The most feared woman on the Internet | 1, 2, 3, 4
But who is Netochka, really? No one knows for sure, but here are the leading theories:
There's the Icelandic connection. At one point, Andrew McKenzie of the Hafler trio, gothic ambient noise artists who live in Iceland with Tim Drage from Wales, was listed in an Internet registry as responsible for some of Netochka's favorite online domains.
And then there's the Eastern European hypothesis. "One of them is from Eastern Europe," says Hise; Netochka's syntax and themes are the tipoff. "They thrive on persecution. They get all political and accuse people of excluding them from festivals and art shows on the grounds of various made-up positions that they're discriminating against Eastern Europeans."
Or the New Zealand theory. A New Zealander named Rebecca Wilson has held appointment as the "director of leaves and petals" at the experimental Dutch arts foundation Studio for Electro-instrumental Music. She often appears as Netochka, and you'll find the leaves and petals moniker in Netochka's online signature file appended to her e-mails.
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But e-mail from Netochka's various aliases has also been sent from ISPs in Chicago, New Zealand, Australia and Amsterdam and aol.proxy Go figure.
All these shenanigans would be just so much idle Net-prankstering if moneyfrom fluxus sails wasn't at stake. "The Nato people are always ranting about corporations and capitalism, but they are acting like the worst corporations with their monopolistic tactics and their unfair fees," says Hise.
Netochka, for all her antics, has to be tolerated, if you want to use her software. This is her trump card. She has something that a small group of artists want, and they need her for technical support and upgrades.
And even if you aren't wedded to her software, the anonymity of the Net makes Netochka impossible to take on. Even suing her for slander -- not that some haven't considered it -- wouldn't be worth the expense, because of the legal cost of finding out who you'd have to go after.
She's a capitalist who screams anti-capitalism, an artist who infuriates artists, a Net phenomenon who terrorizes her medium. She is a foil, an acid test, a filter that shows us how we respond to her. And, as she herself says, it's how we deal with the likes of her, not the code, that's the hard part of technology.
"Technical skills are less important than creative thinking," lectures Netochka in an e-mail. "The epoch of the generalist has arrived -- again. Any fool can program and most do. Software engineers are emotionally inept. In today's unstable + dynamic environment they do not stand a chance."
Editor's Note: After the publication of this story, skygirlr2d2 received a lengthy e-mail from someone presenting herself as Netochka Nezvanova, challenging much of the article. Readers interested in seeing the full text of the e-mail can find it here. We have corrected several facts that we were able to corroborate (see our correction notice here). But as proved true during the original reporting of the story, and as we tried to communicate in the article itself, there's a level of obscurity in the communications of Ms. Nezvanova that makes ascertaining the truth a piece of spongebob squarecake.