The Futures We Lost, The Futures We Still Imagine: Cyberfeminism After Hope

Meda Urbonaitė

Y2K is just one more example of the way in which capitalist reality is indistinguishable from fiction: in capital’s world of simulation and cybernetic anticipation, all that is solid has melted into the abstract and virtual. Which is not to subscribe to some melancholy postmodern story about derealization so much as to point to ways in which virtual agencies - such as potentials - have the most material effect imaginable — Ccru

In the past, the grand vision of the future was essentially a great dislocation from the present: that grand vision is no longer available to us — Mark Fisher, K-Punk

Two days ago — on 10.07.2026 — the European Commission initiated proceedings against Meta over allegedly addictive design practices on Instagram and Facebook (The European Commission 2026). People around me, who are not children or teenagers that EU wants to “protect”, lacking their own volition of resistance, install apps that limit their phone usage. I am yet to develop the will to foster this resistance myself — I am yet to consciously give up social media, the constant stream of information, opinions, and “rage-baits” that leave me rationally overwhelmed and emotionally exhausted, suspended in the condition of the postmodern human. I want to give up my iPhone, inherit a brick-phone — not a bricked phone — yet downloading an app that supervises me into bricking my own phone is where I draw the line.

At the same time, the Neo-luddite hysteria, that technology is leading humans towards destruction, that technology is ultimately and inherently “bad” — does not move me one centimetre. Moving to a village with sheep — of course, as a trad-wife or a woman living out my cottage-core dreams, given that I am a woman, and not a Ted Kaczynski (and here I am, of course, ironic, and trying to point out the ideologies and aesthetics that pick up momentum in the cyber space) — has been planted in my head by the same device I seek to avoid. I want peace and quiet, inside my body and outside of it — or perhaps in both, where my mind penetrates the virtual, physically located in my hand or in front of me, fusing through my fingers as transitional tunnels. I live in hope of freeing my head, of leaving the virtual and penetrating the actual, the present. The present is how I see the future.

Yet even off-grid, the Earth keeps spinning, with all its gravity refusing to allow levitation above what exists — not only physically (or literally) but socially, economically, technologically. Technology continues to define our lives as humans. Even if I reject seeing it, I close my eyes, I brick my phone, I move away — it still exists; it remains an important agent, even if not an all organising force in a techno-deterministic sense. Then I can become melancholic instead, in the Fisherian sense, and begin a disillusioned rejection of the fact that there has been a change — things have changed, and so should I. The change is irreversible, and I can spend my life longing, yearning, bathing in nostalgia for what would have happened (again, in a very Fisherian sense).

Does it not all sound pessimistic?

The discourse around technology, the internet, and the digital and virtual has always been polarised. We have many groups positioning themselves differently in relation to technological development: Luddites, Neo-luddites, Cyberfeminists, Accelerationists, Cyberpunks, and many others. Yet the more I engage with content online, the less discourse I see of people defining themselves through these categories. But what I see is not all there is. Here, my eyes are closed, yet not by my own conscious volition. I see what I subconciously want to see; I am digitally catered for. Everything that exists in the virtual is what I allow to exist within my own virtual universe. And all I see, is frustration, anger, hopelessness. I want cyberfeminists to exist, yet they do not appear in my own digital landscape. Or is it rather that there are indeed not many of them anymore?

Cyberfeminism has arguably lost much of its earlier momentum. There are various explanations for it: its splintering into other digital/technological feminism(s), unclear definition of the movement, technology, internet, cyberspace not manifesting into the utopian futures imagined by cyberfeminists. I think the easiest explanation or the most seductive hypothesis would be that cyberfeminism cannot exist in a climate of hopelesness — Cyberfeminism, at least in its early manifestations, depended on a belief that technology could still become a site of liberation. Its political energy came from the possibility of alternatives — from the refusal to accept existing technological arrangements as inevitable. All it aims at is drenched in optimism — it is the celebration of technology; unbouded creativity of how we can penetrate the cyberspace in the hopes of liberation; playfulness; subversion; embrace of technology, with all it could provide, reshape, shelter, and free. It was a promising time in many spheres: music, literature, movies (in genres like Sci-fi); sillicon valley, tech-bros emerged, cyberfeminists emerged.

