Tools suggestions :

In this essay, the battle chosen is feminism, it goes through the scope of sociology, cybernetics and cyber-feminism. It comes from the term “mother-nature” describing the power that rules real word forces. This neologism describe a cyber-politic movement where women takeover new technologies as weapons against patriarchy. To justify a cyber-matriarchy, this term highlight how women and machines are related in their nature to ally and fight patriarchy. The provocative term “Matriarchy” is used to highlight the attack power of the tools that a cyber-rallying could bring, as the wrath many women have.

This essay will focus on making changes in cyberspace, in order to make them reach and impact our lives. It will explain why cyberspace is an interesting place to fight through the numerous possibilities new technologies and virtual spaces offer.

The example of AI algorithms technologies is probably the most actual and meaningful one.  It will then be the main case study of how machines can be transformed into weapon tools. 

Then, the essay will explore more deeply what these cyber-manipulating-weapons would imply.

In the late XXs, In computation, women were less than 20% of the digital workforce in industrialized western. Computers are now one of the numerous domains stormed by men, which is ironic when it’s a woman that created programming. [1] 
Siri, Apple's AI, released in 2011, only had a female voice available until 2021. 
Like many AI services, Amazon’s AI has a feminine name : Alexa. Giving a name to the bot humanizes the algorithm. So that we identify with it and confide in it more easily.
This shows that a personal “agent” was only imagined as a woman. [2] 
Meanwhile, ChatGPT's more deeply research-based AI, is often identified as man. In cybernetics as society, the man found responses and the woman assisted.
Humans can’t stop projecting gender on machines. They fetishize the picture of the object they got instead of the object itself. To design an effective human-machine interaction, cybernetics had to conserve the real life society rules to understand simulations. [3] 

This essay will focus on how new technology can fight patriarchy in cyberspace. 
The examples cited above are part of that. According to the Computer Security Resource Center, cyberspace is “the information environment that consists of the interdependent network of information systems infrastructures including the Internet, telecommunications, computer systems, embedded processors and controllers.” [4]
 
Even if cybernetics influence social behaviours, “how feminist fights in cyberspaces impact real-life interaction” is out of the scope of this essay. 
The intention of this paper is to study the actuality. “New technologies” related to emerging media and innovations, such as AI, social networks, business, cyborgs, clouds, cybersecurity, etc. All located in cyberspace.

Human behaviours impact cybernetics, cybernetics influence our ways of thinking and habits [5]. Since patriarchy never stopped dominating the real world, should feminist fights move into another dimension? In an intangible space where political power, guns and big muscles are useless?
What are women's advantages? In the 80s, Donna Haraway incredibly well explained how women take care of everyday life better than men but get away from knowledge, just like cyborgs who are reduced away from their real capacities.
Women are intrinsically linked to machines, they are modified machines to serve patriarchy and capitalism. To survive from domination, they developed their tools to adapt to this constantly evolving cycle society. [6] 
This is how Donna Haraway inspired the principle of the “Mother-Machine” (M-M), an ideal feminist movement where women would voluntarily ally with machines to create tools to fight patriarchy.

For Sadie Plant, living in a male dominant reality led women to get more solid inside their realities. She argues that cyberspace is a space where feminine modes of thought can prosper. As we move into an increasingly complex post-cyber era, vertical relationships between humans and machines and between machines themselves turns into exponential connections. This whole new reality offers the opportunity for women to liberate. [7]
The powerfulness of a such movement was established by Bill Nichols in 1988. He showed how in cyberspaces, we are submitted by a staging hyperreality we automatically accept. How these new interactive realities can get us to emancipate social forces. [8] 
Then, to construct intelligent artifacts, The M-M would take up the manipulating codes and rules of cybernetics highlighted by Lucy Suchman in 1987, with a more realistic design. [9]

How are machines and tools related? Machines make its user transparent while using it, but tools have one specific purpose. A phone will show what the user's point : having a good time in front of cat’s videos or insulting women on forums. Things you can’t do with a cultipacker. Today, one of the technologies that influences our life and way of thinking the most is algorithms.
They are biased by beliefs, politics, morality and culture made up by patriarchy. Then, the most powerful attack should be deflecting these algorithms.

So, How can feminist transform algorithms with The M-M?
On Reddit, a user asked the community how he can help his dad get away from his unhealthy conspiracy theories. Thanks to people’s advices, he watched opposite themed videos from his dad’s YouTube channel. In this way, he manipulated the YouTube search engine while putting new data in its algorithms. [10] The user told his act​​ in the “Am I the Asshole?” section, suggesting that his action may be unethical. This “manipulating” act can be compared as a “hack”.
But what if a “Search Engine Manipulation” is made for a good cause, can’t it resonate with the “Hacker Ethic” codified in 1984 by Steven Levy? [11]
Consequently, The M-M suggests the use of SEM as a tool against patriarchy in cyberspace with the use of the “hack” while putting feminist and/or misandrist data in the big black data box of AI algorithms.

In a more “ethical way”, many writers as Emily M Blender in 2021 suggested inscribing into the law the obligation to verify the values brought up by the datasets we use. [12]
This example highlighted well the potential of how putting good data in algorithms can be a powerful tool to influence people. 

So what is the next step? What are our possibilities with these cyber-manipulating-weapons?  What do they imply?

If The M-M movement gained momentum, some ideologies very fed from algorithms as masculinism would tend to disappear. 
As Winner Langdon asked in 1986, we should look at: why some revolutions didn’t work? And why was the computer revolution the most powerful one? [13]

For Kevin Robins in 1995, cyberspace is a place for us to play pretend and live out fantasies that are not possible in real life. [14] Can the M-M do more than fake it until we make it? 
Ruha Benjamin's 2018’s proposals inspired the M-M movement: thinking about a future where new technologies can be tools against inequalities. Break this vicious circle where technologies reinforce discrimination, to transform them into weapons to dismantle them and change these visions. [15]

In a post-cyber era, where cybernetics runs the world, women face a political identity crisis. But changes can’t happen without a cyber-woman-coalition. Like were cyberfeminism, then now the Feminist AI Alliance and Data Feminism movements. [16] 

In 1994, Gilles Deleuze said that sedentary structures can easily be found and destroyed. Street resistance is no more enough, we then need online resistance with the help of hackers.
“It’s time to take advantage of the fluidity of the electronic world !” [17]

 Anaïs Gastineau, 2024