Outline:
Rehabilitating the Vision of a Sustainable Bioeconomic Future
Contents
Intro
The hope of a bioeconomic future that is sustainable & regenerative is on the path towards inevitable failure.
It isn’t a universal truth. There are always anomalies: companies, technologies & manufacturing processes that break free from the norm as isolated success cases, but these anomalies grow to exist outside of the status quo. The very nature of their deviation leaves them incapable of being the driving force that we need to course-correct the entirety of a global bioeconomy & divert it away from its inadequacies.
From a wider perspective, the failings of today’s bioeconomy far outweigh the successes. At the planetary scale, the trends are clear:
• Companies continue to fold (many after significant investment from both public & private sources).
• Technologies under-deliver at scale, and fail to compete on unit economics against entrenched dominant (and often heavily subsidised) methods of production.
• Funding & attention is increasingly diverted away from a bioeconomy in pursuit of planetary & civilizational health, and into a bioeconomy in pursuit of nationalism, furthering of wealth disparity and maximising of neoliberal economic growth.
These trends & trajectories cannot continue. Not if we truly believe in an advanced bioeconomy & its potential to realise new visions for the future of our species.
This writing is my first attempt to distill the considerations & worldviews that have been swirling through me over several years spent working & building in industrial biotech. The attempt is going to be clumsy & muddled at first but I’ll continue to refine it as I pull at more threads, dig deeper into the justifications & rationale behind my views, and learn from others.
I’ll start by considering the past & present, and where/why I think things have gone wrong. I’ll then describe my vision for a revolutionized 2050+ bioeconomic future under 3 headings: how we produce, how much we produce, and why we produce. Finally, I’ll attempt to sketch out an immediate actionable plan to start to push in the direction of this 2050 vision.
Underpinning everything I write, is my unwavering belief that the biotechnological innovations of the last 70 years present us with a species-first opportunity that we’ve so far completely failed to grasp, or even to simply be cognizant of. This opportunity presents a world-changing critical transition that we can influence to tip one way or another. If we miss (or mistreat) this opportunity, it will not come again.
This means it’s time to be honest. It’s time to be critical & radical & brave & all-encompassingly empathetic. It’s time to fully examine the depths of our human-species condition and all of the social, political & economic structures that have spilled out from it and to subject every single one of these facets to absolute critical inquiry in pursuit of a revolutionary future that is holistic, perpetual, regenerative & equitable.
Biotechnology can be the keystone of a new future, but only if we can reconcile the structures of our civilizations to the structures of our biosphere.
The Past & the Present
Before we try to conceptualize better futures, we need to think about where we are today, and what has led us there.
If you take the dictionary definition of biomanufacturing very literally, then our species has been entirely embedded in “biomanufacturing” since at least the agricultural revolution of the fertile crescent (now Iraq) 10,000 years ago. But it’s only in the last ~50 years that we’ve adopted the term biomanufacturing to refer to the “use of living organisms to produce biological materials”. To me, “biomanufacturing” carries implications of anthropocentrism and imperialism which did not always exist (and do not need to always persist) in our interactions with biology for the purposes of production. I will therefore adopt new language:
• Traditional biomaking to refer to our historical use of biology in agriculture, forestry and fermentation.
• Neoliberal biomanufacturing to refer to the current dogma of how advanced biotechnologies are being deployed into markets.
• Future biomaking to refer to my vision for how biotechnologies could be used to empower a new pluriversal symbiosis between anthropocentric industry and ecocentric flourishing.
(Here – a longer note on semantics. I see a stark distinction between the terms “biomanufacturing” and “biomaking” that is worth emphasizing. Where manufacturing implies production in pursuit of commodification, making implies production in pursuit of utilization. It is critically important to consider the impact of these implications much more deeply, but in an attempt at brevity here, I will explore language further elsewhere. It will also be necessary to scrutinize the implications of other terms like bioeconomy & biotechnology, but for now these terms are so basal that I will use them as placeholders for ease of communication.
In time, a new lexicon of revolutionary future biomaking will emerge through this work and the richer work of a diversity of renegade biomakers, thinkers & dreamers).
