1.Kickstopper! - Putting a Stop to Synthetic Biology Pollution
2.Counterculture, Cyberculture, and the Third Culture: Reinventing Civilization, Then and Now
EXTRACT: The biggest risk is that we do nothing and let the synthetic biologists move ahead with releasing hundreds of thousands of synbio seeds, setting an eerily glowing precedent that many other commercial biotech firms and informal biohackers alike will follow - using kickstarter and other crowdfunding sites to do an end-run around oversight of risky technologies.
NOTE: This grow-your-own glow-in-the-dark-plant project, made possible by crowd sourcing, is clearly a PR stunt intended to make synthetic biology seem fun and cool and open to everyone, and in the process turn this extreme form of genetic engineering into something normal, domesticated, and even consumerist.
The people behind it are also keen to emphasise that it is not the work of any corporation or academic laboratory, and this do-it-yourself aspect of the synbio movement is yet another way that synthetic biology is being made to seem not just cool in a geek-chic kind of way, but free of big institutions and so somehow anti-authoritarian - repeated parallels are drawn by the "bio-hackers" with those working with open source software.
But this ignores profound questions about who gets to decide what our world will be like, and about accountability for the consequences - see item 2 - particularly as with biology we are dealing with the living world. And there could be real ecological consequences even with a plant as tiny as Arabidopsis thaliana, as thale cress is after all a wild plant that can be found growing all over the northern hemisphere.
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1.Kickstopper! - Putting a Stop to Synthetic Biology Pollution
ETC to launch counter-Kickstarter campaign to prevent release of synthetic organisms
ETC Group, 7 May 2013
http://www.etcgroup.org/content/kickstopper-putting-stop-synthetic-biology-pollution
A real kicker for biodiversity..
At the end of April 2013, ETC Group learned that three biohackers from the ultra-libertarian Singularity University in California had mounted a project on the popular crowdfunding site Kickstarter. It was a plan to carry out the world's first environmental release of an avowedly Synthetic Biology organism - a glow-in-the dark arabidopsis plant. Shockingly the "Glowing Plants" kickstarter project promised to mail up to 100 bioengineered seeds to anyone from the United States who gave them $40 online . To date over 4000 people expect to receive Syn Bio seeds in the post. The seeds, which they said would likely grow into "glowing plants" (after all, "biology is complicated", admit the masterminds) would be the viable and reproducing products of "Synthetic Biology" - A field that has never had a deliberate release into the environment before. Even more shockingly they claim that the US Government had agreed not to regulate, assess or monitor this widespread random and nation-wide release of synthetic organisms.
In the last few years Synthetic Biology has been gaining increasing visibility in press and policy circles. There have been a parade of pronouncements from expert groups, - including from the President’s bioethics commission, diplomats of the UN biodiversity convention, an EU expert group, the insurance industry etc. To date all have agreed that no synthetic organisms should yet be released into the environment without "precaution", "prudent vigilance", regulation, monitoring, and other sober and sensible safeguards. Yet now the US government appears ready to avert its eyes . Kickstarter turns out to be the only entity to subject the world's first Syn Bio pollution project to any kind of review, sort of. While Kickstarter's own ethical guidelines exclude the posting of projects involving "sunglasses" or "bath products", promoting the world’s first uncontrolled, unmonitored, and unregulated release of synthetic organisms apparently didn’t raise any red flags at Kickstarter HQ. ETC Group and Friends of the Earth have written to Kickstarter to request they cancel the project (see letter here). We have also written to the US Department of Agriculture [see letter here] and to the "Glowing Plants" Kickstarter project creators [see link to letter below].
Kicking back...
What’s the solution for a world that crazy? A little Kickstarter jujitsu (kick butt?)? If the biohackers can have a Kickstarter campaign to release their glowtesque synthetic biology plants, then maybe a few sensible folks could mount their own Kickstarter initiative to stuff the genetically engineered genie back in the bottle – or at least ensure it never makes it out of the glowing plant lab. Enter the counter-Kickstarter campaign – the Kickstopper.
ETC Group is now working to set up our own Kickstopper campaign. We will be applying to Kickstarter to mount a publishing project whose aim is to prevent those Synthetic Biology seeds from being mailed around the US.
The biggest risk is that we do nothing and let the synthetic biologists move ahead with releasing hundreds of thousands of synbio seeds, setting an eerily glowing precedent that many other commercial biotech firms and informal biohackers alike will follow - using kickstarter and other crowdfunding sites to do an end-run around oversight of risky technologies.
