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Artificial Life on a Dead Planet

Charles Thorpe

Introduction

No one today remembered why the war had come about or who, if anyone, had won. The dust which had contaminated most of the planet's surface had originated in no country and no one, even the wartime enemy, had planned on it. First, strangely, the owls had died [. . .] After the owls, of course, the other birds followed, but by then the mystery had been grasped and understood. A meager [extra-terrestrial] colonization program had been underway before the war but now that the sun had ceased to shine on Earth the colonization entered an entirely new phase [. . .] Under U.N. law each emigrant automatically received possession of an android subtype of his choice [. . .] That had been the ultimate incentive of emigration: the android servant as carrot, the radioactive fallout as stick.

(Dick, 1999, p. 15)

Philip K. Dick's science fiction masterpiece, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), presents a future in which most of Earth's species have been wiped out by radioactive fallout and the human survivors are fleeing a ravaged Earth. Survival on the inhospitable terrain of other planets is made possible by android slave labor. For those who cling on in Earth's decaying cities, possession of a live animal is highly coveted, due to the fragility of biological life on the planet and the scarcity of animal life. The majority who cannot pay the premium for a live animal accept as second best an android replica of a sheep, a snake, or an owl.

Science fiction frequently couples artificial life with ecological devastation, violence, and the destruction of human life. Movies like The Terminator or The Matrix present an eviscerated Earth covered in scrap metal and stalked by machines, and scenarios of biotechnological experimentation gone awry have been the premise in films such as I Am Legend and 28 Days Later. These films reflect a cultural undercurrent of unease that contrasts with the techno-hype current in our universities and among our policymakers.

Mar garet Atwood's novel Oryx and Crake (2003) portrays a world in which, as the Earth's species face extinction, corporate laboratories are turning out new genetically engineered life-forms, such as pigs with human internal organs. The corporations also are boosting demand for their pharmaceutical products by surreptitiously producing new diseases. Atwood combines imagery of sterility, extinction, and death with the portrayal of the uncontrollable overflowing of bizarre new life-forms. Life takes new forms, but in ways that offer bleak prospects for the continuation of human life.

As Daniel Dinello (2005) has argued, such science fiction visions of technology out of control can no longer be dismissed as mere sensationalism or paranoia. Rather, these fictional scenarios can sensitize us to dynamics that are institutionally embedded and have political and economic power, but which are also the source of pervasive social anxiety. Such dystopian and pessimistic forms of science fiction offer a useful counter to the breathlessly optimistic, utopian language in which technologies such as nanotechnology and robotics are framed by their proponents (Dinello, 2005, pp. 1–17).¹ What, then, is the critical significance of these couplings of artificial life with the destruction of life? Do these combined images reflect real-world developments? If this is a warning, is it about technology itself, or about a more fundamental dynamic in our social relations and social organization?

Today, the destruction of ecosystems and species by deforestation, chemical pollution, and the effects of climate change is indeed being accompanied by a parallel process of the creation of artificial forms of life. We currently face the evisceration and breakdown of all the systems that sustain life on this planet: from the oceans, to the soil, to the atmosphere. But as capitalist industry devastates the existing natural world, capitalist-aligned technoscience brings into being new forms of autonomous or “lifelike” technologies.

In his famous missive in the year 2000, “Why the Future Doesn't Need Us,” the computer scientist Bill Joy used the term “GNR technologies” to designate the converging fields of genetics, robotics, and nanotechnology – scientific fields that produce technologized forms of life or lifelike technologies. Joy warned that what is new in such technologies is the potential for “uncontrolled self-replication,” which poses the “risk of substantial damage in the physical world” (Joy, 2000). In the mid-twentieth century, the philosopher and sociologist Jacques Ellul used the concept of “the self augmentation of technique” to designate the way in which large-scale modern technological and instrumentally rational systems (such as nuclear power) build their own internal momentum and escape social control (Ellul, 1964, p. 85). What is striking today is the fact that this autonomy of technology is no longer merely metaphorical, designating a loss of control by human beings over our collective creations. The goal of science and engineering in the GNR fields is to produce technological forms that are literally and concretely autonomous: robots that act independently of human command, or new manipulated or synthesized living things – technologies that appropriate the ability of living things to reproduce and multiply.

In an essay discussing the meaning of the android in his fiction, Dick observed that “the greatest change growing across our world these days is probably the momentum of the living toward reification, and at the same time a reciprocal entry into animation by the mechanical” (Dick, 1995, p. 212). This offers a profound insight into contemporary capitalist technoscience. The reification of the living as resource or commodity and the transformation of living organisms into productive machines is today accompanied by the animation of the non-living. Life is reified as it is subsumed within commodity relations and the cash nexus. The living world is integrated within capitalism as a stock of resources to be exploited and as a sink for pollutants. The consequent intense exploitation and waste are largely responsible for the unprecedented human degradation of the natural world and assault on the conditions for life that we are witnessing today. This degradation of the natural world combines with the intensified subsumption of nature and of life itself within capital: the transformation of the living world so as to shape the reproductive capacities of the living according to the timescales and efficiency norms of capitalist production. The result of these processes is a vast simplification in the natural living world: the degradation of the Earth's ecosystems, the loss of biodiversity, and the imposition of standardized agrobusiness monoculture. As in Atwood's Oryx and Crake, this destruction of natural diversity is indeed accompanied by at least the promise of a proliferation of new forms of life, engineered or synthesized living organisms and lifelike machines. A dead planet and artificial life therefore represent twin trajectories of contemporary capitalism.

From Abstract Labor to Abstract Life

In order to make sense of the contemporary interpenetration of life and technology, we must come to grips with how life is used and transformed within our productive and social relations. Karl Marx argued that the capitalist mode of production means the domination of living labor by its alienated, dead products. As he put it in Volume 1 of Capital, “Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks” (Marx, 1977, p. 342). The workers' labor is transformed into an independent power, standing over and against them. In capital, the living is transformed into the dead and what is dead takes on power over what is living (Foster & Clark, 2009, p. 10; Fromm, 1973, p. 339, n. 14; Neocleous, 2003).

Capitalism also involves the domination of the living in a broader sense. Marx wrote in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts that alienated labor makes nature into “an alien world inimically opposed” to the worker (Marx, 1964, p. 111). Through alienated labor, human beings do not engage nature as a life-giving milieu with which their labor is interconnected. Rather, nature is constructed as a set of resources to be exploited. The aim of this exploitation is not the immediate satisfaction of human needs but, rather, the augmentation of capital as self-valorizing value. Marx wrote that as nature is appropriated through alienated labor, “it more and more ceases to be means of life” (Marx, 1964, p. 109, emphasis in original). I want to suggest that this alienation of nature and of life today has two aspects. One is the degradation of the life-supporting abundance of the natural world through extraction, exploitation, and waste, resulting in the mounting global ecological crisis (Foster, 1994; Speth, 2008, pp. 17–66). The other is the production of life that is interpenetrated with capital and, hence, takes the form of capitalized life or living capital (Rikowski, 2003; Yoxen, 1981).

The subsumption of life by capital parallels and is related to the subsumption of labor. Labor is formally subsumed under capital when it takes the form of commodified labor capacity, in other words, when it becomes wage labor. Labor comes under real subsumption when capital assumes direct control over the labor process, transforming working activity so that it takes on a specifically capitalist character. In numerous passages, Marx described how mechanization represents a transformation of labor such that the worker's life-activity is appropriated and subsumed by capital in the form of technology. The machinery develops complexity and takes on a central power in the production process as the worker's activity is simplified and fragmented (Marx, 1973, p. 693; see also Bowring, 2003, pp. 103–104). Hence, according to Marx, “What was the living worker's activity becomes the activity of the machine” (Marx, 1973, p. 704).