All modes of industry & manufacturing can be world-changing, and all across all modes economic system resilience has always been inextricably linked to ecological system resilience, but nowhere are these truths more explicit & visible than in biomanufacturing. When we commodify biological products, a unique bond is woven between those who enact biomanufacturing & the non-human (or sometimes human) biological entities that they subvert to enact it. For 1,000s of years biomaking has gifted us with the ability to commune deeply with the biological & ecological systems that we live & thrive within. This symbiosis between manufacturer (or more broadly: maker) & biology can be commensal or mutual, but increasingly it has been warped into parasitism by the dynamics of modern day economics & “growth-at-all-costs” drivers. And now, for the first time in our species’s history, we have successfully built advanced technologies that could allow us to entirely assimilate the potential of the Earth’s biosphere into the rapid acceleration of biomanufacturing & the industrial functions it currently serves.
For any biotechnology evangelist, the impact that this opportunity will have on our future is impossible to overstate.
And it’s imperative that this species-defining moment belongs to us all.
Because biology is sublime in its complexity. It has self-iterated for million of years before our species even stood on two legs. It is infinitely creative & resilient. It is the divine innovator. If there is anything in our reality that tangibly exists but is still godlike, it is surely the simple mechanism of evolution.
And the combination of our accelerating ability to leverage & control this wondrous multiplicity of biological systems with the unique interaction this creates between maker, ecology & economy is exactly why I believe we’re at the brink of the greatest watershed our species has ever known.
But this opportunity brings risk as well as promise. And so far, we have failed absolutely to harness it effectively for the betterment of our species-level collective.
Because sadly, egocentrism eats ecocentrism for breakfast. Maybe this is a fatal flaw of sapience, or maybe (hopefully) it’s just one of the many possible sapient lifeways we can carve out, and one that we’ve unintentionally trapped ourselves in. If the former is true, then I guess we’re a tad fucked, but if the latter is true, then there must be routes to recreate our species-level lifeway. I believe in the latter, and I see a revolutionized bioeconomy as paramount to achieving it. I have conviction here because, while egocentrism inherently defines all human-made structures & systems, biology is not human-made. Biology exists beyond us & encapsulates us entirely (except for maybe the soul, if you consider this as not completely a function of biology). This means egocentrism alone can never fully enclose the infinite & inscrutable potentialities of biology’s multiplex, and with this truth, we are offered the unique opportunity to look beyond the flaws of our sapience. This is an extraordinary opportunity that no other mode of industry or technology can ever possibly present.
So, to believe we could ever force biology into the narrow confines of economics is surely an inane, arrogant and facetious notion. In biomaking, the biology must guide the making, not the making instruct the biology.
This has been the failing of our past which we have carried into our present through our collective inability to confront our egocentricity bias. Instead, we let ego, game theory, self-interest & ill-intent slowly cannibalize our species & the systems we build.
Biology is anathema to ego. This is the foundational truth that we need to germinate throughout a bio-empowered future if our species has any chance of transcending its current lifeway and sprouting free from the ever-narrowing lens through which we are forced to view the world, ourselves and each-other.
So what should come next? What is the new revolutionary vision we should carry into our future that we need to aspire to, and what are the first steps we should take to move towards that trajectory?
Visions for a Revolutionary Bioeconomic Future
Here, I will work to reify a long-term vision for a reimagined bio-empowered future. As I write above: my ideas for a bioeconomic revolution will continue to clarify as I keep learning, take on the considerations & critiques of those around me, and attempt to build the organisations & technologies that I believe are integral to pursuing incremental progress in the direction of this vision.
For now, I’ve split my consideration into 3 sub-headings:
1. Modes of production: how do we manufacture & what systemic assumptions underpin this how?
2. Volumes of production: how much do we manufacture & to serve what purposes / whose interests?
3. Reasons for production: why do we produce in the ways of 1 & 2 above? How do we interact (on moral & psychosocial levels) with these 2 points, and what impact does this have on our individual & collective human psyches?
For each point, I will revisit the present in a little more detail, before illustrating the revolutionary change I think is necessary for a new future of biomaking.
