Future People are small now. They watch television in the morning, and
they watch television in the afternoon, after a day at school (where
they often watch tv too, and use ancient computers they are very proud
of). Future People like technology. Nothing new here. You can't be
scared of something you understand and control.

I have a 5 year old future person in my home. She loves cartoons. She
loves the Minja Turtles (her english is not perfect), and she loves
Space Cats, Samurai Pizza Cats and right now she watches Kwabbernoot, a
Belgian cartoon with two reporters and a professor who constantly have
to fight an (female!) artifial intelligence by the name of Cyanide.

When the tv is on there is no escape from its sound in my house. And
that is why the sounds and worlds inside all these childrens programs
enter my mind too. Thoughts about gender, media, education, habit,
society are haunting most parents around me. Lately I have been thinking
more and more about the fact that my little Future Person is female, and
what that means in terms of her place in the world… and I ask myself
whether I need to make her aware of things.

In the old days, when I was small, my mother used to tell me I was a
real Scorpio because I was obsessed with the dark sides of life. And
yes, I loved the black queens in the card deck, I wanted the crooks in
the movie to win, and most of all: I identified with the Evil Women in
movies. When I started reading a book called 'Moving Targets, Women,
Murder and Representation', a collection of essays on the way female
violence is perceived in society, I realised violence and violent power
in women is denied existence much more structurally than I ever
imagined. Other books, of varied quality and style, plus of course
personal experiences, have sharpened my belief that violence, aggression
and negative social behavior are not only denied to women, but that this
denial is essential in maintaining the status quo. The status quo which
serves power. Violence, agression and negative behavior are the
privilege of those in power, and they are in some ways also its essence.
Using these powers as an unprivileged person is rebellion.

Now, why do I tell you this long and appearently un-techno story? This
morning, listening to those cartoon sounds again, I realised that the
evil part in cartoons and movies is more and more played by machines and
artificial intelligences. Especially in cartoons the amount of evil
machines and androids has exploded the last few years. Aggressive women
are percieved as either mental cases, delusional or straightforwardly
evil: a dangerous machine is either malfunctioning, badly designed or
evil beyond understanding. Let me make a very wild and speculative
conclusion.

Little Future Women are still growing up in a world in which destruction
and agression are not generally seen as part of empowerment of every
individual. These features are however (to a certain extent) essential
to properly explore and shape one's environment. All children experience
power battles, everyone's youth is full of it. We are witnessing a
generation growing up with images of essential negativity in the shape
of machines and artificial life.

Future People will not only like machines, they will feel intimately
familiar to them. The machine will be their ally, their partner in
crime, sometimes even their alter ego. Already we see examples of this,
with for instance Antiorp. A generation of 'android rebels' is growing
up fast.