We are going to be calling on friends and allies and all who are opposed to widepread release of synthetic organisms to help us kick back and put a stop to this syn bio pollution project. If you are interested to help the kickstopper initiative, to back it on kickstarter once it goes live and to spread the word of this important campaign please leave us your name and email at this page we will keep you informed as the kicsktopper rolls ahead.
And if you would like to donate funds to make this happen before we get set up on Kickstarter you can donate here.
Thank you.
Updates and Links:
30th April 2013 - Letter to Kickstarter requesting them to cancel the Synthetic Biology 'Glowing Plants' project.
http://www.etcgroup.org/content/kickstopper-letter-kickstarter
30th April 2013 - Letter to USDA APHIS concerning the Synthetic Biology "Glowing Plants" project.
http://www.etcgroup.org/content/kickstopper-letter-usda-aphis
2nd May 2013 - Letter to Synthetic Biology 'Glowing Plants'project.
http://www.etcgroup.org/content/kickstopper-letter-glowing-plants-project
7th May 2013 - The Wall Street Journal: "Glow-In-The-Dark Plant Makes Activists See Red"
http://www.etcgroup.org/content/wall-street-journal-glow-dark-plant-makes-activists-see-red
7th May 2013 - Response from "Glowing Plants" project
http://www.etcgroup.org/content/response-glowing-plants-project
8th May 2013 - New York Times: "A Dream of Trees Aglow at Night"
http://www.etcgroup.org/content/new-york-times-dream-trees-aglow-night
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2. Extract from: Counterculture, Cyberculture, and the Third Culture: Reinventing Civilization, Then and Now
Lee Worden
http://leeworden.net/pubs/reinventing-civilization.pdf
[This essay is to be found in the book "West of Eden: Communes and Utopia in Northern California" (edited by Iain Boal, Janferie Stone, Michael Watts, and Cal Winslow) and is well worth reading in full as it provides not only a highly revealing profile of Stewart Brand (Mark Lynas's techno-guru) but also explores the rise of a commercialised techno-counterculture and how some of the ideals of '60s utopian social movements became commoditised by Brand and others for the purpose of accumulating wealth.]
EXTRACT: ... J.R. Oppenheimer's famous testimony on the creation of the atomic bomb: “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and argue about what to do about it only after you've had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”
If the decisions that decide what our world will be like are made without accountability by a few privileged experimenters in Europe and the United States, and they are made by doing whatever is technically sweet and worrying about the consequences later - or by doing what is technically sweet and seems like a good idea to the inventor - we are facing a future of great violence and injustice…
… [this kind of DIY] “do-ocracy” …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 also happens to be the way technology is managed in the current world. The decisions whether to create a new technology are in the hands of the creators and their funders; anyone who has the time or resources can create or fund a new invention; and anyone who thinks it shouldn’t happen, for instance because we don’t want to give some maladjusted high-school kid the tools to create a renegade bacterium that will eat our entire biosphere, is just out of luck.
Do-ocracy is popular partly because it offers to fulfill the promises of Wikipedia and Linux, that we can make a better world together, all acting as equals, and throw off the chains of oppressive institutions. What is the alternative, anyway? Making laws against things? Making people get permission from some kind of central authority before they can learn things and use their creative spirit to try out new ideas? Social change movements on both the left and the right (and in other directions) agree on the need to devolve power downward and create horizontal forms of self- governance. It is important to address these problems in an antiauthoritarian way.
I believe that this is in fact a fundamental challenge of antiauthoritarian social movements. We must be able to offer a plausible way to hold people accountable for the damage they do. We have to have a way for those who are affected to participate in deliberation about what will be done to their communities. This may be a part of the ongoing project of understanding how communities manage commonly held resources - the biosphere is one of our largest commons - or it may be more usefully seen as simply a fundamental problem of self-governance. Humans are generally agreeable, and these problems may be largely solved by people becoming aware of the issues involved in their decisions, and by their becoming more directly connected to and aware of the communities impacted. We may do well to cultivate a general ethic of responsibility and accountability, so that people who violate the norm have to face the disapproval of their community. Overall, though, the problem is unsolved and must be addressed if we are to responsibly claim to provide a promise of a better world...
[For more on Brand and his philosophy see also http://www.spinwatch.org/index.php/issues/science/item/5490 ]