Modes of Production
Present:
Biomanufacturing largely replicates the same tired infrastructures of production that it proclaims to be disrupting: manufacturing processes are scaled-up and agglomerated into huge fermentation plants whilst value chains are compartmentalized into the laboratories, workshops, research institutes & facilities of the prevailing technocrats, hyper-wealthy capitalists & elitely educated (predominantly of the global north).
All of this creates a biomanufacturing imperative that is almost entirely removed from the eyes, hands & hearts of the global citizenry. In part, this unquestioning adoption of the status quo of traditional manufacturing into biomanufacturing speaks to how entrenched the dogmas of capital, extractivism & consumption are inside almost all of us. But it also points to how the existing hierarchies of influence & control naturally pervade into biomanufacturing’s ambitions, both from the top-down (via capital) and from the bottom-up (via egocentrism’s contortion of individual motivations & value systems). More basely, the transfer of incumbent modes of production into biomanufacturing exposes a severe lack of courage, imagination or artistry at all scales inside biotech ecosystems.
This perpetuation of outdated neoliberal economic forms serves only to perpetrate enclosures across greater swathes of human & non-human existence, and have these enclosures penetrate deeper into the human spirit.
And, just as the logic of prevailing socioeconomic structures is only justifiable when it discards significant externalities such as water quality, soil health, the “invisible” labour of mothers & other carers, ecosystem stability, displacement of indigenous communities & lifeways (and the list goes ever on), the logic of the biomanufacturing economy that we’ve been building also demands that we blind ourselves to these same key externalities, plus additional externalities specific to neoliberal biomanufacturing (these to be explored elsewhere, but briefly they include the publicly-funded nature of almost all foundational biotech innovations, the sovereignty of non-human species, the long-standing intimate relationships between indigenous peoples & their bioregional metagenomes).
The necessity of willful ignorance in the face of these externalities makes the foundational logic of today’s bioeconomy deeply flawed and extremely fragile. A ground-up rebuild of our biomanufacturing modalities is needed if we are to countenance these externalities & avoid repeating the mistakes of the past.
Future:
Our modes of production need to become distributed, adaptable & rapidly iterative. I believe that this requires the ability for production value chains to operate far more holistically & autonomously than they currently do across the majority of the imperial core. We need to reject the neoliberal lie of the tragedy of the commons and reclaim the collectivism & smallholding spirit of a global citizenry by building a highly democratized & accessible network of biomaking nodes.
Scale-out & empower instead of scale-up & alienate.
To be clear: a drive towards hyper-local distributed biomaking is not a call for an increase in the ideologies of localism, nationalism or anti-globalism. In fact, my view on hyper-local biomaking is that it can achieve quite the opposite. By empowering communities to take ownership of their biomaking and to thrive from within, whilst also framing this local thriving in the context of a globally enmeshed biomaking ecosystem, we can build new forms of social empowerment, unity and cohesion into a global bioeconomic network that is holistic & multiscalar.
Ensuring that the future bioeconomic system is truly multiscalar is key here. Each community-scale biomaking unit needs to also consciously operate as an informed & empowered node that feeds into a diverse global network of other such nodes: together emancipated from the ravenous regime of neoliberal biomanufacturing.
By building this complex network, biomaking will grow to embody biological principles instead of manufacturing principles as its fundamental tents. Only in learning from & mirroring the complexity of ecological & biological networks (think trophic systems, mycorrhizal webs, metabolic pathways, microbial consortia) can we feasibly create a new global economy that is perpetually resilient. Another prospect that would arise from this kind of distributed & non-hierarchical future of biomaking is the potential for emergent properties to arise that could not be rationally predicted or implemented otherwise. Once again, this design synergizes with the natural properties of biology: presenting the ability to generate new human-species lifeways that it would be impossible to foresee or conceptualize if relying purely on the egocentric rational mind.
In this way, by fully embracing ecocentric system design guided by biological principles, we can begin to make genuine progress towards advanced civilizational goals like universal flourishing, extended human longevity & multiplanetary existence in a way that other technologies and the socioeconomic structures they rely on could never fathom.
By facilitating the establishment of empowered & autonomous hyper-local community biomaking units, and enshrining all of these units as interconnected nodes within a globally enmeshed non-hierarchical biomaking network, we can create a new and lasting mode of industrial existence. This multiscalar system will span geography, culture and time and sit as the foundations for a bioeconomic system that can persist for 100s of generations.
