prospects of the biotech industry and the reasons its propaganda is so
powerful)
A collaboration between the hotel des etrangers and the test-tube children
thessaloniki, november 2005.
TV viewers, users of green revolution pesticides, biotech-lab researchers -
everybody knows the dangers of genetic modification. Priests, gynecologists,
childless couples, NASA officers - everybody knows the hazards of animal and
human cloning. Alone this radical uncertainty about the effects of genetic
engineering should suffice as an argument to halt all genetic
experimentation and fully ban biotech products. Why doesn't it?
There seems to be a simple reason. All visions and positive ideas about the
future of society today have reached a tragic impasse. In the last fifteen
years, the ideologies propagated by the biotech industry, agricultural and
medico-pharmaceutical alike, offer the only available hope for humanity's
progress. Biotechnology is made to appear as the magic wand that will cure
all ills and lift all social conflict. This magic wand offers functional
capitalist solutions and manages to deepen our mistrust in each other as
social and collective beings.
Prevailing myths about biotechnology today are that it will end all poverty
and illness in the "developing" and "developed" countries and dissolve the
feeling of unhappiness and alienation among the privileged. (?) Yet if this
were true, why would all biotech companies spend so much of their capital
for establishing "research and development" or "bioethical" front companies
for their pro-biotech and anti-common sense propaganda all over the world?
Why would the biotech oligopoly have to unite in an ideological war against
the truth?
What of the future?
There seems to be no ready-made advice, no simple recipe, no easy vision
that would involve us in thinking about how to live. What do people believe
in apart from short-fuse messiahs and promises of security against imaginary
enemies? Whether you are poor or wealthy, parent or childless, fat or
skinny, old or young, whether you are employed or not, an immigrant worker
or his boss, you are called to worship bioscience as the only authentic and
forward-looking answer. The cult of biotech is as effective as any previous
religion. - it has been the industry's only real legal cover.
Where does all this inspired technology come from?
Before products like interactive computer games or heart-transplant cameras
enter the triumphal cycle of mass production and consumption for those who
can pay for them, they have already been tried, tested and usefully put to
the service of the war machine. The military-industrial complex is the main
source and sposor of bio-science on a national and supra-national level.
From nanotech to stem-stell research, just like with nuclear and digital
technology before, the brave new creations of the biotech market now are
born of corporate and state greed for more domination, i.e. more refined
weapons and more secure profits. Yet the real novelty of biotechnology is
the way in which it effects and encourages new markets for the corporations,
new forms of labour control, new forms of policing, new political meanings
to economic and military competition.
In other words, biotech is a luxury weapon of domination today - a mass
weapon tomorrow. It is the only hope against mass despondency and depression
today - the name of a self-destructive society tomorrow.
powerful)
A collaboration between the hotel des etrangers and the test-tube children
thessaloniki, november 2005.
TV viewers, users of green revolution pesticides, biotech-lab researchers -
everybody knows the dangers of genetic modification. Priests, gynecologists,
childless couples, NASA officers - everybody knows the hazards of animal and
human cloning. Alone this radical uncertainty about the effects of genetic
engineering should suffice as an argument to halt all genetic
experimentation and fully ban biotech products. Why doesn't it?
There seems to be a simple reason. All visions and positive ideas about the
future of society today have reached a tragic impasse. In the last fifteen
years, the ideologies propagated by the biotech industry, agricultural and
medico-pharmaceutical alike, offer the only available hope for humanity's
progress. Biotechnology is made to appear as the magic wand that will cure
all ills and lift all social conflict. This magic wand offers functional
capitalist solutions and manages to deepen our mistrust in each other as
social and collective beings.
Prevailing myths about biotechnology today are that it will end all poverty
and illness in the "developing" and "developed" countries and dissolve the
feeling of unhappiness and alienation among the privileged. (?) Yet if this
were true, why would all biotech companies spend so much of their capital
for establishing "research and development" or "bioethical" front companies
for their pro-biotech and anti-common sense propaganda all over the world?
Why would the biotech oligopoly have to unite in an ideological war against
the truth?
What of the future?
There seems to be no ready-made advice, no simple recipe, no easy vision
that would involve us in thinking about how to live. What do people believe
in apart from short-fuse messiahs and promises of security against imaginary
enemies? Whether you are poor or wealthy, parent or childless, fat or
skinny, old or young, whether you are employed or not, an immigrant worker
or his boss, you are called to worship bioscience as the only authentic and
forward-looking answer. The cult of biotech is as effective as any previous
religion. - it has been the industry's only real legal cover.
Where does all this inspired technology come from?
Before products like interactive computer games or heart-transplant cameras
enter the triumphal cycle of mass production and consumption for those who
can pay for them, they have already been tried, tested and usefully put to
the service of the war machine. The military-industrial complex is the main
source and sposor of bio-science on a national and supra-national level.
From nanotech to stem-stell research, just like with nuclear and digital
technology before, the brave new creations of the biotech market now are
born of corporate and state greed for more domination, i.e. more refined
weapons and more secure profits. Yet the real novelty of biotechnology is
the way in which it effects and encourages new markets for the corporations,
new forms of labour control, new forms of policing, new political meanings
to economic and military competition.
In other words, biotech is a luxury weapon of domination today - a mass
weapon tomorrow. It is the only hope against mass despondency and depression
today - the name of a self-destructive society tomorrow.
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