The reification of labor as a commodity is experienced by the worker as estrangement from his living activity, as his work is regulated, standardized, and disciplined. What Harry Braverman (1974) described as the “degradation” of work accompanies and is a condition of the augmentation of the capacities of machinery in the productive process. Marx argued that, under capitalism, value is derived from “abstract human labour,” that is, labor as a general capacity abstracted from such concrete actions as weaving or tailoring (Marx, 1977, p. 150). It is also implied by Marx's theory of real subsumption that capital tends to reconstruct labor as an activity, so that differentiating qualities are increasingly lost. The specifically capitalist labor process is one in which work is simplified and rendered abstract in practice, as the organizing intelligence in the labor process passes from the worker to capital itself expressed in the system of machinery.

The tendency in Taylorism, automation, and later twentieth-century developments in computerization is toward the loss of differentiating qualities from work. Hence, the mid-twentieth century saw the rise of the “mass worker” whose working activity “meets Marx's definition of ‘abstract labour’ – labour which is independent of the particular concrete form it takes at any given time” (Bowring, 2004, p. 106; see also Hardt & Negri, 2000, p. 292).

Continuous with modern capitalism's tendency toward abstract labor is a tendency toward abstract life. This means the decontextualization, reification, and commodification of the productive and reproductive capacities of living things.² Sociologists William Boyd, W. Scott Prudham, and Rachel Schurman argue that an analogy can be drawn from Marx's concepts of the formal and real subsumption of labor to the formal and real subsumption of nature. Under formal subsumption, nature is transformed into a set of resources and commodified. But the “natural schedules of biological or geophysical (re)production,” the available natural stock of these resources, and their geographical location are confronted by the capitalist as exogenous brute facts (Boyd, Prudham, & Schurman, 2001, p. 563). This is the case in extractive industries such as mining and logging. In contrast, “The real subsumption of nature refers to systematic increases in or intensification of biological productivity” through inputs such as fertilizers and growth hormones or through the manipulation of the genetic program (Boyd et al., 2001, p. 564). Under real subsumption, capital imposes a specifically capitalist mode of (re)production, speeding up natural processes or altering them to increase reliability, predictability, efficiency, and control.

Boyd, Prudham, and Schurman are too cautious, however, in referring to the relationship between the real subsumption of labor and that of nature as merely analogous. These are not mere analogies but are actually historically and practically interrelated developments. Marx treated the organization of labor and the organization of nature as interrelated aspects of the capitalist production process. Just as labor is transformed, through its combination and mechanization, nature is transformed as “gigantic natural forces [. . .] [are] pressed into the service of production” (Marx, 1977, p. 775). The pioneer of Marxist environmental critique, John Bellamy Foster, suggests a close actual relationship between the real subsumption of labor and nature as interconnected developments within monopoly capitalism. The scientization of production was closely related to the concentration of capital in oligopolistic enterprises. The application of science in the chemical and electrical engineering industries meant a new level of capital-intensiveness that gave advantage, through economies of scale, to large firms. Foster argues that the scientization of production under monopoly capitalism “was aimed at extending both the division of labor and the division of nature, and in the process both were transformed” (Foster, 1994, p. 110). The real subsumption of labor and nature both tended toward simplification and homogeneity: “complex, highly skilled labor was to be reduced to its simplest most interchangeable – and hence cost-efficient – parts. [. . .] As labor became more homogeneous, so did much of nature, which underwent a similar process of degradation” (Foster, 1994, p. 111).

Modern sciences of genetics and bioengineering have pioneered the control of life – for example, in the production of standardized organisms, such as particular varieties of mice or fruit fly, for use as experimental models (Kohler, 1994; Rader, 2004). Today, such scientific techniques are harnessed closely to capitalist production, so that the control of life through genetic engineering and biotechnology allows the intervention in reproductive processes so as to configure these for efficient commodity production. In this process, life is rendered abstract. Particular qualitative differences (for example, between species) are overcome as genes are moved around and spliced between organisms and as, in synthetic genomics, the disassembly of life into its most basic components facilitates the assembly of new forms of life as patented living commodities. Sociologist Finn Bowring argues that “modern biotechnology [. . .] allows human beings to disregard animals' natural form of life.” At its most extreme, “its goal is to transform the natural world into a universe of functional bio-machines” (Bowring, 2003, pp. 134, 143).

As well as in genetic engineering and “synthetic biology,” abstract life is expressed in what John Johnston (2008) calls the “machinic life” of robotics and computational artificial life. While synthetic genomics attempts to create “programmable” biological organisms, bringing the logic of engineering into the biological realm, the fields of machinic life may be seen as an attempt to relocate the reproductive capacities of life in the inorganic domain of metallic robots and computers. In new fields such as bionanotechnology, we can see practical efforts to break down the boundaries between what practitioners refer to as “hardware,” “software,” and “wetware,” and indeed to merge the so-called hard artificial life of computing and robotics with the so-called wet artificial life of synthetic biology.

Robotics pioneer Rodney Brooks suggests that the melding of flesh and machine is pervasive in contemporary culture: “Researchers are placing chips in animal, and sometimes human, flesh and letting neurons grow and connect to them. The direct neural interface between man and machine is starting to happen. At the same time, surgery is becoming more acceptable for all sorts of body modifications” (Brooks, 2002, p. x). As the robotics revolution becomes integrated with the biotechnology revolution, he argues, “Our machines will become much more like us, and we will become much more like our machines” (Brooks, 2002, p. 11).

In these discourses and accompanying practices, life is thereby abstracted not only from particular organisms and ecologies, but also from the organic altogether: life becomes instead a set of abstract functions that may be expressed in either animal or machine or in their combination. The constitution of abstract life tends toward the conceptual abstraction from qualitative differences between the organic and the non-organic and toward their practical reconstitution.

The technological convergence between the sciences of automation, information, and biological control, signaled by acronyms such as “GNR,” suggests the convergence between abstract labor and abstract life. Such ideas are part of the discourse of capitalist techno-futurism, a way of promising continued progress and the continual reinvention of capital (Cooper, 2008). An advertisement for the Lexus automobile forecasts: “Someday nanotechnology will be used to turn plants into [automobile] components” (Lexus, “Hello Someday” advertising campaign, October 2009). The dream of total automation and the workerless factory, central to the techno-utopian fantasies of robotics and nanotechnology pioneers, combines with visions of the total control of the reproductive capacities of living organisms. Such techno-futurist visions are not idle fantasies but are pursued in the projects of universities, spin-out firms, and industrial research laboratories. What such visions and projects augur is the emancipation of capital from its dependencies on human and biological life exogenous to it through the appropriation of life for capital itself. “Thus all powers of labour” and, we should now add, of life, “are transposed into powers of capital” (Marx, 1973, p. 701).