But rehabilitating our modes of production will be futile if we don’t also rehabilitate the rate at which these modes are utilised by humanity. This requires a reassessment of how much we produce, and for what purpose.
Volumes of Production
Present:
Rates of material production & consumption are informed by key drivers that are aberrations born out of neoliberalism’s co-option of our industrial culture. Primarily these drivers are the insatiable need for GDP to grow and compound at all times followed by the rabid avarice that the pursuit of this growth can indoctrinate us with. Under the pressure of these drivers, we are forced to maximize the rates at which we extract & accumulate both resources & wealth for the benefit of imperialists, kleptocrats & oligarchs. This is growth-at-all-costs allowed to spread unimpeded: its virulence infecting us all with a vicious cycle of production, consumption & malcontent that metastasizes like cancer.
But infinite growth inside a finite system is impossible. It is an idea pushed into dominance by egomaniacs & sociopaths and is completely untethered from reality. The invasive irrationality that has infested our species’ industriousness must be usurped as a matter of urgency if we are to fight for a new future of bioeconomic thriving.
Future:
First, we need to cast out our addiction to GDP growth and reject the acceleration of capital accumulation & crisis profiteering that is enacted by corporate monopolies & hyper-wealthy imperialists. This challenge extends far beyond biomanufacturing, and will be a long & arduous pursuit, but I believe that a reimagined future of revolutionary biomaking infrastructure is the strongest platform to materialize these changes out of.
I see the new priority motivating drivers that we need to instill into our rates of biomaking as:
• Achieving a pluriversal high standard of living that is equitably distributed across all geographies & cultures.
• Fulfilling basic needs to achieve this high standard whilst also fulfilling the social, psychological & philosophical needs of a global citizenry.
• Operating well within the limits of the Earth’s planetary boundaries.
• Diverting capital flows away from monopolies and towards more equal distribution across the global citizenry.
By shifting our attentions towards these aspirations, we can scrutinize the underlying growth-at-all-costs drivers of production more openly than is currently allowable. Only through honest reflection can we nudge cultural dialogues away from over-production & over-consumption in service of the hyper-rich imperial elite and towards production & consumption in service of ourselves & our communities (from local to global).
This is all possible through biology, because it’s what biology has been doing for millennia.
Although achieving these things will not be easy, it is at least obvious in its logic. Produce less, discard less, and consume to nourish a collective species-level lifeway, not to further enrich the already extreme wealth of the few imperialist demagogues that have abused & corrupted this lifeway.
Beyond the questions of how we produce & how much we produce, is the question of why we have reached this point, and how it reflects on the identity of ourselves & our species as a whole. Facing the existentialism of this question is vital, uncomfortable, and is the final category inside the theory of change I aim to clarify in this writing.
Reasons for Production
Present:
Understanding how the average 21st century citizen views themself inside the narrow reality we have constructed is a complex task that I will inevitably fail to explore in any satisfactory depth.
To keep this writing focused on how biotechnology could be better utilised to grow revolutionary futures, I will begin from a hypothetical baseline that is (sadly) far more utopian than the reality of today’s existence. This means I won’t be spending time here to examine the numerous horrors that we’ve installed as conditions of human existence under neoliberal dominance. These horrors include genocide, war, famine, epidemia & ecocide. All of these abominations need to be abolished, but I’m not yet qualified or educated enough to speak on them in any detail so, for now, I won’t.
But despite my ignorance, I believe that a reimagined bio-empowered future would contribute significantly to preventing such future atrocities from arising. Where this belief fails is in the ability to end existing crises or to repair the near-term physiological, psychological and environmental traumas that these crises inflict across our world. There is no panacea here. To claim anything otherwise would be reductionistic, naive, and perhaps duplicitous.
Our current political structures are not accidents. They have been engineered to operate exactly as they are doing. Now more so than ever before, there is a dire need for a new global politics of care. While a bio-empowered future will be foundational to the maintenance & proliferation of this politics of care, I don’t view biotechnology as its sole inception point. The degree of necessity transcends any isolated technology drive or economic trend.
