I was recently given a piece of writing by Lee Worden which is to be published in West of Eden: Communes and Utopia in Northern California. It is titled "Counterculture, cyberculture, and the Third Culture: Reinventing civilization, then and now." It's worth talking about here because it deals with authority and counter-forces, protecting or upholding rights, the role of government and when it should be embellished, reevaluated, checked, or diverted, and how to integrate/evaluate and regulate technological advancements.
Worden tracks a pretty surprising network of people from the mid 60's Whole Earth foundation; through the Apple, Wired, and all of the Dot-com 90's madness; into the free culture movement that spawned; and up to the current (shocking) synthetic biology movement and its anarchist twin, the Biohack movement. I was surprised by the connections, and it took a while to pull them all together. I made this chart to track some of it.
Lee points out surprising "ironies" (hypocricies?) in the ideologies held by Steward Brand and his fellow of hippies-turned-"Digerati," but finds some consistent threads as well: dismissal of regulation + acceptance of capitalism, staunch individualism at the expense of designated responsibilities and/or expense of accoutability. "Without the hindrance of rules and regulations," and, as I have written on the chart, with a "vehement embrace of the Enlightenment values of reason, individual initiative, and the grand narrative of progress through scientific discovery"1
"A fundamental value is being obscurred in these visionary projects: technological innovations are not a unalloyed good; they can have immense consequences for people and communities not involved in their creation, and it is not liberating to impose massive changes on passive victims without their participation."2
I support many DIY movements. Let's look at a few which are active in the Bay Area: backyard gardening/urban farming, cooking and preserving, making/modifying clothing, metalworking/woodworking. These are not new skills. They are old skills which have been "lost" only in recent generations. In fact, many of these DIY movements are reactions to the disempowering effects of technological advances, tied in with economic globalization, on humans. This is distinctly different from the technological utopianism and techno libertarianism of Biohackers and Hacktivists and what-have-yous of the open-culture movement.
My sister Faith Gilbert, an active participant in the San Francisco (& soon, NYC) DIY movement, a farmer-in-training and an organizer of "re-skilling" events, among other things, weighed in on the differences in an email:
I know well the feeling of empowerment that comes with acquiring knowledge, skills, and the ability for deft creation. Based on my limited understanding of BioHack ideology, there are certainly connecting threads between these two forms of social action. Both are formed as reactions to a system that seeks to privatize knowledge - either knowledge about producing food and other essentials, or knowledge of complex scientific and biological processes. Behind both movements lies an element of distrust: the system that owns this knowledge (be it Monsanto or the more vague government-sponsored technocracy) does not have our best interest in mind.
However, while distrust of the powers that be may be a main uniting factor, the use, desire for, and definition of power seems to be the main difference. The idea behind open sourcing of biotechnology is that if a super-powerful institution has the ability to alter and create life forms, individuals should also. In other words, the individuals involved want the same level of power that the government holds, and the overall goal is to increase one's individual might. Second, the idea seems to be that rules and regulations, while ignored by larger institutions, should not be applied to individuals either.
In the DIY movement, at least in my experience, works by the opposite logic. First of all, the knowledge in question - growing, cooking, stitching, building, creation of all sorts - these skills are the collective birthright of humanity, a set of skills that we ourselves created. No institution or set of institutions is allowed to strip them from ordinary humans and then sell them back to us. [Possible metaphor: BioHack thinking is that the Man is sitting on a big pile of cookies and not giving any away; BioHackers decide to publish the combination to the lock on the cookie jar. In DIY thinking, the Man stole our grandma's cookie recipe, is using it to sell millions of cookies (a few addictive substances and poisonous chemicals have been added in the meantime), and rather than support that asshole, we learn how to make cookies for ourselves].
I do think that protecting old knowledge that has sustained us for all time is different than claiming a right to new knowledge that may be very dangerous in practice. It's wisdom we're reclaiming, not intellectual property. However, I think a bigger, more important difference is that anyone can make bread or grow lettuce, and the damage one can do with this knowledge is very small. Not everyone can hack a system, understand complicated data, and use it to fuss around with living things. A very specific kind of person with specific training and intelligence can do that, and the damage one can do is, well, immeasurable. Therefore, that knowledge will always be held in near or total monopoly, and opening it up to a tiny slice of the public will not make us any safer or more free."
Lee writes that the "technocracy" that we live under "trusts technologically smart people to make the best decisions about how and whether to reinvent the world. Technolocially smart people have created internal combustion and its apocalyptic climatic consequences; X-Rays, Thalidomide and DES; uncounted ubiquitous pollutants, toxins and carcinogens; and, of course, the apocalyptic dangers of the atomic bomb."3
Physical computing/electronics and open source software are a few areas I am familiar with which run into the grey area between that which is known and that which we have only yet dreamed up, consequences unknown. I am dipping into the field of wearable computing from (what I think of as) a harmless standpoint: I like the notions of creating games and systems that promote more attentive interaction with the living world. And yet…
Recently in my "Active Wearable Objects" class, we had a guest lecture. Lynne Bruning, who describes herself as a 'Textile Enchantress,' showed her work and work by other artists, electrical engineers, chemists, and computer scientists. Some of it was benign and unsurprising (electronically enhanced, runway-type clothing such as dresses with multicolored LEDs) but some accomplished things we students had never seen (outside of sci-fi). She showed a series of protoypes that target the medical/sports industries and do things like monitor your movements, heart rate, and ingestion in order to send continuous feedback to your healthcare provider.
A question was raised: "What if, some day, our insurance companies demand that we wear one? What if they require one of those someday, to subscribe to their coverage, and then they create a contract to terminate or significantly reduce your coverage immediately if you breach certain rules… like eating a cheeseburger when you've been diagnosed with high blood pressure?" We all stared at the slide for a minute, contemplating.
For every subsequent new invention she showed us, there was another challenge, another 'what if?' A shirt that sends continuous feedback on your heartrate to your love, via his/her smart phone.
"Oh, I get it—to know that you are sleeping soundly if they're away? Cute," I said.
Lynne laughed at me. "Or… that your heart is beating suspiciously fast when you told him/her you would be sleeping soundly?"
"Oh."
The point is, new inventions can be used in uncontrollable ways. They can be "radically disruptive inventions that pull us all into a new world in which we have to adjust to a new texture of daily life whether we like it or not."4 And I would even say that bringing it back to 'lifestyle changes' significantly waters down the reality. It is not always a question of adjustment; sometimes the food you eat to live, your health, and the land you live on are at stake. Technology has not yet offered solutions in time with the problems at hand.
When it comes to biology, and the creation/modification of organisms which, unlike machines, can reproduce and breed into the environment, it seems that a system for assessing risks and containing experiments is absolutely necessary.
A "Do-ocracy," Worden says, is "an ethic of self-organization in which anyone who decides to do something is empowered to do it, and to make the decisions about how to do it… anyone who objects… has less say than I do because I'm the one who's putting the work into making it happen."56 This is effective for getting things done fast, but, Worden cautions, it "doesn't work well for resolving conflicts between people who want different things to happen; it doesn't protect people who have less ability to do things because of unequal access to time, or to resources, or unequal physical ability; and it is no help to people who believe that certain things just shouldn't be done at all." It's also, he says, "the way that technology is managed in the current world. The decisions to whether to create a new technology are in the hands of the creators and their funders."7
What should a system for enforcing accountability and responsibility look like? Ugh. I'll have to get back to that one, I've got nothing.
1 Lee Worden, Counterculture, cyberculture, and the Third
Culture: Reinventing civilization, then and now. Chapter from unpublished manuscript, 2010. 14.
215
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
6 16
7 15
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