<nettime> PUBS: Thacker, Bioinformatics and Bio-Logics

["Soenke Zehle" <soenke.zehle@web.de>]

Thacker, Eugene. "Bioinformatics and Bio-logics." Postmodern Culture 13.2
(April 2003).
<http://www.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/current.issue/13.2thacker.html>

Catching up on some more or less recent lit on the informatization of the
biological, I came across Thacker's new piece. A lot has happened since
Doyle/Kay/Keller mapped the cold war textualization of the genome... also
saw that Thacker was at the 2002 Biomedia conference... if anyone is doing
work in this area, it'd be luvely if you would drop me a line. I am
especially interested in how these processes of informatization (or its
subsumption under the information-form, if you will) facilitate the
proprietarization of the biological via the extension of the IPR regime
(James Boyle et al), in part because I'm not too enthused about the standard
idiom of anti-biotech/corporate accountability campaigns. The
nature-is-not-a-commodity agenda seems pretty dead-ended to me, also quite
ironic: why would the critique - i.e. charges of biopiracy etc. - affirm,
even if inadvertently, the character of 'nature' as some kind of originary
property? No 'theft' without property relations, but I guess it's difficult
to think outside the (property) box, as they say. Cheerio, Soenke

#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net