Book of the Week: Biobazaar. The Open Source Revolution and Biotechnology. By Janet Hope. Harvard University Press, 2008.

We continue our presentation of Janet Hope’s new book on open source biology.

Janet Hope:

“Another broad social movement with potentially very strong connections to open source biotechnology is the appropriate technology (AT) movement. Adherents believe that the failure of decades of technology transfer from industrialized countries to solve problems of poverty and hunger in the developing world suggests a need for development pathways that de-emphasize growth and technological monoculture. They advocate the development and use of alternative technologies that are appropriate to local user needs. Such technologies are variously called intermediate, progressive, alternative, light-capital, labor-intensive, indigenous, appropriate, low-cost, community, soft, radical, liberatory, and convivial technologies.

To appreciate the connection between open source biotechnology and the AT philosophy, consider the perspective on technological innovation articulated by Austrian philosopher and anarchist Ivan Illich in his book Tools for Conviviality.

For Illich, tools are intrinsic to social relationships: individuals relate to society through the use of tools, either by actively mastering those tools or by being passively acted upon. A tool is “convivial” to the extent that it gives each person who uses it the opportunity to enrich the environment with the fruits of his or her vision. Convivial tools facilitate autonomous and creative intercourse among people and between people and their environment; by contrast, “industrial” tools allow designers to determine the meanings and expectations of users. In a technological age, rationally designed convivial tools are the basis for participatory justice—that is, for justice that consists not only in equal distribution of technological outputs (for example, material goods such as drugs or seeds) but also equal control over inputs.

“The principal source of injustice in our epoch,” argues Illich, “is political approval for the existence of tools that by their very nature restrict to a very few the liberty to use them in an autonomous way.”

Consider the use of agricultural biotechnology to produce technical “locks” such as hybridization and genetic use restriction technologies (“GURTs”) that render seed unsuitable for replanting or suppress the expression of introduced traits in saved seed. These are only the most extreme examples: the use of genetically engineered crops that may contaminate others in the vicinity also restricts the autonomy of those who would prefer to grow traditional crops; even the development of new food crops for developing countries is often a case of tools “acting upon” the intended beneficiaries instead of empowering them to define their own productive future. An Andean potato farmer may be very poor and yet not want a genetically engineered potato that boosts yield so as to generate a cash crop. Such a commercial existence may threaten a way of life that the farmer values more than he or she values the ability to buy industrial goods; yet a closely related technology that improves the taste of a variety the family eats every day may be very welcome. In Chapter 6, I noted that the capital intensiveness of biotechnology research and development is sometimes perceived as an obstacle to the implementation of open source. This view is linked to assumptions about the nature of biotechnology as an essentially industrial—as distinct from convivial—technology. But molecular biotechnology and other advanced technologies need not be anticonvivial. Science can be used, not to replace human initiative with highly programmed tools, but to facilitate autonomous, decentralized production. New possibilities for cognitive and material advance opened up by basic discoveries in biotechnology offer a choice: we can apply our new understanding to develop tools that would propel us into a “hyperindustrial age,” or we can use it to help us develop truly “modern and yet convivial tools” that “enable the layman to shape his immediate environment.” Such a convivial biotechnology need not be inherently expensive, because it would consist of simple tools that work with rather than against the tendency of living things to proliferate of their own accord.

Janet concludes:

“These are the very properties that open source licensing seeks to confer through the guarantee of “technology freedom,” described in Chapter 5. Meanwhile, bazaar governance ties the rewards for knowledge creation to the diffusion of knowledge rather than its exclusive control and restores the patterns of communication through which knowledge goods “come to life in society as public goods.”83 Open source biotechnology would give those who are excluded from the organized interests of science, state and industry the ability not merely to question the trajectory of technology development, but to affect that trajectory directly by participating in the design of the technology itself.”