Was Valerie Solanas The Genius Behind the Internet?

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By Matt Haber

June 3, 2008 | 12:39 p.m

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via warholstars.org

Today's Los Angeles Times features an op-ed by A.S. Hamrah about the 40th anniversary of Valerie Solanas' assassination attempt on Andy Warhol. (We stumbled upon this via The New York Times' Opinionator blog.)

Ms. Solanas, a playwright who formed a group called S.C.U.M. ("Society for Cutting Up Men") and wrote its manifesto (she is also widely credited as being the group's only member), shot Mr. Warhol in his office. After summarizing the details of the shooting, Mr. Hamrah describes Ms. Solanas' manifesto: "a mixture of social philosophy and fine shtick, her work has the rare virtue of seeming at the same time totally insane and totally right."

Here Mr. Hamrah speculates on how the late Ms. Solanas (she died in 1988) may have predicted our current wired age:

It was in 1968 that Warhol first noted that in the future, everyone would be famous for 15 minutes. But in 1967, Solanas had prefigured that with a warning of her own. In the future, she wrote in her characteristic mode of threat-laced irony, 'it will be electronically possible for [a man] to tune in to any specific female he wants to and follow in detail her every movement. The females will kindly, obligingly consent to this.' These twin predictions sum up the world we find ourselves in now, the world of reality TV, Facebook, Twitter, the entire free-range panopticon. Solanas made her prediction in a footnote to 'SCUM Manifesto,' but the whole essay is like that.