The Pirate Organization: Lessons From the Fringes of Capitalism (14 page)

The normalization of business and economic activity does not result from the natural laws of economic selection. It is the result of collective enactments of principles that define competition and establish what legitimate profits are. The pirate organization, sometimes under the guise of a robber baron, participates in this enactment process by contesting the privileges of past or present monopolies. From 1870 to 1970, the economic history of the United States showed that business leaders took possession of partially uncharted territories and codefined the norms of competition. Taking land and mines, the mountains and their resources, and tiptoeing around ever-changing laws, these leaders shaped the development of the West. For their part, pirate organizations were foiled in their attempts to denounce the new norms that tried to reset the rules of “fair” competition and redefine what legitimate profits or bankruptcy were (e.g., the Sherman Act or, more recently, the Telecommunications Act of 1995). While it seems that the pirate organization is an ever-failing condition, pirates do manage to imprint the future trajectories of capitalism.

Chapter Thirteen

THE PIRATE ORGANIZATION AND THE BUILDING BLOCKS OF LIFE

Life is basically the result of an information process, a software process. We have created the first species that has a computer for a mother, and that is capable of reproducing, on this planet
.

—Craig Venter, founder of Celera Genomics, 2010

When we think of territories, we tend to think of land masses. By this measure, the territorial expansion and normalization process that began in 1492 came to an end in 1899, when an international conference came to the conclusion that every emerged territory on Earth had a sovereign owner. But this isn’t right, is it? As physicist Richard Feynman said, “There is plenty of room at the bottom”—in this instance, at the micro- and nanoscopic scales. And that space represents partially uncharted territory. The discovery of DNA in 1953 heralded the beginning of a new topographical era, only fifty-four years removed from the date the last land mass found an owner. In 2000, Tony Blair and Bill Clinton announced that the “first complete map” of the human genome had just been established by an international public consortium, the Human Genome Project, as the result of an unprecedented cooperative effort. At the time, this exploit was compared with the first voyage to the Moon and the first map of American territory unrolled by Thomas Jefferson.
¹
Back then, the genome map did not yet fall under the territory of capitalism, but it didn’t take long for the normalization process to begin.

Biocorsair and Biopirate Organizations: The Venter Case

Craig Venter’s exploits date back to the beginning of the 1990s. At the time, he decided to register patents on the genes whose sequencing he was overseeing at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), a government-funded organization. Venter’s attempt caused a scandal, since he was attempting to appropriate the living. Taking advantage of the vagueness of biogenetic regulations, Venter left the NIH and founded a private organization called Celera Genomics in 1998. Venter’s aim was to compete with the Human Genome Project in the race to fully sequence human DNA. The bet paid off: despite starting eight years behind, Celera crossed the finish line at the same time as the Human Genome Project. Venter announced in 2000 that Celera Genomics had produced a complete genetic map of a human being.

Celera’s methods for decrypting DNA were less refined than those used by the Human Genome Project. Mainly computational, they used electronic sequencers with massive processing power. Celera was funded by private investors who expected returns on the patenting of discoveries stemming from the intermediary decoding of the genome. To make up for lost time, Celera also integrated into its genome map the results published and made freely available by the Human Genome Project as they became available. Venter took seriously the words of the cyberpirate Digital Ebola—in order to “hack the machine, you must first hack yourself”—offering Celera his own DNA as a target for the first “hacking” of the human genome outside of any direct sovereign control.
²
His own genome thus became the template for the first map of a new gray area in capitalist expansion.

Clonaid and Celera are two notorious pirate organizations that operate in biogenetic territory. They are not alone, and it is not their intention of leaving things at that. In 2002, Venter left Celera to create the Craig Venter Institute (CVI), whose objective is to create a synthetic form of life. Unlike the dubious doctors who worked for Raël, the group that had human cloning high on its agenda, CVI researchers met the stringent standards of scientific and academic rigor. In 2007, CVI developed
mycoplasma laboratorium
, the first synthetic chromosome ever created in a laboratory. In 2010, very special bacteria came out of CVI’s laboratories: its entire DNA stemmed from a chemical synthesis generated by machines conceived by Venter’s team. According to researchers, this spectacular advance opened the door to the artificial creation of new living species (“synthetic life”). In order to have their discovery validated by the editors of the prestigious journal
Science
, CVI biologists had to prove the synthetic character of the bacteria’s DNA by incorporating into it a coded text that would guarantee the artificial origin of the macromolecule. Venter chose to include several excerpts in this encrypted text, including another famous Feynman quote: “What I cannot rebuild, I cannot understand.”

This quotation could become the calling card for an entire generation of biopirates who manipulate DNA in makeshift laboratories, often for the fun of it, but sometimes also because they dream of a world in which each citizen would be responsible for the management and improvement of his own biological capital (organs, stem cells, etc.). Contrary to conventional wisdom, it is not necessary to have an extensive education or major financial means to tinker with DNA, say, in one’s garage. The processing power of personal computers will soon be sufficient for sequencing a DNA molecule at home. Also, the costs of acquiring this knowledge and the instruments required to modify or recombine a DNA molecule decrease by the month. Today, these underground practices pose little risk of catastrophe. We don’t have to worry about deadly viruses. But tomorrow, who knows? Various multinational reports point to this as a real threat, which will only loom larger in the years to come.
³
Markus Schmidt, an expert in biosecurity, called on authorities to debate this issue now, because in a few years, “it will be too late to go back and close this Pandora’s box.”
⁴
The “DIYbio” movement, which brings together dozens of independent laboratories worldwide, plans to make all biological engineering available to everyone so that control of the biogenetic space will no longer be the monopoly of state-sponsored research institutes.

