After decades of ambivalence towards technology, many feminists are now finding a wealth of new opportunities, spaces and lines of thought amidst the new complexities of the 'telecoms revolution'. The Internet promises women a network of lines on which to chatter, natter, work and play; virtuality brings a fluidity to identities which once had to be fixed; and multimedia provides a new tactile environment in which women artists can find their space.

Cyberfeminism has, however, emerged as more than a survey or observation of the new trends and possibilities opened up by the telecoms revolution. Complex systems and virtual worlds are not only important because they open spaces for existing women within an already existing culture, but also because of the extent to which they determine both the world-view and the material reality of two thousand years of patriarchal control.

Network culture still appears to be dominated by both men and masculine intentions and designs. But there is more to cyberspace than meets the male gaze . Appearances have always been deceptive, but no more so than amidst today's simulations and immer- d,rns of the telecoms revolution. Women are accessing the circuits on which they rT'ere once exchanged, hacking into security's controls, and discovering their own posthumanity. The cyberfeminist virus first began to make itself known in the early 1990s.1 The most dramatic of its earliest manifestations was A Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century, produced as a digitized billboard displayed on a busy Sydnev thoroughfare.

Like all successful viruses, this one caught on. VNS Matrix, the group of four women artists who made the billboard, began to write the game plan for All New Gen, a viral cyber-guerrilla programmed to infiltrate cyberspace and hack into the controls of Oedipal man — or Big Daddy Mainframe, as he’s called in the game. And there has been no stopping All New Gen. She has munched her way through patriarchal security screens and many of their feminist simulations, feeding into and off the energies with which she is concurrent and in tune: the new cyberotics engineered by the giris; the queer traits and tendencies of Generations XYZ; the post-human experiements of dance music scenes.

All New Gen and her allies are resolutely hostile to morality and do nothing but erode political power. They reprogram guilt, deny authority, and have no interest in the reform or redecoration of the ancient patriarchal code. With Luce Irigaray (1985b: 75), they agree “how the system is put together, the system is put together, how the specular economy works”, are amongst the most important questions with which to begin its destruction.

This is the first discovery: that patriarchy is not a construction, an order or a structure, but an economy, for which women are the first and founding commodities. It is a system in which exchanges “take place exclusively between men”. Women, signs, commodities, and currency always pass from one man to another”, and the women are supposed to exist “only as the possibility of mediation, transaction, transference - between man and his fellow-creatures, indeed between man and himself” (Irigray 1985b:193). Women have served as his media and interfaces, muses and messengers, currencies and screens, interactions, operators, decoders, secretaries… they have been man’s go-betweens, in-betweens, taking his messages, bearing his children, and passing on his genetic code.