Understanding the New Sciences in the Pursuit of Life

Two readings – a paper written by Sandra Braman presented at IAMCR, Singapore, 2000 entitled ‘Informational Meta-technologies, International Relations and Genetic Power: The Case of Biotechnologies’ (Braman, 2000: 1-31) and Dan Schiller’s ‘From Culture to Information and Back Again: Commoditisation as a Route to Knowledge’ (Schiller, 1994: 93-115) were helpful in introducing the notion of ‘totality’ – the need to understand information as an integrated, transformative phenomenon, the basis for the re-composition and restructuring of all spheres of life. These insights augmented my own nascent thoughts on the informationalisation of life processes, clarified some of the core issues, and contributed to legitimising this line of enquiry in competing areas of concern.

Schiller’s study, described the information-intensive, new economy as the latest stage of capital accumulation, an aspect of a single historical process. Braman introduced the notion of IT as a meta-technology and described its chameleon-like qualities – its ability to take different shapes, its flexibility, its malleability, its material and physical existence at a variety of levels – as resource, as product, as input, as output, its functionality, its very mundane character on the one hand along with information as a key input in the manipulation of life forms, the creation of life and non-biological intelligence.

Additionally, at WACC’s Global Congress in the Netherlands in 2001, Anne Foerst, in a typically robust presentation, whisked the audience through the many interfaces between robotics, artificial intelligence, and their consequences for ‘personhood’, challenging our understandings of faith with questions such as ‘Can robots have human dignity?’ ‘What is the meaning of Creation, the Creator and personhood in the context of non-biological intelligence?’ While there is an element of rhetoric in such questions, given that it will take a while before we rub shoulders with such intelligence, the picture of the robot Kismet invoked bemusement and amusement, denoted change in the air, and challenged participants to deal with change from a faith perspective and in terms of totality.

Digital is all

Information has become a constituent element in all life processes by virtue of the ubiquity of digital code. It also makes sense to explore ethical issues and, for that matter, critical issues in the political economy of communications, from within the macro context characterised by the informationalisation of society. An example of informationlisation is the massive growth in what is called ‘tradeable information’ including on-line and new media services, entertainment and information services from stock market and commodity prices to weather patterns. Digitalisation has also hastened in-house convergences as for instance in the banking sector – the coming together of banking, brokerage, financial services, etc. that have, in turn, increased the circulation of capital in the trillions of dollars.

Digital code has also hastened marriages between previously separate technologies – IT and Biotechnology, IT and Military Technologies and so on, and the ethics of convergent technologies and questions related to the nature of power and property relations in this new era are not only fascinating but also deeply worrying. It is fascinating because IT-based applications have the potential to contribute to the democratisation of societies, the sharing of knowledge, access to opportunities, to the strengthening of human potentialities – and yet these applications can be adapted and manipulated for the purpose of control, and worse, destruction.

We live in an era characterised by what Robert Boyle has called the ‘homologisation’ of information (Boyle, 1996: 1-23) – almost all information, whether it be of a biological or non-biological kind has been digitised, and digital code has become the mother of all productive applications across a number of sectors that were previously characterised by separate technologies, processes, policies and regulatory mechanisms. IT, on the one hand, at a very mundane level, functions as a transport mechanism for carrying information like roads carry vehicles and pipes carry water. But the analogy ends there because unlike roads and pipes, IT is not just about flows, it is also the basis by which ideas and content are turned into products – intellectual property – and therefore into commercially valuable products.

The universality of code enables networking, convergence, translations, blurrings – and it is this quality and inter-functionality of code that is at the very core of the vast changes taking place in the networked societies in which we live. How do we begin to grapple with the many ethical implications arising – as the gene (nature) and practice (culture) become implicated within a single ‘information continuum’, as societies and the many distinct institutions and processes that define society become plugged into a global information grid and in turn is shaped by the logic of information?