So, to be able to more easily examine how the human condition interacts with biomanufacturing, I’ll consider a hypothetical idealised working-class global citizen who has all basic physiological & safety needs met. They have affordable access to a nutritionally complete diet. They have clean air to breathe & water to drink. They have a home as shelter. They are not at risk of subjugation by their state or other institutional actors and they live in a stable democracy that allows trust in leaders and in the agents of the state who are tasked with upholding law & order.
Reasons for production are fed by the reasons for consumption, and for this idealised 21st century citizen, these reasons are just one more thing that has been deformed by the pervasiveness of growth-at-all-cost drivers. Under current neoliberal rule, the idealised citizen will continue to consume beyond their basic needs not to enrich their higher needs or the true quality of their existence, but to conform to the impositions that are insatiably enforced by the structure of the market.
This means that the current rationale at the heart of our incumbent economic structures (and emerging bioeconomic structures) is entirely unfit to serve the complete needs of a human-species citizen.
• Social needs of love, trust & belonging are failed by the architecture of consumption that forces us to see ourselves as inadequate when compared to others, both in terms of personal capital accumulation and material ownership. This architecture (which the structure of neoliberal biomanufacturing will continue to perpetuate) prevents us from collectivizing & building social cohesion to its fullest strength. This rationale also instructs how online media platforms are established & operated to demolish the fulfilment of social needs.
• Self-esteem of individuals is crushed by the above, as well as by the compartmentalization of production value chains and the aggregation of key economic functions into the control of a hyper-wealthy few, which removes economic agency from the wider citizenry and reduces them to rationalizable consumers who have their higher purpose stripped from them: automatons that exist only to perpetuate the flows of a market that is sterile & lifeless.
• Self-actualization needs are failed by the increasingly narrow scope of lifeways and neurotypes that are allowed to exist under neoliberalism. Art has been assimilated by the machine of growth-at-all costs and reduced to “art-as-we-know-it”. The prospering of neurodivergency has been restricted by the brutal utilitarianism of a capital-addicted market. The pluriversalism of a diverse global citizenry has been eroded until the imperialist patriarchal idol of homo economicus reigns supreme to subjugate all other potential routes to enlightenment.
In short, the ability for any individual to fully realise their potential as a multiplicitous sapient entity rooted in biology has been severely restricted. Even those who have won (or been handed) extreme privilege & wealth are heavily warped by how they have been conditioned to interact with utility, productivity and consumption. This is not species-level collective flourishing and never can be. If we allow this rationale of production to continue to dominate & malform us, then we prove ourselves to be utterly inadequate and unworthy of our sapience.
But yet again, biology can be the solution. Biology’s thriving is impervious to the whims of artificial market forces or the corrupting influence of capital. It has thrived for millennia long before these anthropocentric shackles and will thrive long after them. By embracing biological principles through future biomaking, we can aspire towards a restitution of the fullest potential of our species-level lifeway that we’ve disemboweled before the false altar of neoliberalism.
Why we produce anything, and how that informs the identity of ourselves & our species, needs radical reimagination from the deepest foundations. This is a huge undertaking that is fundamentally spiritual & existential, but economic structure will strongly influence the space that is (or currently — isn’t) available for this deep work to happen, and democratized bioeconomic structures can expand this space in a way that no other economic mode can.
By pushing towards a future of revolutionized biomaking, we can fight to secure an open space to expand what it means to be a species of industry and how this meaning influences our agency & identity from the scales of the individual to the collective. In this bio-empowered space for reimagination, we must act with courage, resolve & empathy in order to sow, nourish & nurture the ideas that grow.
Future:
If we seek to rediscover the why of our species’s industriousness and to rebuild individual capacity for self-actualization, we firstly need to address the rot that informs the current why. In this, the core task becomes exorcising the corrupting rationale that is driven into us from the economic architecture that creates it. Unfortunately, this rationale has been reigning over our shared psyche for over 100 years, and dethroning it will not be so simple. It will take time, conviction & sustained effort from both grass-roots & top-down initiatives. But by building the appropriate structures into bio-empowered technologies & economies (structures that are open, accessible, transparent & equitable) we have the potential to rebuild the foundations of our sapience and progress towards a goal of universal self-actualization that’s never been remotely possible before.
