ABSTRACT
This essay is written in response to a number of analyses from the past few years of the new computer culture, which I find very unsatisfactory, but whose approaches have become common currency.3 The two most obvious elements of this consensus have been, first, that computers are to be understood as a component of postmodern culture, for which older categories like 'class', and 'exploitation' are hardly relevant; and second, that the most obvious strands of digital culture – computer games, virtual reality, and cyberpunk – should be conceptualised first and foremost as gendered, about which the primary question is whether they are ineliminably masculinist, or whether there are 'gaps' for feminist appropriations. This analytic terrain is worryingly narrow and misleading – not least because of its almost wilful ignoring of the history of computers.