An example of such blurrings in real life is the ownership of human biological and genetic material. There was a famous court case in 1990 – ‘Moore vs. the University of California’ – on the issue of patenting DNA sequences. John Moore was treated for a condition called hairy-celled leukaemia. During the treatment, his spleen was removed and unbeknown to him, researchers created a cell line (appropriately called Mo) from this excised organ, and patented their ‘creation’. When Moore found out, he demanded a share in the property rights. When that was not forthcoming, he took them to court. The California Supreme Court, in its ruling, rapped the knuckles of researchers for not taking prior consent, but it also denied Moore property rights to his cell line because the court decreed that the cell line was the researcher’s invention. In other words, as one critic has observed, Moore was the author of his destiny, but not of his spleen! (Boyle, 1996: Chapter 9).

Today computers are not merely used by bio-tech firms to store, analyse and retrieve data, they are being used to model, design, simulate and image products and processes, and re-programme life itself. Without digital technologies it would have been close to impossible to decipher the billions of bits of data being generated on the human genome. The social critic Jeremy Rifkin has observed that the operational language of the computer is the ‘…common language that is creating a seamless web between the information and life sciences and making possible the joining together computers and genes into a single, powerful, technology revolution’ (Rifkin, 1998: 85). Companies involved in making sense of human genetic data – genomics, have, in the wake of the economic downturn, moved into drug development, hoping that a miracle drug will jump-start share prices and increased investments in bio-informatics.

Ethics

The more we read, the more we came to the realisation that these new meta technologies unlike the previous generation of technologies, have the potential to exert a hegemonic influence on society. Not only has there been a colonisation of production by information, and the generation of substantive economic value today resulting from information-based applications and processes, but information has also invaded everyday life – the spheres of work, leisure, the daily rhythms of existence, relationships, understandings of self and the beyond – in subtle and not so subtle ways. For example, there are very few people today whose lives have not been affected by the response to 9/11. The turn towards increasing biometric and other forms of surveillance are bound to impact on one of liberalism’s core foundations – the autonomy of individuals and their individual freedom.

It is precisely because of the intimate nature, texture and depth of this embrace that we can call these technologies ‘hegemonic’. In other words, information has not only given rise to a coherent and systematic, globally applicable, world-view, it has become the principle of organisation at the core of a variety of societal institutions. As these technologies flood the market and tighten their embrace on our lives, it is of great importance that we find the time and space to query, critique and, if necessary subdue these technologies to the needs of humanity. IT can be assessed in terms of its technological, economic, occupational, spatial, cultural dimensions. What are some of ethical issues arising from the interfaces between these new technologies and life itself?

Biotechnologies in the life science industry have implications for food security, survival and the long-term well-being and health of people. Surveillance technologies – including the hard varieties used by the military, national security, the state and commercial actors, and soft varieties such as ID and credit cards make sure that we are all perpetually x-rayed, categorised and assessed in terms of our credit worthiness or as a security risk, and financial technologies linked to commodity markets are involved in the large-scale pauperisation of communities.
Biometrics, for instance, became a growth area in the aftermath of 9/11. It is basically an information-based system designed to verify the identity of a person by checking their unique imprint – fingerprint, pattern of the iris, palm print – against a database. Biometric technologies have become a feature at immigration control desks in the USA and elsewhere. Jeremy Bentham’s 18th century vision of an institutional architecture of control that could be universalised (the Panopticon that would allow seeing without being seen) is being realised today via a plethora of surveillance technologies resulting in the generalisation of control. We are being told that increased security is good for us. Actually we are not being told. These new structures are being imposed. We are expected to acquiesce.

The aftermath of September 11 and thedreadful wars in West Asia have revealed the extent to which information and information technologies have become vital to the maintenance of geo-political interests, the shaping of people’s expectations, understandings of freedom and the common good, the destruction of ‘recalcitrant’ peoples, economies and ways of life, and the universalisation of control via national and global security measures.
Not only has surveillance been stepped up, it has been legitimised with a raft of legislations that have extended the power of governments over their citizens. And of course we are all aware of the consequences of smart bombs, ‘collateral damage’, the militarisation of information and the fluid ease with which ordinary, peace-time mediations can quickly become transformed into war-speak. It is interesting to observe that every significant conflict that the US has been involved with since the Gulf War in 1991, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and now Iraq, has involved new generations of information-based weapons systems – from the laser guided video shows that were standard television fare during the first Gulf War to the satellite guided smart bombs that were used in Afghanistan to the digital battlefield and command and control systems that will eventually result in a total integration of cross-sectoral offence and defence capabilities.

