The man in the radio

I am profoundly afraid of where technology is leading us, in particular various biological technologies. A while back, I was very optimistic about biology's liberatory promise. Did we not manage to free women from the constraints of their biological cycles with birth control pills? Did we not change what it means to have sex? Those were grand accomplishments, but we humans buggered it up as usual. Birth control has in some circumstances created new inequalities between the sexes; women have to bear the risks of "the pill", while both sexes partake of the benefits equally. Other forms of birth control have casualized sex and, by implication, relationships. For someone as needy and clingy as me, this is bad news.

The future promises to be even more exciting or frightening--perhaps both at the same time. I hope for the best, but I know better. Every new technology gets taken up by society, and decisions around the directions of the technology are made by the almost exclusive idiot-caste of those in power. Somehow, despite the best of intentions--or perhaps the finest of rhetoric--we end up creating new imbalances, new dependencies, new centres and new margins, new things to privilege, new prejudices to dress in the Emperor's clothes (shiny, beeping, metallic, test-tube clothes).

An example from biology (because it's my baby): there is a growing movement for free open-source biological data (much like free open-source software). This movement argues that the purported goals of the life sciences (human benefit, general goodness all around) are better served if more researchers had access to patented data. They argued quite well that the third world would benefit if they had the means to make transgenic crops, as opposed to some paternalistic biotech giant patenting seed and selling it to them. (Whole other issue: how the fuck did we allow anyone to patent a seed? Did we allow the chemists who discovered the elements ot patent them? (They actually tried, but the government stopped them.) It migth seem a silly analogy, but it's not.) But are the big companies that invested millions into obtaining this genetic data going to release it for the common good? Of course not. When you strip off the ultrathin veneer of pharmaceutical-commercial-style bullshit, our big corporate "citizens" are concerned with moeny and power. And that is never going to change. I wish it would, but it won't; we tried to a few times, but human covetousness found new forms of expressing itself. So in the end, the old (white male) boys' club enriches themselves at the expense of everyone else.

I give us 45 more years. Then balance will be partially restored. Not the good kind of balance, either. The balancing-out that involves (metaphorically) four hooded riders scattering virulent biological agents and fire and mobs and libraries sinking into the bogs and semiautomatic gunfire and floods and walking rat-fetus hydrids casting long fetal shadows on the wall by the light of the incendiary bombs.

And now some hippity-hop: "I ain't here to argue about His facial features / or here to convert atheists into believers / I'm just tryin' to say the way school need teachers / the way Kathie Lee need Regis / that's the way I need Jesus."