But, as the problem isn’t primarily technological or economic, neither is the heart of the solution. For a thriving bio-empowered future to be able to remediate the rationale of the economy, I believe the most important goal is to create a landscape of hope through the vast expansion of biotech-literacy, and of story-telling & art that is inspired by biotechnologies. The essence of the revolutionary human spirit must be woven through the tapestry of the bio-empowered future.
With this expansion of art, a grand vision for the future should be enfolded: an insurgent imagining of a world where every individual citizen is enabled to participate in a global distributed biomaking network that is made of, operated by, and in service to, the commons. By shunting the story of bioeconomic flourishing away from a deterministic one that is externalised into the control of large corporates & private equity, and towards a holistic tale of community-led initiatives where centres of power are subverted and stories of human agency are retold, we can grow something that creates an existential sense of self-determination permeating out from the heart of our existence into diverse symbioses with the wider non-human aspects of our biosphere. Only with this keystone in place can we then completely unravel the ills that our dominant economic infrastructures have hammered into us.
This begins with stories, not technologies. And stories are ours; to make, to share, to iterate and to keep alive. In this, future biomaking extends far beyond the making of food, fuel or any other material good and into the making of belief systems, language, culture, tradition and therefore into the making of newly democratized modes of future building.
None of this will be easy. But it’s imperative that we try far harder than we currently are. Only by striving to create can we make the impossible into the possible into the probable into the undeniable. For now, the vision I’ve described is only a skeleton-like imagining of a benevolent future, but it’s one that, if nothing else, at least deserves significantly more conversation, examination, scrutinizing & testing.
The immediate challenge lies in the fact that the prevailing structure of our civilization allows us so little room to do these things. To craft better futures we need new assemblages to experiment with reimagined socioeconomic foundations, and we need a playground that can house & nurture them. Such assemblages will be born in storytelling before being tested & proven by a biotechnologically-empowered citizenry.
Above, I’ve sought to describe an end-state: a bio-future that is pluriversal, democratized, equitable & perpetually flourishing.
Now, I will spell out the nearer-term actions that I think need to be taken to point us in the direction of this end-state.
An Actionable Roadmap
(Here, another quick note on lexicon. “Roadmap” is a poor fit for what I’m trying to describe, but suits as a placeholder for now).
To summarize everything above: we need to redress how we produce, how much we produce, and why we produce. The how speaks to structure, the how much speaks to throughput, the why speaks to something vital but more esoteric — call it multiscalar sapient psyche, existing across the entire spectrum from the level of the individual to the level of the entire human-species.
Across the next 10 years, I think we need to achieve:
Democratization:
First, we need to expand awareness of biotech to reframe its goals, massively widen access, and accelerate global progress:
• Solve the global scarcity of biotech-literacy with a concerted effort to expand public engagement & information dissemination, particularly into regions & communities that have been (and still are) heavily exploited & marginalized.
• Building out from biotech-literacy expansion: enable these newly empowered communities to proliferate waves of biotech-informed art — storytelling, music, grass-roots activism, media, performance, and anything/everything else.
• Alongside this proliferation of art, host community assemblies to empower democratized decision making in relation to bioeconomic scale-out and begin to forge a new landscape of hope through bio-empowerment.
• Through these community assembles, libraries of art & landscapes of hope: enmesh the histories & worldviews of a diverse global citizenry into the creation of a framework to inform new bioeconomic infrastructure.
• In parallel to all of the above: establish a first wave of globally-distributed (but highly interconnected) community-led biomaking & biofoundry hubs from which to test & iterate the framework.
• Use this iteration to establish a robust infrastructure scaffold that facilitates the propagation of autonomous bio-hubs across the globe, and that enfolds these hubs as nodes of the first embodiment of a global democratized biomaking network.
Distribution:
With a prototype system of worldwide democratized biomaking in place, we then need to move towards building technical capabilities to massively expand distribution of this new system.
• Innovating modular labs to achieve low-cost end-to-end biomaking system development. To include: discovery of new biological production hosts & products, biological R&D & characterization, process development & optimization, refinement of output utilities.