A Dead Planet

We are currently undergoing what scientists dub the “sixth extinction,” the sixth mass extinction event in the world's history – and the first one that is caused by human activity (Ananthaswamy, 2004; Eldredge, 1998; Leakey & Lewin, 1995). Plant and animal species are vanishing at 100 to 1,000 times the natural “background” extinction rate. In its 2007 survey of species, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature found that 39% of the species it surveyed were threatened with extinction: “one in three amphibians, one quarter of the world's pines and other coniferous trees, one in eight birds and one in four mammals” (Novack, 2008; see also Ananthaswamy, 2004; Severino & Seligmann, 2008). The Zoological Society of London (ZSL) reported in 2008 that the world's population of wildlife has fallen by between a quarter and a third since 1970. Populations of marine species fell by 28% in just 10 years (1995 to 2005) and populations of ocean birds have fallen by 30% since the mid-1990s (“Wildlife Populations,” 2008). The editor of the ZSL report, scientist Jonathan Loh, described the decline as “completely unprecedented in terms of human history. You'd have to go back to the extinction of the dinosaurs to see a decline as rapid as this” (ZSL, 2008). This massive loss of species is caused by a combination of the destruction of natural habitat, overexploitation, pollution, the spread of invasive species, and, increasingly, the effects of climate change.

Ocean ecosystems are under severe pressure due to exploitation and pollution, leading to a dramatic decrease in the diversity and complexity of ocean life. According to marine ecologist Jeremy Jackson:

Overfishing has led to the plummeting of fish stocks. Descriptions from the preindustrial era portray an abundance of ocean life that is now hard for us to imagine. Callum Roberts, Professor of Marine Conservation at York University, remarks that, “We have come to accept the degraded condition of the sea as normal. People [. . .] dismiss as far-fetched tales of giant fish or seas bursting with life” (quoted in Vidal, 2008, p. 26). An article in The Economist notes that

Effects of overfishing are compounded by global warming. Coral reefs are bleached and dying: “Perhaps only 5% of coral reefs can now be considered pristine, a quarter have been lost and all are vulnerable to global warming” (Grimond, 2009, p. 4). There are ever more algal blooms appearing in the oceans and ever more and ever larger “dead zones” caused by algal blooms, areas of ocean depleted of oxygen and therefore sea life. These had been known to occur as the result of fertilizer run-off from agriculture. They are now occurring more frequently, independently of fertilizer run-off, apparently from global warming causing shifting ocean currents to bring nutrients up from the depths to the surface, leading to growth of algae. In 2006, the UN Environment Program said that the number of such dead zones had grown by a third in the space of two years (Grimond, 2009, p. 4; Than, 2009; “UN: Ocean Dead Zones,” 2006). According to a Pulitzer Prize-winning Los Angeles Times story, the algal blooms are “distress signals from an unhealthy ocean. Overfishing, destruction of wetlands, industrial pollution and climate change have made the seas inhospitable for fish and more advanced forms of life and freed the lowliest – algae and bacteria – to flourish” (Weiss & McFarling, 2006). The complex ocean ecosystem, once capable of sustaining abundant and diverse life, is being transformed into an eviscerated environment sustaining only simplified and less diverse organisms.

In recent years, there have been a number of both disturbing and poorly understood cases of the crashing of wildlife populations. Scientists do not fully understand what is causing the Colony Collapse Disorder affecting honeybee populations in the United States and Europe, but it seems to be the result of a “synergistic” combination of stresses such as chemical pollution, parasites, pathogens, and lack of food (MacKenzie, 2009; “Scientists Untangle,” 2009). It is similarly unclear what is behind the fungal infection known as “white nose syndrome” that is killing vast numbers of bats in North America (Kolbert, 2009, pp. 60–62). Along with factors such as disease and habitat destruction, chemical pollution is thought by scientists to be a contributor to the sharp decline of amphibian populations, with 32% of the world's amphibian species now threatened (“Worldwide Amphibian Declines,” 2009). A recent study suggests that deformities found in increasing numbers of frogs in the United States are “caused by a synergism between parasitic infection and exposure to low levels of agricultural chemicals” (Hileman, 2002). Professor of Ecology Joseph M. Kiesecker speculates, in line with this, that chemical pollution may be “changing the environment in ways that increase disease prevalence” (quoted in Hileman, 2002; see also Collins & Crump, 2009, esp. pp. 8, 99–100, 101–104, 198–199).

Soil erosion is a silent crisis facing global agriculture. As environmental journalist Stephen Leahy puts it, “in the past 40 years alone, 30 percent of the planet's arable land has become unproductive due to erosion, mainly in Asia and Africa. At current erosion rates, soils are being depleted faster than they are replenished” (Leahy, 2008; see also Sample, 2007). According to Lester Brown, director of the Earth Policy Institute research group, deforestation and overgrazing in Africa are contributing to dust storms that “are slowly draining the continent of its fertility and biological productivity” (quoted in Vidal, 2009).

Deforestation, in particular the destruction of the rainforests, is a major cause of biodiversity loss and a contributor to climate change and is caused by logging, clearance for agriculture, mining and industrial development, and dam projects (“Amazon Carbon Sink,” 2004; “Amazon Destruction,” 2005; Pearce, 2006). Deforestation of tropical forests and primary forests increased in the first five years after the millennium, compared with the 1990s (though the Brazilian government recently announced plans to reduce the rate of deforestation). According to the environmental news site Mongobay.com, “each day at least 80,000 acres (32,300 ha) of forest disappear from Earth” (“A World Imperiled,” ca. 2009; see also “70% Deforestation,” 2008).

Climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions (and intensified by deforestation) adds to and compounds problems of the alteration and depletion of life-sustaining systems and the extinction of species (Pounds & Puschendorf, 2004; Science Daily, 2007). Research by NASA scientist James Hansen reveals that the planet has undergone warming of 0.6°C (1.08°F) since 1970 and the 10 hottest years occurred between 1997 and 2008. This warming is due to accelerate, with devastating consequences. As Hansen puts it, these changes place the world in “imminent peril” (quoted in McKie, 2009). In 2004, a group of zoologists and biodiversity scientists wrote to Nature predicting “on the basis of mid-range climate-warming scenarios for 2050, that 15–37% of species in our sample of regions and taxa will be ‘committed to extinction’” (Thomas et al., 2004). In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that 20–30% of plant and animal species would be at increased risk of extinction if average global temperatures were to rise by 2.7 to 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit (Bethge, 2007). On January 28, 2009, Al Gore testified to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that if carbon emissions were unchecked, global average temperatures could rise by 11 degrees Fahrenheit over the next century. With increased desertification and crop failure cutting food supplies, as well as the melting away of glaciers threatening water supplies for irrigation and drinking water, such a development would bring “a screeching halt to human civilisation and threaten the fabric of life everywhere on Earth” (quoted in Goldenberg, 2009).

Already, climate change is producing serious water shortages. According to the Working Group on Climate Change and Development, the melting of Andean glaciers “forces people to farm at higher altitudes to grow their crops, adding to deforestation, which in turn undermines water resources and leads to soil erosion and putting the survival of Andean cultures at risk” (quoted in Vidal, 2006). In 2008, the executive director of the UN Environment Program warned that climate change may lead to severe droughts and water shortages such that parts of the world may have to be abandoned by humans (Jowit, 2008). So the creation of oceanic dead zones is paralleled on land by desertification: complex life-sustaining ecosystems are replaced by simplified ecologies incapable of supporting human life.

The evisceration of ecosystems is connected with a more general process of homogenization. Bio diversity is lost, and wild species give way to domesticated monocultures of industrialized farming. The destruction of the wild accompanies and furthers the global expansion and dominance of a globalized corporate culture in which all differences are assimilated to a common commodity form. The loss of habitat for wild species is accompanied by the loss of diversity of human cultures. As journalist Terry Glavin points out, a corollary of the extinction of species is the destruction of indigenous peoples and the extinction of their cultures and languages (Glavin, 2006; Nettle & Romaine, 2000). The complexity both of nature and of human cultures is being diminished, giving way to monoculture. The environmental crisis manifests a powerful tendency toward simplification (Wessels, 2006).

