak in very precise terms about how a computer network functions, but when we speak of ourselves, we tend to say very crude things like, "Are you taking it all in?" or "You’re absorbing information", in a very crude and imprecise vocabulary.
Definition · paragraph 4
These substances rarely play any kind of metabolic function in the plant: they are not nutritious, they do not aid it in any other way, they simply defend it against its predators. The chemical weapons can be surprisingly elaborate and also surprisingly vicious.
Definition · paragraph 4
These include tannins, flavanoids, terpenoides, saponins, photosynthesizers and alkaloids. These substances rarely play any kind of metabolic function in the plant: they are not nutritious, they do not aid it in any other way, they simply defend it against its predators.
Definition · paragraph 5
Once morphine had been extracted, it was quickly followed by the other constituents of opium which include codeine and quinine, and then caffeine and the majority of the other substances, too. By the end of the 19th century, many alkaloids and other compounds could be detached from their native plants and synthesized or at least extracted in the laboratory.
Appears in sections
Cyberfeminism, Xenofeminism, and Technical Subjects Primary section
Sadie Plant, Amy Ireland, and the technical, gendered, and synthetic subject positions running through the archive.