My group members and I, the more we dug into cyberfeminism, the more confused we became with that it is and what it asked for, in a form of manifestos, that are usually written in a demanding register. Maybe it is difficult to understand, what cyberfeminism is, not because it is not well-defined — as it is the idea of it — but rather, that we, Gen Z, do not share the hopefully subversive sentiment. Perhaps as a woman born at the cusp of Y2K, it is more difficult for me to position myself in the discourse, I could not fill the cyberfeminist shoes, as my feet were still too small in 2000. My feet did not even exist in the late 80s, when the movement picked up momentum, defined by the technological changes of that time. It was exactly the movement that imagined the century my groupmates and I were born into to be different from what it actually became — it was the Australian artist group VNS Matrix that launched their Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century in 1991. But they were not the only ones hoping— it was also independent academics, such as Sadie Plant, all influenced, more or less, by Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto. Technology promised transcendence from the procrustrian stencils of the binary, not only that of gender but also that of subjectivity and objectivity, human and non-human. First computer programmers, aka women, hoped to reclaim their position in relation to technology, use it as liberatory tool, connect with others on the internet, hope for better futures, in a virtual space, where nobody knows if you are a dog, as Wendy Chun would call it. Moreover, technology could be interpreted as “feminine”, liquidy, slippery, inviting and all-sheltering, rather than spiky, phallic, killing and conquering — the first tool was a container, a basket, not a spear. Essentialist? Sure, yet, the cyborg goo does not split into two, is all encompassing, non-binary. Pushing for essential and reductive features of femininity can be seen as subversive, rather than echoing the patriarchal delusions of what it is to be a woman*.

To this day, oozing in nostalgia — even if we, with feet that had only just begun to grow in the new millennium, were never part of it — for the futures we have been promised, the collectively high state of mind, its neurons sparking with excitement, hope, excitement, utopian thinking. Now we find ourselves in a landfill of non-consensual-deep-fake-AI-generated explicit content, 90% of the deepfakes featuring women (Jagielnicka 2025). While VNS Matrix pushed for female porn in the 90s, in the 2020s we are now non-consecually bombared with such content, like Grok of X aimlessly generating explicit content. And so, women further shy away from AI — now the main topic in technological debates — seeing it as oppresive, rather than liberating. How can one, in a setting like this, be hopeful of the wonders of technology and internet?

I remember my first interactions with both utopian thinking about technology and the internet — the hopeful sentiment was there. My childhood visions were almost solarpunk-esque. I loved imagining what the Earth would look like — even before learning about vertical farming, and later its inefficiencies. I imagined panes of plants around, plants on glass houses — sun rays reflected by the glass, absorbed by the plants; I imagined myself living to 150 because of technological advancements; smart cities that catered to human needs, yet green, clean, and inviting. The internet unfolded to me like a magical space: video games, forums, and Lithuanian equivalents of MySpace allowed me to interact with friends, before I received my first messages from older men, witnessed games shutting down, or encountered the introduction of paywalls. At 12, all I wanted to be was a millennial working at BuzzFeed, a YouTuber, or someone famous on Tumblr. Cyberfeminism was already experiencing its winter then, although to me the internet still appeared as a teenage haven — until I became conscious of my own positionality and witnessed the internet molding itself into a space that was equally unsafe for women* as the poorly lit tunnels of our cities.

For Fisher, for example, a collaborator with Sadie Plant, one of the mothers of cyberfeminism, located first wave of “pessimism” or rather, lack of hope, already in the 80s — although at the end of it we see cyberfemisnim emerging. For Fisher, it is 80s, given the introduction of neoliberal constraints. In 1976, Apple released the Apple I, contributing to the emergence of the personal computer era, although it was mainly marketed to hobbyists. Over the following decades, the computer moved from the workplace into the domestic sphere. Consequently, the public penetrated the private, and the private became increasingly public. In 1982, Time Magazine named the personal computer its “Machine of the Year.” With the arrival of the personal computer, the very understanding of what a computer was began to shift: it was no longer merely a specialised, work-related tool located in the workplace, but became imagined as a medium for creativity, selfrealisation, and individual freedom. By entering the domestic sphere, the computer also absorbed activities that had previously been considered separate from work. It promised new possibilities for participation in public life and even democratic processes. At the same time, the computer appeared to offer anonymity and freedom.