We are seeing not only the extinction of wild species, but also a dramatic decline in the diversity of domesticated plants and animals. Glavin writes, “by the beginning of the twentieth century, about 4000 breeds of animals had been domesticated, but by the end of the century, 618 of those distinct breeds were extinct and another 475 were threatened with extinction” (Glavin, 2006, p. 219). It is estimated that the diversity of major livestock breeds is diminishing at about 5% per year (Glavin, 2006, p. 219). There has also been a dramatic reduction in genetic diversity in all major food crops over the course of the twentieth century (Glavin, 2006, p. 214). What Pat Mooney, executive director of the Rural Advancement Foundation International, calls a “plague of sameness” attacking the world's plants has accelerated with contemporary agrobusiness and biotechnology (quoted in Glavin, 2006, p. 214). The tendency toward sameness was exacerbated by the industrialization of agriculture promoted in the post-World War II “Green Revolution,” which increased and concentrated the corporate control of agriculture (Glavin, 2006, pp. 217–223).

Industrial agriculture imposes standardization and monoculture, abstracting the reproduction of plants and animals from the interconnected processes of natural ecosystems. Sociologist Barbara Adam describes how industrial agriculture abstracts not only from place, but also from time. Technoscientific and industrial techniques detach agriculture from the natural rhythms that traditionally linked the patterns of farming to those of the natural world:

A similar process of abstraction is indicated by the distinction drawn by biologists Richard Lewontin and Jean-Pierre Berlan between farming and agriculture: “Farming is producing wheat; agriculture is turning phosphates into bread” (quoted in Foster, 1994, p. 117).

Agriculture relies increasingly on industrial inputs of fertilizer, pesticides, and machinery. In many cases, industrialized agriculture involves the total abstraction of the organism from the environment. Foster gives the example of cattle “removed from pasture and raised in feedlots.” Under these industrial conditions, “their natural waste, rather than fertilizing the soil, becomes a serious form of pollution” (Foster, 1994, p. 122). Industrial raising and slaughter of animals exemplifies the linkages between the real subsumption of labor and the real subsumption of life. In the mechanized chicken processing plant, one can see the relationship between the standardization of nonhuman animals as commodities and the routinization and control of human labor (Horowitz, 2004, esp. pp. 228–229).

The intimate historical and material relationship between the real subsumption of labor and the real subsumption of life is also indicated by Barry Commoner's 1976 analysis of the economic roots of the energy crisis of that decade. Commoner pointed out that the extreme energy dependence of our economic and social activities was a relatively recent phenomenon: “there have been sweeping changes in the technology of agricultural and industrial production in the last thirty years” (Commoner, 1979, p. 211). New technologies integrated into mass production after World War II massively increased the environmental impacts of the modern economy. The economy became more dependent on oil with highway building and increased use of automobiles and trucks for transportation. Petrochemical products became much more widely used in industry, agriculture, and in consumer products. The vast quantities of non-biodegradable, and often toxic, synthetic products produced and used in the postwar period marked this, Commoner argued, as the “Synthetics Age” (Commoner, 1979, p. 187). The combined capital-intensiveness and energy-intensiveness of the new industrial system was driven by attempts to integrate science into the production process so as to subsume both nature and labor. The new highly energy-dependent petrochemical agriculture was aimed at overcoming the barriers to profitability posed by natural growth cycles and local ecological conditions: harnessing nature to industrial patterns and products. Industry itself was becoming more capital- and energy-intensive in the ongoing quest to replace labor with automatic machinery. Commoner argues that the overriding obsession with increasing the productivity of labor led to a capital-intensive and energy-intensive apparatus of production, one which is highly wasteful and inefficient in its use of natural resources (Commoner, 1979, p. 212). Commoner points to the relationship between the real subsumption of labor via mechanization and the degradation of the environment.

Drawing on Commoner's analysis, Foster argues that the post-World War II system of mass production and industrial agriculture is “counter-ecological.” The system is predicated on the denial of the ecological principle that “everything is connected to everything else” (Foster, 1994, pp. 118, 120). The standardized, simplified ecosystems of industrial agriculture are expressions of the way in which industrial agriculture binds life to the abstract value of money. In contrast to the interconnectedness of living things within natural ecosystems, in capitalist agriculture, as Foster puts it, “the only lasting connection between things is the cash nexus” (Foster, 1994, pp. 120–121).

We are frequently left with the remnants of formerly vibrant ecosystems: parks and zoos rather than genuine wilderness and wildlife. As wilderness is eliminated through deforestation, as the fabrics of ecosystems are ripped apart, and as biodiversity of both wild and domesticated nature is lost, species are preserved in a “living dead” form in zoos and national parks. Glavin (2006) writes that “living dead” is “a term biologists have begun to use to describe those species that are not expected to escape extinction without significant human intervention, such as captive breeding. Among the world's endangered mammals, birds, and reptiles, already 1500 species are expected to be wholly dependent upon captive breeding by 2050” (pp. 20–21). The surviving members of these species live an abstracted existence in parks or zoos; they become specimens. As Glavin puts it, “they will not be ‘wild’ animals at all. They will be functions of artificial selection. They will live on in zoos, and perhaps some large parks [. . .] They will live in a simulacrum of the real world” (Glavin, 2006, pp. 24–25). The boundary between the natural and artificial is broken down as the survival of these specimens comes to depend on interventionist programs of captive breeding. Such programs are promoted in terms of the pervasive ideology of techno-salvationism: “The alchemies of cryogenics, transgenetic manipulation, and the emerging biotechnologies that zookeepers are developing raise the very real possibility that many of the ‘living dead’ species of the world will never become extinct, at least not in the way that geneticists or taxonomists use the term” (Glavin, 2006, p. 38). In the United States and Britain, zoos and natural history museums are preserving genetic information on endangered species as “frozen arks” (Glavin, 2006, pp. 38–39; Harmon, 2009). As Glavin points out, given the destructive trajectory of modern societies, the notion that such projects constitute an “ark” and that there will at some point in the future be wild habitats into which these species can be restored seems “utopian.” Instead, the most that such projects seem to promise is merely the indefinite maintenance of the “living dead” status of such species (p. 39).

Species are extracted from decimated ecosystems and preserved as specimens in zoos, and their sperm, embryos, tissue, and DNA are preserved. Already, the reproduction of these endangered species is increasingly indebted to techniques such as artificial insemination. Glavin writes, “Semen is being extracted from anesthetized tigers and stored away in frozen test tubes. The fertilized embryos of endangered gaurs are being implanted in Holstein cows. Horses are giving birth to zebras” (p. 39). So alongside the abstract existence of these species as “specimens,” there is a further abstraction at work, accomplished by the new capabilities of genetic engineering. These species are preserved as abstract life. The preservationist project becomes linked to the technological control of abstract life in which qualitative differences between organisms and species are overcome. As Glavin puts it, “it is about the bleeding away of differences in the living world, and of differences between captivity and freedom, between the real and the fabricated” (pp. 30–31).