Ownership

If ethics is a primary reason for involvement in this area, the issue of ownership of resources is a close second: the need to study, and engage with, the proprietorial knowledge environments and intellectual property regimes that have been legitimised through multi-lateral negotiations by the WTO and WIPO, and through legislations at country and regional levels, especially the USA and the EU. We are all aware that ownership of the world’s resources – biological and non-biological – is the basis for capital accumulation. The informationalisation of production is merely the latest stage of capital accumulation – the exploitation of labour and extraction of surplus remains the primary objective of capitalist growth – and integrated new technologies are a much more efficient way of increasing wealth than the previous generation of technologies. One of the characteristics of the present stage of capital is not only the globalisation of accumulation, but the enormous investments made to protect accumulation, and to invest knowledge with property status.

The relationship between the history and political economy of TRIPS and contemporary resource ownership patterns is a story that needs to be widely told. Vandana Shiva’s observation on TRIPS – that it was the result of negotiations carried out by premier trade bodies representing the USA, the EU and Japan – is pertinent to our discussions precisely because the 12 US corporations represented by the US Intellectual Property Committee at these discussions, including Monsanto, Du Pont, IBM, Pfizer, Merck, GM and Rockwell, are among the leading life science industries today and corporations involved in the manufacture of military hardware and software (Shiva, 1998: 85). Bio-informatics – the result of a merger between biology and information technology – is the basis for a massive multi-billion dollar industry featuring not only the traditional agro and pharma industries but also IT giants including IBM, Compaq, Motorola, Hitachi and others.

There is a rush to create software and hardware capable of processing the billions of bits of genomic data and another rush to create miracles cures and cash in on the windfall profits. Despite the fact that this industry is not in the pink of health at the moment, it is clear that it has enormous economic potential and it is therefore equally important that critical media researchers explore this area. There are a number of questions that need to be explored. What emerging structures of governance support these new economic interests? What are the ways in which new property regimes have begun to underwrite these developments? What global policies and governance institutions are supportive of the commodification and privatisation of genetic information including human biological information? (see Thomas, 2003: 3-12).

For those whose parameters for the study of a critical political economy of communications were mainly based on an interrogation of the politics, structures, processes, systems and rules pertaining to the extension, maintenance and dominance of the cultural industries – there is an absolute need to address not only the traditional structures of cultural and economic dominance in our globalised world but also the new sources of global cultural, economic and political power and the instruments being used to reinforce this power.

In other words, the lessons of the AOL-Time Warner merger and the decline of that partnership may, in the long run, be of less significance than IBM’s massive investments in the life sciences. And rather than deal with communication policy issues per se, it is imperative that we interrogate the source of property power in the knowledge economy – the structures, systems and instruments of intellectual property that have become the means of maintaining corporate dominance in the new economy.

Faith

A third area of interest is issues of faith that have been affected by or arise out of the interface between new technologies, communities and life. Ronald Cole Turner made a provocative suggestion that we need to understand genetic engineering as co-creation – human beings co-operating with Ultimate Reality in the act of creation (Cole-Turner, 1989: 68-75). With the benefit of hindsight contemporary innovation related to convergent technologies seems to have already become a public celebration of creation that is free from the strictures and structures of religion. However religion remains a central force in society and whether science likes it or not, there are two dimensions to this interface – what science brings to religion and what religion brings to science.

Religions in many parts of the world seem not to be interested in a dialogue with science. Science and scientists do not ordinarily figure in religion-speak and are remote, like Mars. This is a blind-spot that needs to be addressed. At the same time the direction of science is also problematic. It would seem that the majority of innovation in the new sciences deals with how to profit from human woes – AIDS, malnutrition – and it would seem that we have yet to discern the uses of new technologies or for that matter the purpose of creation or co-creation within a larger vision of sustainable development.