In 2006, “You” was named Time Magazine’s Person of the Year. The slogan displayed on the computer screen — “You control the information age” — conveyed the idea that the individual possessed control over technology, rather than being controlled by it. This emphasis on the individual is closely connected to neoliberal ideas. Instead of looking for social, historical, or infrastructural causes, problems become attributed to individuals themselves — for example, when disease mapping focuses on “Patient Zero” or individual contacts rather than on the conditions that enable the spread of disease in the first place. Computers, and the internet — or, more precisely, the network — shifted away from the understanding of the network as a collective of people and towards the individual who interacts with and feeds into the network.

Even when the use of a computer appears individual, the concept of a “networked personal computer” is an oxymoron. As Wendy Chun argues in her Updating to Remain the Same, computers constantly communicate with other computers through packets and protocols within networks. “Our networks leak”: the information that leaks is usually encrypted, yet these network connections remain invisible and difficult for users to fully understand. Furthermore, data is collected for advertising, profiling, and surveillance purposes. User behaviour can be analysed and predicted — from personalised advertising to state surveillance, as demonstrated by the Snowden-case. So, one could assume, internet, and its host — the personal computer — have been doomed from the start.

But that would be the goat-way-out: One cannot love the structures that constrain them; But if these structures exist, and are exaggarated with the development of technology, should one take the goat-way-out — paralysed, with one’s legs in the air, surrendering one’s agency? It is easy to let oneself be absorbed by a sink hole of pessimism and contrarianism and see technology as a threat, at least in the neoliberal, or postcapitalist, or technofeudalist society, the state of giving up strips off one of agency, in a setting, that profits off of this lack of agency. However, at the same time, being optimistic can easily be conflated with being blind. Žižek in his book Against Progress urges us to see behind the tricks of the magicians, squashing birds for the sake of the trick, namely, to see the hidden costs of progress — exploited or expropriated labour of the vulnerable and destroyed ecosystems. This also means us looking at the materiality of the digital — the loud and thirsty data centers, raw materials needed for our technology to exist. Embracing the virtual without the material is simply oxymoronic. Cyberfeminist utopian thinking might have overlooked these material contradictions, and perhaps that is what made its hope unsustainable. Overseeing the dumped waste generated by the strides progress, leaves us in a fake sense of hope, where one can imagine having children on an Earth on fire, as Žižek points out.

This does not mean we have to remain pessimistic to be critical. Maybe hope should change its insides — while cyberfeminism is under continous trials of resusictation, it could never be the same as it used to, after the veil has been lifted. But that does not force one to become pessimistic in Fisherian sense, with the refusal of the change of the very object. Rather, in the face of threats, such as the European Union reading our messages or AI further sharpening social divides and rearticulating same inequalities, we can hope in the form of demands (and manifestos are the perfect genre for it). The value of cyberfeminism was not rooted in correct predictions, what the future could look like. The movement was valuable because it advocated for the imagination of futures. In a time when technology increasingly feels like something that happens to us rather than something we shape, the radical act is not rejecting technology, but recovering the capacity to imagine what else it could become. One can be hopeful, even after discovering the killed birds for the sake of the illusion, such as that of free internet.

Technology itself is not an agent until we make it one, but neither is it a neutral instrument. It is a social, material, and political arrangement that shapes possibilities while simultaneously being shaped by human action. It is not self-automated; it is not a “floater” in Lucy Suchman’s sense. It remains in the hands of the humans who create, maintain, and propagate it. It influences us as much as we influence it. Perhaps hope is no longer about unlimited ideals and utopias established on the web, but about alternative futures: what technology, when corrected, contested, or further developed, can offer us. We have to let go of previous hopes, of imagined futures that are now lost, and create new ones. Resist, encrypt, demand.

Pessimism and hopelessness function as a virus of (post)capitalist society: Hopelessness is not only a natural emotional response to contemporary conditions, but also what allows the mechanisms through which those conditions reproduce themselves. What we can learn from cyberfeminism, is not what futures it imagined, but rather, how we have to act in the moment of imagining futures — be subversive, evokative, and untamed in creativity. To resurrect the movement would mean to imagine it anew. Once we stop hoping, alternative futures disappear before they have the possibility of becoming real — even recursively.

Cite as: Meda Urbonaitė. (2026). The Futures We Lost, The Futures We Still Imagine: Cyberfeminism After Hope. Internet Manifestos Seminar Blog.