Artificial Life

Animal specimens are being abstracted, for their own protection, from ecosystems that are being destroyed. At the same time, genetic engineering is producing new animal strains which themselves are seen to represent risks to natural ecosystems and which therefore must be segregated. An example is the controversial transgenic AquaAdvantage salmon, developed by the company AquaBounty to be faster-growing than natural varieties of salmon currently used in aquaculture. Transgenic salmon are controversial due to worries about the potential for their escape from aquaculture nets into the wild and the possibly disastrous effects of their breeding with wild salmon. The production of transgenic salmon would be continuous with the dynamics of capitalist industrialized agriculture whereby natural processes are overcome in the cause of the enhancement of productivity; reproductive capacities of life are mobilized, but reconfigured to fit with capitalist dynamics (Bowring, 2003; Kelso, 2003, p. 93). This poses the problem of the relationship between this manufactured life-form and the broader natural environment. The risks are unknown: the existence of such life in the natural environment takes the form of a “real-world experiment” (Levidow & Carr, 2007). Risk is contained by the sequestration of the new organism from the ecosystem. The AquaAdvantage salmon is designed to be sterile, this sterility protecting not only the intellectual property of the biotech corporation but also the environment (Kelso, 2003, p. 89). Yet, the sterility of all individuals in a population may not be guaranteed so there is also the problem of the containment of the creatures from the environment. For the protection of the natural environment, either by sterility or by spatial segregation in “escape-proof facilities,” these creatures may have to be kept in abstraction from the ecosystem (Kelso, 2003, p. 101).

“Life” is today radically abstracted, re-situated, and reconfigured. The term “artificial life” is used with broad connotations in this chapter to denote the manifold ways in which modern technosciences, including genetic engineering, computing, robotics, and nanotechnology, are technologizing biological life and creating new forms of autonomous, self-replicating, and, hence, “lifelike” machines. But “artificial life” is also a term of art, and one of the most radical challenges to existing conceptual and ontological barriers between life and technology has come from the new technoscientific field that takes the name of “Artificial Life” (hereafter, AL). Thomas Ray, a pioneer of the field, defines its goal as “understanding biology by constructing biological phenomena out of artificial components, rather than breaking natural life forms down into their component parts. It is the synthetic rather than the reductionist approach” (Ray, 1995, p. 179). The umbrella incorporates hardware (robotics, nanotechnology), software (“replicating and evolving computer programs”), and wetware (“replicating and evolving organic molecules”) (Ray, 1995, pp. 179–180). AL seems, however, to be mainly associated with the “software” aspect in which Ray himself specializes and which is associated with the complexity and computational sciences of the Santa Fe Institute in the United States (Helmreich, 1998). The thrust of the project is the computer simulation of the self-organizing, replicating, and reproductive capacities of living things and ecological systems. These simulations inevitably raise the problem of the relationship between the simulated and the real: the philosophical question underlying much of the interest in AL is whether this “life on screen” is not merely “like” a living system but is an alternative instance of life (see Turkle, 1995, pp. 154–158).

Although Ray emphasizes that AL is synthetic, not reductionist, it nevertheless follows the logic of abstract life. Ray writes:

Stefan Helmreich writes that AL may be seen as the consolidation of theoretical biology, artificial intelligence, and robotics. But he argues that the project derives much of its character from theoretical physics: “This shapes [. . .] its claims to be a biology that will be true anywhere in the universe, just as physics is true everywhere in the universe” (Helmreich, 1998, p. 47). AL operates with a conception of life that is abstracted from any given existence, form, or environment. From the initial abstract, universalistic, theoretical physics-influenced concept of life there follows the thought that life could evolve beyond the merely incidental biological forms of plants, animals, and micro-organisms.

Techno-futurist literature often posits a movement from biological to technological evolution. Carnegie Mellon University artificial intelligence researcher Hans Moravec is a key proponent of a kind of cosmic transhumanism in which living intelligence evolves beyond the organic to inhabit machines, and ultimately to inhabit the universe itself, as intelligence takes on new manifestations in post-terrestrial, post-Darwinian life. “We are,” he says, “in the process of inspiriting the dead matter around us. It will soon be our honor to welcome some of it to the land of the living” (Moravec, 1999, p. 111). Moravec fantasizes about the diversity of this posthuman and post-terrestrial intelligent life, evolving over the next millennium from his own and his colleagues' attempts to instill intelligence in non-organic matter. As “ex-human” life, derived from these experiments, evolves to inhabit outer space, this new extra-terrestrial ecology will become “much more diverse than Earth's biosphere, shaped by discoveries and inventions yet to be made and thus hard to conceive” (Moravec, 1999, pp. 146–147).

The prediction of a new diversity of artificial life is put forward also by Rodney Brooks, the director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He foresees a “Cambrian explosion” of robotic life, a new complexity and diversity in artificial intelligence and robotics reminiscent of the rapid proliferation of complex biological organisms about 530 million years ago. Indeed, Brooks saw his laboratory's creation of “Genghis,” an insectlike robot, in which the interaction of simple components yielded complex behavior that gave the appearance of intentionality, as the beginning of his laboratory's own “Cambrian explosion” (Brooks, 2002, p. 51).

Brooks insists that the robots that he is producing, able to act somewhat autonomously in unstructured environments, “are not just robots. They are artificial creatures” (Brooks, 2002, p. 11). Brooks's vision is shared by scientists working on the Symbrion Project at the University of the West of England (UWE) in Bristol. The project involves the construction of motorized robots, each roughly the size of a sugar cube, which are able to communicate with one another and to “assemble themselves into much larger machines to carry out specific tasks when required” (Sample, 2008). According to Alan Winfield of UWE, these robots will “not only [. . .] cooperate, they'll self-assemble and self-organise into artificial organisms” (quoted in Sample, 2008). Like Brooks's insectlike robots, these are also modeled on an ant or termite colony, each organism relatively simple but together forming swarms that can manifest adaptive behavior.

There is a growing interest in designing robotics to mimic the natural world. Researchers at Tufts University are attempting to develop a robot that mimics the motion of caterpillars. A New York Times article reports:

Such robots frequently have military applications. The MIT-linked defense robotics firm Boston Dynamics produces robots that mimic animal motion, such as the four-legged “Big Dog” that can carry supplies over rugged terrain. A collaboration between University of Pennsylvania, Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Lewis and Clark University, and Boston Dynamics has produced the “bioinspired” RiSE robot, capable of climbing vertical walls, a project that obviously has surveillance and military applications.³ iRobot, the private firm founded by Brooks, has also become a major manufacturer of robots for war (Singer, 2009, p. 111).

The development of animal-mimicking robots is paralleled by the technologization of animals. There is a trend, particularly in military and security research, to use animals as instruments. Scientists at Los Alamos have used Pavlovian conditioning to train bees to detect explosives. A newspaper article on this development features pictures of bees restrained in “specially designed harnesses” at the laboratory (“Bomb Squad,” 2006) (see Figure 26.1). This denaturing of the animal, as it is placed under laboratory controls and divorced and deprogrammed from its natural behavior, aims at turning the animal into a technological tool. The hope is to integrate the bee into a device. The research scientist leading the project claims that “the bees could be carried in hand-held detectors the size of a shoe box, and could be used to sniff out explosives in airports, roadside security checks, or even placed in robot bomb disposal equipment” (“Scientists Train Bees,” 2006).

Genetic engineering aims at an even more fundamental technologization and control of living creatures. The production of transgenic animals collapses barriers between life and technology and between species, but also merges what were previously distinct sectors of production: agriculture, pharmaceuticals, and the industrial production of materials. In February 2009, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the safety of ATryn, an intravenous anti-clotting drug produced in the milk of genetically engineered goats (Lite, 2009). The Canadian firm Nexia Biotechnologies has created a goat that produces spider silk protein in its milk. As the company's CEO puts it, the genetically altered goats are “cheap factories” for the company's product, an ultra-strong material that they have dubbed “BioSteel” (quoted in Barad, 2007, p. 469 n. 26; “GM Goat Spins,” 2000).