• With these technical developments, launch laboratory infrastructure into a greater number of global communities. Vitally, this launching must be done from within (not from outside of) these communities, and must explicitly embed the principles of distribution, democratization & global enmeshment. Embedding these tenets will start to create a critical mass of citizen scientists that can eventually dwarf the industry’s existing capacity for technical throughput. Mobilisation of the masses beats hyper-optimisation & robotization of a technocratic elite.
• Via the scale-out of this mass mobilised biotech infrastructure: dispel the value drivers that underpin research & production so that we shift away from the siloing & protectionism that is rife across the current modes of biotech system development. This shift requires a rethink of how we incentivise knowledge sharing, and the action points here will inherently facilitate this rethinking in how they redistribute the ability for intellectual contribution, as well as the control of intellectual property rights, biological assets & research/production method development.
Emancipation:
(Again, on language. I would prefer to call this autonomization, but incumbent industry leaders have conflated the term with robotization. Here, I’m advocating for the diversity of the human citizenry to have autonomy over how they engage into a bioeconomic future, not for the establishment of “self-driving” labs that operate autonomously from this citizenry and serve only the acceleration of both wealth & intellectual disparity.
So in an attempt at clarity, I’m using the term emancipation instead. This is still far from perfect, as the word carries a heavy historical context, but it’s what I’ve chosen for now).
To achieve everything above will require significant intervention from the existing bioeconomy workforce. This is unavoidable (and not necessarily undesirable) and will require us to be ever-cognizant of the biases that we carry with us out of prevailing neoliberal biomanufacturing. If the necessary interventions of the existing workforce can be performed with high moral integrity and permanence of mission, then eventually the reliance on pre-existing highly-trained experts from the imperial core will become both insufficient & inappropriate to meet the demands of the virtuous cycle we hope to create. At this point, the network needs to become self-governed, with each node empowered to act autonomously within the totality of the resilient global framework. Emancipated from the restraints of a neoliberal, extractivist & highly inequitable bioeconomy.
• Build out (or ideally, allow to emerge organically) proliferation blocs that can operate to expand the network into new communities where additional nodes can arise through increasingly grass-roots means.
• Channel democratized technology development efforts into new biomaking innovations that can convert the waste-streams of neoliberal manufacturing (both bio & non-bio) into biomade products & utilities, thereby challenging waste capitalism & further diverting resource flows away from old dogmas.
• Establish global governance groups to produce a worldwide charter to strengthen the authority of the network and to enshrine rights of nature & metagenomic sovereignty of nature into law across the world.
• Further empower the globally enmeshed network to co-create new solutions & innovations that minimise any technical dependency that future biomaking has on incumbent value chain actors from the imperial core (such as developers/manufacturers of hardware, software, wetware, genetic tools, processes, etc).
• By virtue of all the bullet points above, create new platforms to unlock the ability to crowdfund significant resources (financial & beyond) into biotech & biomaking initiatives in a way that is currently impossible.
• Through this new ability to crowdfund, nurture the positive feedbacks that will be generated between distributed value creation, biomaking production utility, value return, story-telling & network proliferation. A virtuous cycle of community biomaking instead of a vicious cycle of neoliberal biomanufacturing.
Emergence:
And finally (probably beyond a 10 year plan)…
• Achieve shared global realization that together as an empowered & mass mobilised citizenry, we’ve established a fully operational bioeconomic system that is massively distributed, entirely democratized, can persist sustainably for 1,000s of years to come, is equitable across all regions & cultures, and supports flourishing of the vast majority of human & non-human biological plurality.
• Relax. I will probably celebrate with a beer (fermented by local biomakers).
That’s everything that I’m going to try & contain within this document. Finer points (of which there are a huge number) will spill into other pieces of writing that I will link back to this central piece. My goal is to weave an ever-deepening narrative through this writing as I continue to learn, be challenged, and work to build real-world biomaking initiatives, systems & communities.
Importantly, this will be a living, evolving piece of work. Everything I’ve written above is my first pass, and I’ll update it as my understanding matures and I welcome more & more outside perspectives.
My hope is that this work can be both theoretical & practical, and can act as a seed which will sprout and fractalize, growing into one mast within a forest of others: all surging upwards towards a future that will vindicate the continuing failings of our species through a revolution of empowerment & enlightenment directed by biological principles.
What makes us human is not dead. I still have hope.