My argument is that theorizations of hypertext that employ the rhetoric of empowerment are essentially modernist theories, and thus of limited value in promoting feminist aims. Personally, when I read hypertext, especially literary hypertext, I do not feel empowered. What I feel is a pressing need to change the way I read. Thus, rather than asking whether or not hypertext empowers its users or thinking of ways to make hypertext an empowering technology, I think we ought to ask how it changes us--that is, how it changes individual readers and writers, how it changes the notion of literacy, how it changes pedagogy, how it changes educational institutions, and how it changes the world.