Figure 26.1 Honey bees, restrained in specially designed harnesses at Los Alamos National Laboratory, are being trained to sniff out explosives. Photo by Rick Scibelli/Getty Images. Reproduced with permission.

The technologization of animal life is carried forward by the new potential for the standardization of animals through cloning. Cloning represents an extension of the simplification of nature that one finds in agricultural monoculture, and the key application of cloning is in agriculture. The New Scientist notes that “cloning [. . .] offers a much more precise way of making genetically engineered animals. Traditionally, transgenic animals were made by injecting gene copies into a new embryo – an inefficient and chaotic process. Genes can land anywhere in the genome, disrupting other genes. Now researchers can insert DNA at a precise position into a single adult cell, and then clone it to create the desired animals” (Aldhous & Coghlan, 2006, p. 10). So cloning is a radical extension of engineering control over life and therefore of the capitalist subsumption of life, rendering life compatible with industrial norms of precision, standardization, and regularity.

Synthetic biology represents a still more radical development beyond genetic engineering. In a paper published in Science in early 2008, the J. Craig Venter Institute announced that its scientists had created a synthetic chromosome, synthesizing from laboratory chemicals the genome of the bacterium Mycoplasma genitalium (Jha, 2008; “Patent Pending,” 2007). This synthesis of DNA was a step toward Venter's “ultimate goal of inserting the synthetic chromosome into a cell and booting it up to create the first synthetic organism” (Synthetic Genomics, 2008). In 2010, Venter confirmed that his team had accomplished this next step, thereby making a “synthetic cell” (Robbins, 2010).

Computing imagery (such as “booting it up”) signifies the technologization of the organism and the ambition toward predictability and control (Hedgecoe, 1999, esp. pp. 217–218). William Boyd argues that there is an affinity between the conceptual modes through which biological technosciences approach life and the capitalist dynamics involved in the manipulation of life: scientific reductionism facilitates commodification. He argues that “the metaphor of life as code [. . .] has come to provide much of the foundation for efforts to ‘improve’ biological systems by intervening directly in the genetic program itself. Codes [. . .] can be cracked, programmed, and reprogrammed” (Boyd, 2003, p. 31). Nobel laureate Hamilton Smith, who led the scientific team at the J. Craig Venter Institute, likened the production of the artificial genome to finishing the operating system of a computer: “By itself, it doesn't do anything, but when you install it on a computer, then you have a working computer system. It's the same with the genome: the genome is the operating system for a cell and the cytoplasm is the hardware that's required to run that genome” (quoted in Jha, 2008). The understanding of life in terms of hardware and software is bound up with the practical goal of the computer-assisted design of life: Venter called his new cell “the first self-replicating species that we have on the planet whose parent is a computer” (quoted in Robbins, 2010, p. 1).

Synthetic biology follows an engineering paradigm and there are striking similarities with Taylorism. Just as Taylorism involves the initial analysis of the worker's living activity, the analytical breaking down of that activity into its constituent parts, and the re-engineering of the work process, similarly synthetic biology involves the breaking down of the complexity of life into relatively simple components with the aim of rebuilding these components. Like capitalist mass production, synthetic biology operates via the assembly of standardized or replaceable parts. A key tool of synthetic biology is known as the “BioBrick,” which consists of fragments of DNA. An article in the popular science magazine BBC Focus explains,

The BBC article emphasizes that this use of standardized parts reflects an engineering orientation and points out that “a number of this new breed of biologists have come from an engineering rather than a life sciences background” (O'Connell, 2006, pp. 49–50).

The production of abstract life means intervention aimed at overcoming the complexities and interdependencies of the natural world, as the following quote in the BBC article makes clear:

Synthetic biology is an assault on complexity not only analytically, but also in practice, as it seeks to package nature into standardized components in aid of producing standardized engineered-but-living products.

Drew Endy, another MIT scientist working in synthetic biology, explains that the goal is to build predictability into biological processes: “We can probably engineer biology in such a way to produce components that are insulated from one another, that are designed to be easy to put together and then behave in ways that you expect” (quoted in Jha, 2005). As science journalist Alok Jha put it, “if biology is to truly turn into a technology, engineers need to develop standard biological components that they can simply plug into their application – something available in all other forms of engineering” (Jha, 2005). The Economist, which has published a number of cautiously optimistic articles about this new technoscientific field, notes that “Synthetic biologists plan to [. . .] industrialise the process in a way that will let people order biological parts as routinely as they order electrical components. If this vision is realised (and there is still a long way to go) biotechnology will become a true branch of engineering” (“Playing Demigods,” 2006).

Synthetic biology operates with abstract life – life broken down into components that can be treated as engineering tools. This abstraction is also abstraction from ecosystems and geography: the appropriation of the productive capacities of nature and their re-situation in a technological/industrial setting. In this way, the obstacles posed for capitalist production by natural scarcities, timescales, and geographies may be overcome. Financial Times journalist Clive Cookson writes, “within a decade some researchers believe that bacteria, for example, could be designed that would mass produce drugs that currently have to be painstakingly harvested from rare plants” (Cookson, 2006).

Scientific reductionism and technological standardization are linked together in a process of the commodification of the living. As Nikolas Rose has written with regard to the development of the “molecular” approach to biomedicine:

These processes of reduction and manipulation are linked to what Rose calls “a new political economy of life in which [. . .] biopolitics has become bioeconomics” (Rose, 2007, p. 17). Epistemological reduction of the living to the level of the molecule combines with an engineering ethos that aims toward efficiently reordering life for the purpose of making it optimally productive.

The engineering paradigm in biology is merging with nanotechnology as a project of technologizing life and animating technology. Bionanotechnology is predicated on the notion that DNA molecules, proteins, and enzymes are already “machines” or “self-assemblers” found in nature, which can themselves manipulate matter at the nanoscale. The UK Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) defines bionanotechnology as

The aim is to harness natural processes occurring at the nanoscale for a variety of applications from medicine to “molecular computing” to the manufacturing of materials. The linking of biotechnology with nanotechnology is associated with hopes of unifying biology with industry, harnessing natural reproduction to the production of medical and industrial technologies and consumer goods.

Although bionanotechnology is in its infancy and nowhere near the production of industrial-scale quantities of materials (Jones, 2004, p. 125), there are hopes for the possibility of scaling up. New York University chemist Nadrian Seeman has pioneered attempts to harness the self-assembly of DNA molecules to make complex self assembled structures, leading ultimately to the ability to manufacture fibers or electronic devices. An article in the Christian Science Monitor describes him as the “Henry Ford” of nanotechnology, for his attempts to develop the production of molecular machines to industrial levels of efficiency and mass production. According to the article,

Commenting on the potential feasibility of Seeman's vision of molecular mass manufacture, British nanotechnology scientist Richard Jones notes that

The potential applications for bionanotechnology techniques are already entering into the imagination of new avenues for business (as in the Lexus advertisement quoted earlier). Cookson writes in the Financial Times: “The fusion of nanotechnology and biology may also allow us to grow products such as solar collectors and liquid crystal displays from living material” (Cookson, 2006).