A classic example of this lack of discernment was the announcement by GM technologists in India that they had created a protein rich ‘protato’ that would solve India’s problems with malnutrition. Now of course there is no denying that malnutrition is a major problem and that extra protein would be of help. However, informed observers, one of whom dismissed this innovation as ‘another magic bullet from the trash can of the biotechnology industry’ (Vidal, 2003: 14), have pointed out that local cereals and pulses that have up to 26% protein content against the protato’s 2.5% would have been the answer – but for the mono-culture and scientific farming that have displaced and marginalised these indigenous food varieties.

There is a need to understand larger purposes and meanings in a world that is increasingly rendered intelligible by science and technology. What is the meaning of transcendence and immanence in the context of new technologies, is there the space to understand theistic continuity in human and technological evolution, what should be done to channel human creativity in the direction of health, wholeness and wholesomeness and how do we begin to rethink our metaphors and language so that we communicate the message of life in a credible manner?

And last but not least, issues related to new technologies and the new de-humanizations – the loss of freedom, creativity, control, autonomy, the new stratifications that have begun to define the resource rich and poor. Religious organisations simply cannot keep its distance from engaging with, understanding the new sciences – because its primary vocation is to ensure that Creation remains a gift for all.

Empowerment

My final concern is with issues related to science, technology and human freedom. How do we advocate life-affirming technologies? How can the great diversity and wealth of information technologies be used to make a difference to the lives of ordinary people? And how do we design a future in which technologies are subordinated to the needs and priorities of life, humanity and freedom? A core issue that is enmeshed with empowerment is that of the Commons – peoples access to and use of the memories and skills, the cosmologies and technologies, the spaces and places that help keep alive other traditions of science and technology, other ways of life.

Admittedly, the issues can be dauntingly complex and removed from the everyday life of faith communities. Faith communities typically opt for certainty. These new technologies are quite radically uncertain in their consequences – although I believe that this is a good enough reason for faith communities actively to begin to understand them, to re-centre knowledge and information on the pursuit of humanity and life.

Paper presented at the workshop on ‘The Impact of Cybernetics on (Human) Life: The Political Economy and Ethics of ‘Convergent Technologies’’, organised by the World Association for Christian Communication and the Advanced Institute for the Study of Life, Jirisan, Korea, 20-24 June 2003.

References

• Boyle, J. (1996). A Politics of Intellectual Property: Environmentalism for the Net. Http://www.wcl.american.edu/pub/faculty/boyle
  
• Boyle, J (1996) Shamans, Software and Spleens: Law and the Construction of the Information Society, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
  
• Braman, S. (2000). ‘Informational Meta-Technologies, International Relations, and Genetic Power: The Case of Biotechnologies’. Paper presented at IAMCR 2000, Singapore. See also the chapter by Braman, S. (2004) ‘The Meta-Technologies of Information’, in Braman, S. (Ed.), Biotechnology and Communication: The Meta-Technologies of Information, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers: Mahwah, NJ/London.
  
• Cole-Turner, R (1989). ‘Genetic Engineering: Our Role in Creation’, in Mangum, J. M. (ed.), The New Faith-Science Debate, Augsburg Fortress, Minneapolis and WCC Publications, Geneva.
  
• Rifkin, J (1998). The Biotech Century: How Genetic Commerce will Change the World. Phoenix, Orion Books Ltd., London.
  
• Schiller, D. (1994). ‘From Culture to Information and Back Again: Commoditization as a Route to Knowledge’, Critical Studies in Mass Communication, March.
  
• Shiva, V. (1998). Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge. Green Books/ The Gaia Foundation, Devon/London. See also Shiva, V. (2001), Patents: Myths and Reality, Penguin Books, India.
  
• Thomas, P. N (2003). ‘Digital Co-habitations: The Social Consequences of Digital technologies’, in Media Development 2/2003.
  
• Vidal, J ‘Scientists develop GM ‘protato’ to feed India’s poorest children’, The Guardian, 12 June 2003.

Pradip Thomas (PhD) is Associate Professor in the Department of Journalism and Communication at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia