Replicunts: the Future of Cyberfeminism - Liana Borghi, Pat Cadigan, Gwyneth Jones, Francesca da Rimini, Josephine Starrs, Sadie Plant Virtual Futures University of Warwick, 26-28 May 1995 VirtualFutures.co.uk The virtual revolution is also a sexual revolution. All New Gen plays with cyberspace amazons, and the Puppet Mistress weaves webs on the net. What are the virtual futures of gender and sexuality? What happens to masculinity and feminity as the Cyberflesh Girlmonsters come on line? Can patriarchy survive the emergence of cyberspace? Is anything straight in a non-linear world? Does the cyborg have a sex? Is a new sexual politics - or post-politics of some kind - gathering pace in the midst of the digital revolution?Cast: Virtual FuturesTags:

Today, cyber means war. But back in the 1990s, it meant sex — at least, the kind of sex you can have in a chat room. Why did the word change, and where did it originally come from?

It all started with "cybernetics," an obscure term popularized by a mathematician named Norbert Weiner in the 1940s. For his groundbreaking book Cybernetics, Weiner borrowed the ancient Greek word "cyber," which is related to the idea of government or governing. Indeed, the only time the word cybernetics had appeared before was in a few works of political theory about the science of governance.

In his writing, Weiner described what was at the time a pretty futuristic idea — that one day there would be a computer system that ran on feedback. Essentially, it would be a self-governing system. And for a long time, cybernetics remained the purview of information theorists like Weiner, and early computer programmers.

Science fiction author Pat Cadigan, whose novel Mindplayers is a cyberpunk classic, recalled that her first encounter with "cyber" was of a decidedly Weinerish variety. She told io9 that the first time she heard the term was when she was in high school in 1967, and somebody mentioned cybernetics. "I asked what cybernetics was. 'It has to do with computers,' was the answer. My eyes glazed over. For years, that was the only word I knew with the prefix 'cyber' in it."

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But all that changed a little over a decade later. Cadigan recalled:

One morning in 1979, I was getting ready for work and Gary Numan's "Cars" came on the radio. Afterwards, the DJ said, "There's some cyberpunk for you." He was making a joke; in 1979, the punk movement was in full flower but the chaotic noise of punk music was starting to evolve into electronic noise. The Bizarre Evolution of the Word "Cyber" 4 SEXPAND Still, that joke quickly became a reality. In the early 1980s, the cyberpunk movement took over science fiction, spurred by the popularity of the film Bladerunner and William Gibson's novel Neuromancer. Authors like Cadigan, Bruce Sterling and Rudy Rucker were writing mind-blowing stories about the merging of humans and computers. Cyber became a catch-all prefix that could be added to any word to make it sound cutting-edge. Cadigan noted that cyber "sort of supplanted the term 'digital' in some ways as an indicator of something that was high tech."

The 1990s: Decade of Cyber

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Are you a cyberpunk? This early 1990s poster explains it all to you. R.U. Sirius was a founder of Mondo 2000, the definitive futurist magazine of the early 1990s. And now he's posted a ton of snippets from it over … Read… Cyberpunk was a mostly-underground artistic style in the 1980s, but suddenly in the 1990s everything was cyber. As more and more people got internet access, the alien world of cyberspace from William Gibson's work became a household consumer item.

Richard Holden, a lexicographer with the Oxford English Dictionary, recently researched the history of cyber for the dictionary. He told io9 that the 1990s were a time when use of the word underwent rapid diversification:

The Oxford English Dictionary entry for the prefix cyber­- has evidence of its use going back to 1961 (in Cybertron, as it happens), but . . . it seems to have become particularly popular in the 1990s — we don’t have all that much evidence for its use before then. This seems likely to be a result of the invention of the World Wide Web, and the earliest evidence we’ve found for words like cyber-bully, cybercommunity, cybergeek, cyberlaw, cyberstalker, and, indeed, cybersex and cyberwar all comes from the early 90s. At that time you . . . seem to get a mix of positive and negative terms involving the prefix, which possibly reflects the mixed feelings people often have about the opportunities and threats a new technology can bring. Ben Zimmer, who writes about linguistics for the Wall Street Journal, agreed with Holden, noting that the seemingly-incongruous ideas of cybersex and cyberwar "grew up side by side." The earliest recorded use of the term "cybersecurity" came in 1989, the exact same year when the word "cyberporn" was coined. But neither term was dominant. In the heady days of the 1990s "information superhighway," before people got used to the idea that shopping, dating, and work could exist online, adding the prefix cyber to something made it seem like it was taking place in the gleaming, pixelated world inhabited by futuristic youth.

Had the iPhone come along in the 1990s, it's likely that we'd be calling our devices something very different. Cadigan said, "Terminology-wise, I find it interesting that we never had cyber-phones. The mobile/celluar phone became the cell and then evolved into the smart phone, not the cyber-phone." Just as today everything from buildings to phones can be "smart," in the 1990s anything could be cyber.

Including sex.

The Cybersex Moment

The Bizarre Evolution of the Word "Cyber" 56 SEXPAND Back in the days of AOL chat rooms, IRC channels, and text-only multi-user games, lots of people started having cybersex. Most of this furtive online activity involved no more than people talking dirty via text.

But cyber-pundits suggested that teledildonics and virtual reality sex were just around the corner. Soon, we would be having sex with chrome-plated dragon beasts in landscapes made of diamond flowers. And we would be stimulating our lovers 3,000 miles away with sex toys that plugged into both partners, sending the orgasmic shivers of one to the other via the internet.

Zimmer pointed out that Douglas Adams may have invented the idea of cybersex back in 1982, when he remarked in Life, the Universe and Everything that "Zaphod had spent most of his early history lessons plotting how he was going to have sex with the girl in the cybercubicle next to him." As more college age people began piling on to the internet in the mid-1990s, cybersex became trendy slang for what you did with your long-distance boyfriend using the university dial-up connection. And, like most slang, it quickly got shortened to cyber.

It is an internet radio, a cyberspace shuttle, and a kind of archive. LMB takes you on a journey through an almost forgotten web that is loud, colorful, often "personal", and doesn't care about standards. Though it might be forgotten by many, some parts of it are still there, waiting to be explored. And maybe we can learn something along the way. What?

LMB plays a continous stream of MIDI music. However these aren't just random tunes, instead the songs are taken from websites where they are being played as background music.

While playing a song the LMB cyberspace shuttle flies through a stream of images that have been taken from the website you're (kind of) listening to.