Legitimately Expropriating Humanity?

In biogenetic territory, organizations of the milieu seek patents, a goal that goes against a basic principle of piracy. As we’ve mentioned previously, the pirate organization fights against state-granted privileges in the name of a different cause (e.g., putting forth a more equal sharing), but organizations of the milieu like Monsanto seem to take away what belongs to everyone. They do so presumably to improve on nature and adapt each crop or animal to local conditions—climatic or feeding, for instance. By genetically modifying the DNA of a plant species and then patenting it, these organizations can lay claim to the ownership of this species. Then they can decide whether or not to impose the payment of royalties on the users who have been supplied with seeds. As a consequence, growing methods that have been used throughout the ages for certain plant species are now infringing on a property right that did not exist before. For many opponents, companies who pursue these patenting practices are expropriating humanity and privatizing what should otherwise benefit society as a whole.

By law, a species whose genotype has been patented can only be cultivated where the organization holding the patent authorizes it. TRIPS agreements (Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) promoted by the World Trade Organization set down minimum standards for intellectual property rights. They recognize the ability to patent life that has been modified in the laboratory, but not life modified on farms, as specialists consider these changes unstable. If such a norm were to be imposed on everyone, legitimate organizations would gain a tremendous advantage in exploiting the living. A rival norm, defended by the UN, the Convention of Biodiversity (CBD), proposes as an alternative the transfer of responsibility for the gene pool to sovereign states. This solution would favor state organizations such as the NIH as well as the subcontracting of borderline research to biocorsair organizations. In any case, the normative indeterminacy surrounding ownership of the living is now at its peak. While about 20 percent of the human genome is already targeted by one or more of forty thousand US patents, a recent US court ruling took a first step in invalidating DNA patenting as a whole on the grounds that genes are part of nature and thus a common heritage. In a brief issued by the Department of Justice, it is acknowledged that “this conclusion is contrary to the longstanding practice of the Patent and Trademark Office, as well as the practice of the National Institutes of Health and other government agencies that have in the past sought and obtained patents for isolated genomic DNA.”
⁵

This ongoing debate is reminiscent of a time when the pirates of the seas disputed the monopolies of the Indies companies and fought the state’s corsairs. However, the oceans no longer constitute the preferred space for capitalist deterritorialization. With respect to maritime routes, norms have developed since the second half of the nineteenth century and have stabilized today around the principle of “the common heritage of humanity,” which, on the high seas, excluded both private appropriation and sovereign expropriation.
⁶
These principles as yet do not apply to the gray area of DNA. Biogenetic territory is still partially uncharted.

Ultimate Consequences: The Evolution of Life and Capitalist Evolution

Daniel Heller-Roazen traced a genealogy of pirates that goes from the common enemy of all (
communis hostis omnium
, as described by Cicero) to the enemy of humanity (
hostis humani generis
).
⁷
At the same time
humanity
was becoming the central character in history, from the sixteenth century onward, states began to normalize the entire globe and to acknowledge the finite nature of our world. As far as territorial expansion is concerned, capitalism is done with the surface of the Earth. Thus, nowadays, the opening up of new spaces is only possible in infravisible limbo or outer space: biopiracy, nanopiracy, and space piracy are arising or will arise. As with so many organizations before, their acts deemed illegal under the accepted principles of their era will reshape the very territoriality of these invisible worlds and contribute to promulgating codes suited to take the capitalist machine to the next level.

While pirate and corsair organizations have always produced technological, social, and political mutations by diffusing alternative norms, the biogenetic territory presents a substantially different situation than what played out on the high seas, airwaves, or the Internet. Designing norms for DNA manipulation is not just mapping out the biogenetic territory, but also setting new boundaries on the nature of life itself. For this reason, and for the first time in history, the evolution of capitalism and the evolution of living species could literally begin to intertwine. This potentially explosive junction could reverse a great number of standards that we take for granted, and the normalization of the living could profoundly change mankind’s relation to other territories.

Throughout the twentieth century, biopolitics as defined by Michel Foucault reigned supreme. The state’s role was to normalize territories so as to make them suitable for its citizens. But what will happen when individuals and organizations are able to modify genetic code and hybridize living species? Instead of modeling social norms to adjust the territory to the species with which it is populated, organizations would be able to opt for a more direct intervention on the species’ biological features, provided that they remain owners of the living thus remodeled (e.g., by claiming patenting rights on modified DNA). This would undoubtedly upset the nature of capitalism much more than, say, the creation of a Tobin tax or a Zapatista revolution in Chiapas.

The consequence of such an upheaval would be threefold. First, because efforts aimed at conquering DNA or space typically involve transnational teams and funding, the deterritorialization of both human life and space would have to occur within a world system based on a principle of sovereignty expanded to the supranational level. The norms applicable to biogenetic and extraterrestrial territories would need to be defined at a high level that would go above and beyond the particular interests of any given nation-state. Although the multinational Human Genome Project represented a move in this direction, the ongoing space race still puts nation-states in direct competition. In particular, the Chinese plan to return to the Moon seriously calls into question the normalization of the Moon’s surface and underground “on behalf of humanity.”