A key feature of techno-futurist discourse is the image of the displacement of the factory and thereby the emancipation of production from its dependence on potentially antagonistic human labor. Seeman's “extremely small factory workers” signify an escape from dependence on human labor by harnessing the fundamentals of life. In nanotechnology guru Eric Drexler's visions of the future, the workers are self-assembling nanobots or “molecular assemblers” (Drexler, 1986, pp. 14, 54–58; Kurzweil, 2005, pp. 228–230). Ray Kurzweil draws on these ideas in a way that exemplifies how nanotechnology visions express the desire to meld production with life. In the idea of self-assembly, the productive apparatus of capitalism is imbued with life: “Self-assembly allows improperly formed components to be discarded automatically and makes it possible for the potentially trillions of circuit components to organize themselves, rather than be painstakingly assembled in a top-down process. It would enable large-scale circuits to be created in test-tubes rather than in multibillion-dollar factories” (Kurzweil, 2005, p. 115).

At the same time as life is reified, transformed into a mechanism or object, capital is strangely imbued with lifelike qualities. Drexler explicitly puts forward nanotechnology as a project which liberates capital from the productive and reproductive powers of both labor and nature, instead vesting those powers in technology and, hence, in capital itself. In Engines of Creation, Drexler writes:

Nanotechnology as “self-replicating capital” represents the emancipation of capital from contradictions and limits. Nanotechnology is the material realization of the ideal of productive capital, or, in Marx's terms, of capital as “self-valorizing value.”

Melinda Cooper argues that the combination of economic crisis and a growing recognition of ecological limits, expressed most influentially in the Club of Rome's Limits to Growth report of 1972, was the impetus toward the development of the bioeconomy. The promotion of commercial biomedicine and bioengineering was, Cooper argues, in opposition to the tropes of stagnation and limits that pervaded the political economy and culture of the 1970s. Biotechnology, since highly dependent on venture capital, was economically linked to the financialization of the economy, the expansion of debt, and the uncoupling of the financial sector from the “real economy” (see also Rajan, 2006). It was a focal point for fantasies of the dematerialization of capitalism and the overcoming of all limits. These futures were founded on the assumption that “while industrial machines are subject to the laws of depletion and diminishing returns, life at its most ‘lifelike’ obeys a law of self-organization and increasing complexity. Where industrial production depends on the finite reserves available on planet earth, life, like contemporary debt production, needs to be understood as a process of continuous autopoiesis, a self-engendering of life from life, without conceivable beginning or end” (Cooper, 2008, p. 38, emphasis in original). Biotechnology was linked to the promise of self-reproducing capital and never-ending growth.

During the financial crisis of 2008, the surge of speculative money into commodities (combined with other factors including the taking over of agriculture by biofuel crops) led to a spike in food prices (Blas & Dinmore, 2008; Minder, 2008; Watts, 2009). At the height of the crisis, techno-salvationism reared its head, with genetic modification and other technoscientific innovations put forward as the solution to food scarcity. As food prices surged, the Financial Times called for a “second ‘green revolution,’” arguing for new investment in raising agricultural productivity through advanced technology (Blas, 2008). The chairman of Nestlé took the opportunity of high commodity prices to make the case for overcoming European resistance to agricultural biotechnology: “You cannot today feed the world without genetically modified organisms” (quoted in Minder, Bounds, & Wiggins, 2008). As the world appeared headed for 1970s-style stagflation, Jeffrey Sachs asserted that new technologies offered a way out of both the food crisis and the broader economic crisis. Sachs argued for massive investment in sustainable technologies such as solar power, electricity storage and transmission, hybrid engines, carbon capture, cellulose-based ethanol, “safe nuclear power,” new drought-resistant crop varieties, and new irrigation techniques that “can help impoverished farmers move from one subsistence crop to several high-value crops year round” (Sachs, 2008, p. 31). He opined that “countless other technologies on the horizon can reconcile a world of growing energy demands with increasingly scarce fossil fuels and rising threats of human-made climate change” (Sachs, 2008, p. 31). This new techno-salvationism offers to overcome the problems generated by past development and by earlier failed technological fixes. Climate change has exacerbated the depletion of world food stocks. But the legacy of the Green Revolution has also added to the problem, since it led to the development of agriculture that was highly dependent on energy and petrochemical inputs and water. The new “green revolution” means using biotechnology, including genetic modification, to try to increase yields in spite of shortages of water and the growing cost of energy and petrochemical inputs (Beattie, 2008). Techno-enthusiasts become more insistent about the “imperative” for such technological fixes in proportion with the irrational, crisis-ridden nature of the prevailing economic system and its destructive relationship to the natural world (Vidal & Lawrence, 2010).

As the world's politicians appear paralyzed in the face of global warming, techno-salvationism is rampant in this area. The Bush administration backed a range of technological fixes to the crisis, including “giant mirrors in space or reflective dust pumped into the atmosphere” (Adam, 2007; see also Broad, 2006; Etc. Group, 2007). Private corporations are seeking to profit from developing “geoengineering” solutions to climate change. Proposals have included spreading iron filings on the ocean surface to encourage plankton and sequester carbon dioxide (Etc. Group, 2007). There have been protests against an Indian and German expedition to the Antarctic to engage in experimentation involving the spreading of 20 tons of iron sulphate over a 300 sq km area in the Southern Ocean (Bhattacharya, 2009).

The environmental imbalance produced by carbon pollution creates a potentially lucrative demand for technoscientific products and expertise, and there are companies waiting to take advantage of such opportunities. Modern industrial civilization is doing away with the relatively stable and benign climate that has existed for 10,000 years since the last Ice Age. As the environmental journalist Fred Pearce puts it:

The life-sustaining environment that was a taken-for-granted common good can no longer be taken for granted and the maintenance of equilibrium in the atmosphere and ecosystem becomes potentially an artificial technological accomplishment. As our life on Earth becomes increasingly precarious, it becomes also increasingly artificial.

Even the problem of algal blooms in the oceans, caused by pollution and climate change, has become a focus for techno-salvationist hopes. The problem was highlighted when 32% of the 50 sq km area off the coast of Qingdao, devoted to Olympic sailing during the Beijing Olympics, was covered in algae. However, as well as raising awareness about the danger to ocean life caused by the industrial transformation of the environment, the algae also led to technovisionary speculation about the possibility of new biofuels. A Financial Times article noted: “But the crazy growth rates of algae under favourable conditions – doubling their mass every day or two – is one reason why they are seen as an attractive future prospect by the biofuels industry” (Cookson, 2008). An economic system that requires “crazy growth rates” finds a match in an equally virulent and invasive species. And not content with existent green algae, bioscientists are seeking to engineer new varieties that may be more efficiently harnessed to capitalism's energy requirements: algae for biofuels is one of the potential applications that Craig Venter promises for synthetic life (“Craig's Twist,” 2009).

The notion of a technological fix to environmental problems is also dear to the hearts of nano-visionaries. Drexler's nanotechnology manifesto, Engines of Creation, contains a chapter on “The Limits to Growth” that presents the nanosphere as holding the solution to problems of resource limits: “When we develop pollution free nanomachines to gather solar energy and resources, Earth will be able to support a civilization far larger and wealthier than any yet seen [. . .] The potential of Earth makes the resources we now use seem insignificant by comparison” (Drexler, 1986, p. 162).⁴ Historian W. Patrick McCray argues that the techno-futurist thought of Eric Drexler and Ray Kurzweil was developed in reaction against the 1970s discourse of “limits to growth.” In opposition to the image of Earth as a closed system, in which resources were being rapidly depleted, and the law of entropy applied, techno-futurists like Drexler looked to the infinities of outer space. Before transferring these fantasies of superseding limits into the realm of nanotechnology, Drexler was an enthusiast for space colonies (McCray, 2009; see also Drexler, 1986, p. 165). Access to resources beyond Earth remains central to Drexler's vision: “Yet Earth is but a speck [. . .] The resources of the solar system are truly vast, making the resources of Earth seem insignificant by comparison” (Drexler, 1986, p. 162). Similar extra-terrestrial fantasies are found in the writings of technovisionaries such as Kurzweil and Moravec.

In Moravec, techno-futurist fantasies of artificial intelligence extending out beyond Earth into the universe combine with a romantic-primitivist critique of industrialism. Moravec's narrative begins with a loss of Eden and develops toward technological salvation. “A thousand centuries ago,” he tells us, “the world was fully automated. Our ancestors were supported by the maintenance-free, self-operating machinery called Nature. But, in an Adamic bargain predating Faust, they meddled with the mechanism. By tilling and planting, they magnified the machinery's productivity but trapped themselves in a routine of heavy, unpleasant labor” (Moravec, 1999, p. 127). From agriculture developed urban civilization and modern industrial society. Unchanged biologically from our Stone Age ancestors, we are today born into a highly technologized, unnatural environment. There is a mismatch between the human organism and the industrial urban environment that “induces alienation in the midst of unprecedented physical plenty” (Moravec, 1999, p. 7). Since Moravec conceives of alienation in biological and essentialist terms, he can suggest that the problem is destined to be overcome by transcending and eliminating the biological human organism. “Technological evolution” will again restore us to our natural state of idleness as machines take over work, and “intelligence” will take flight from our unwieldy bodies to inhabit realms beyond Earth itself (Moravec, 1999, p. 9).

Kurzweil's fantasy of “the Singularity,” similarly to Moravec, denies limits by imaginatively escaping from the constraints of Earth as the relevant environment. In Kurzweil, the rejection of spatial limits (of Earth) and of temporal limits (via radical life-extension) is achieved ultimately through decorporealization. When minds can be uploaded as information to computational hardware, then

Following abstract labor and abstract life, these fantasies involve a further abstraction: human existence is decorporealized and abstracted as “intelligence” and therefore delinked from its material ecological basis. Kurzweil's fantasy of endless growth deals with the problem of ecological limits just by denying the salience of ecology, seeking what he calls “transcendence” (Kurzweil, 2005, p. 388) in a decorporealized, informatic consciousness. But the fantasy of transcendence arrives at a state of incorporeal oneness with the universe that seems to be close to religious notions of the afterlife (Geraci, 2008). This artificial life of uploaded, incorporeal intelligence seems to be a form of death.

Conclusion

Artificial life and a dead planet are twin expressions of a world built on the basis of alienated labor. The alienation of one's own living activity produces an alienated relationship with the broader world of the living. The degradation of labor is implicated in the degradation of life. The imposition of capital's framework of value devalues the particularities and qualitative potentiality of the individual human being (Mészáros, 2008, p. 47). The broader living world of nature is also deprived of value, as that which cannot be rendered in cash terms no longer has value; hence, much of the Earth becomes a sink for pollution and other “externalities” of capitalist production. The standardization and disciplining of human productive activity are accompanied by the standardization and control of the reproductive processes of natural organisms. The living is reified, then, symbolically in terms of the way in which it is valued – quality being reduced to quantity – and practically, as both human activity and nature more broadly are degraded, standardized, and routinized, becoming increasingly thing-like.

As Philip K. Dick perceived, the reification of the living is accompanied by the animation of the non-living. The routinization of work makes mechanization possible, and subsequently is further imposed through mechanization. The sophistication of the capabilities of computers and automatic machinery develops in tandem with the abstraction and simplification of ever-broader swathes of human activity. The standardization, fragmentation, and control of living organisms are achieved by the granting of increasingly lifelike qualities and capacities to the non-living. So we have technologized life and lifelike or “living” technology.

Drexler's designation of this living technology as “self-replicating capital” and “productive capital” is an analytical insight, the critical implications of which he himself cannot develop. The infusion of capital with life is accompanied by salvationist rhetoric in techno-futurist thinkers like Drexler, Moravec, and Kurzweil and is fundamental to their images of endless expansion and technological progress. As Cooper has argued, the technologization of life through biotechnology has been crucial as a way of maintaining the idea of the progressiveness of capitalism, against the challenge posed both by the threat of economic stagnation and by environmental consciousness of “limits to growth.” Although seemingly far-fetched, the technological salvationism of thinkers like Drexler, Kurzweil, and Moravec expresses assumptions that are in fact pervasive in the ideology of modern technoscience. Today, as political or regulatory solutions to climate change are stymied by entrenched capitalist interests and by the anarchic international system of nation-state competition, hopes for a solution are increasingly vested in a technological fix, through geoengineering, however fantastical such technological solutions appear (York, Clark, & Foster, 2009, esp. pp. 14–15). What geoengineering augurs is potentially the radical technologization of the planet's geophysical processes (solar reflectors in space, etc.). This would mean that the Earth itself becomes a capital-intensive system, requiring huge investments of capital to maintain its life-supporting systems. The common milieu of life, making possible all production and reproduction, is thus potentially transformed into an artificial milieu, dependent on and intertwined with capital. At the macro-scale of the Earth system, as well as the micro-scale of the genetic code, the reproduction of life is appropriated by, and subordinated to, the reproduction of capital.

The reification of the living and the animation of the non-living tend toward the environmental degradation of Earth so that life is no longer self-sustaining. For equilibrium, sustenance, and the promise of a future, the technovisionaries encourage us to look instead to the powers of capital, expressed in technological miracles of geoengineering, life in outer space, or uploadable intelligence. The renewal of capital as self-replicating, productive, self-valorizing value takes over from the renewal of life. Or, rather, the renewal of capital becomes the precondition for the renewal of life. Marx wrote in Volume 3 of Capital:

As the powers of the living are annexed to technology, an asymmetric symbiosis with capital is increasingly imposed on the living world. Capital becomes the artificial womb for life. The condition of “living dead species” abstracted from their living milieu, surviving in an artificially preserved commodified form, comes to characterize life in general. Marx described capitalism as an inversion through which living labor is appropriated for the augmentation of dead labor, and dead labor rules over the living. The capitalist “vampire” sucks the living activity of the worker (and, we should add, of the broader natural world), and from this it appropriates and takes on the characteristics of life. Living death describes the character of capital itself as self-valorizing value. As labor and life are subsumed by capital, this condition of living death is also generalized. This is the meaning of artificial life on a dead planet.

NOTES

1 Obviously techno-enthusiasm has characterized much of the science fiction genre (e.g., Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke), and the techno-futurist discourse of robotics and nanotechnology enthusiasts often references or overlaps with such techno-optimist science fiction (Milburn, 1958, esp. pp. 39–58).

2 The concept of abstract life is implied also by Melinda Cooper's discussion of organ transplantation as an abstraction of the “livable time of the organ” from the body (Cooper, 2008, p. 126). The idea that abstract life is closely related to abstract labor is also, I think, implied by Eugene Thacker's analysis of “biomaterial labor” and of biotechnology's “economic uses of ‘life itself’” (Thacker, 2005, p. 202).

3 See Boston Dynamics, http://www.bostondynamics.com/ and the RiSE Project, http://kodlab.seas.upenn.edu/∼rise/newsite/index.php?leaf=1

4 Drexler is also an enthusiast for cryogenic freezing as “insurance” against loss of species (Drexler, 1986, p. 123).

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