Fully Automated Luxury Communism A Manifesto

The technique itself is both simple and elegant. That’s because CRISPR, which stands for ‘Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeat’, imitates the immune mechanism of bacteria when attacked by a virus in nature. Confronted with such a situation, the bacteria will take strips of the virus’s DNA and insert it into their own using an enzyme called Cas. These newly formed sequences are the CRISPR, which the bacteria then uses to produce RNA copies to recognise viral DNA and repel future attacks.

While these processes have been observed and understood since the early 1990s, it wasn’t until 2013 that CRISPR was transformed into a tool suitable for gene-editing. That was achieved by replacing the bacterial CRISPR RNA system with a modified guide RNA which now acted as a signal to inform an enzyme, called Cas9, where to look. This allowed the enzyme to efectively scan a cell’s genome to isolate a match before slicing it out. Applying this same process, scientists can change or add DNA within a cell in a manner reminiscent of cut, copy and paste – although, for now, a slight margin of error remains. Decades after confirming DNA is responsible for genetic inheritance, and more than sixty years since the invention of the silicon transistor, information technology can reprogram biological systems with increasing ease.

Already, governments in a number of countries including the US and UK have approved the use of CRISPR-Cas9 in human embryos and adults. You can even buy home kits online using the same system to modify bacteria in your spare time. Altering bacteria to glow in the dark like jellyfish or develop resistance to certain strains of antibiotics might have won a Nobel Prize thirty years ago – today children in middle school are doing it.

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Trials with CRISPR-Cas9 have already yielded impressive results in laboratories across the world, creating ‘buf beagles’ without myostatin, preventing HIV infection in human cells, partially reversing the efects of Huntington’s in nine-month-old mice, and slowing the spread of cancer. It seems increasingly likely that gene-editing in general – and CRISPR-Cas9 in particular – could help eliminate a number of genetically inherited conditions, and with over three thousand caused by a single incorrect letter in our DNA – including Huntington’s disease, cystic fibrosis and sickle cell anaemia – that alone would represent spectacular progress. In the second half of the twentieth century humanity eradicated smallpox. In the first half of the twenty-first it could eliminate thousands of genetic disorders. Forever.

But the possibilities of gene editing go beyond mitigating, and even overcoming, genetically inherited conditions which impact hundreds of millions. The genome could be reprogrammed to become resistant or even immune to things like stomach flu, HIV and Alzheimer’s as well as lowering the risk for coronary heart disease, having leaner muscle and possessing stronger bones. This might all sound a little much, and before editing the human genome at scale such eforts should be subject to vigorous public debate. But how much diference is there between improving nutrition for health outcomes and optimising our biological programming? Not much – and while pursuing both is likely ideal, the second is a lot more precise.

Since 2016 alone, the number of gene-editing trials deploying the CRISPR-Cas9 technique have substantially increased. With the overwhelming majority taking place in either China or the United States, and the latter now playing catch-up, some are now referring to this new rivalry as ‘Sputnik 2.0’.

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But while such a comparison is easy to understand, there is a seismic diference between innovations in biotechnology today and the Cold War clash for scientific supremacy a half century ago. For fifty years after Sputnik was launched in 1957, the cost of space exploration was so prohibitively high that only states, and superpowers at that, could aford to participate. Techniques like CRISPR-Cas9, by contrast, have drastically lowered costs of entry to gene editing, and whether you want to cure cancer or create biological weapons of mass destruction, the necessary technology might soon be available for tens of thousands of dollars rather than billions. The consequences of that, with the cost of editing the genetic material of both ourselves and other species falling ever closer to zero, are dificult to overstate.

Yet we are starting to catch glimpses of what that future might look like. In early 2017 the US Food and Drug Administration was contacted by David Ishee, a kennel operator based in Mississippi with a passion for biohacking. Ishee had recently been developing his skills with CRISPR-Cas9, conducting personal experiments in his garden laboratory. He hoped to use the technique to eliminate an inherited condition common to Dalmatians called hyperuricemia, which can cause gout, and had sent the FDA an outline of his plans. Having presumed agency approval was a mere formality, Ishee was surprised when he received no response.

On January 18 it became clear why, as the FDA released a proposal to regulate cattle, pigs, dogs and other animals modified with gene-editing tools, including CRISPR-Cas9. A previously ambiguous area at the interface of DIY culture and high-value technology would now require federal approval and be subject to significant government oversight.

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That came as a blow to Ishee, who told one outlet that it would be ‘easier to teach dog breeders CRISPR than … why pure breeding is a bad thing’. His view was that the genetic material of pedigree dogs is in no way ‘natural’ to begin with, and that CRISPR ofered a means of correcting biological errors which were the result of human intervention.

The FDA proposed treating the edited portion of an animal’s genome as equivalent to a veterinary drug. So just like a new pill, edited animals can’t be sold, or even given away. And, just as importantly, it is likely edited genomes may be subject to intellectual property rights and patent. Imagine the battle over Napster, the file-sharing P2P network at the turn of the millennium, and now apply it to biology. Even if information does want to be free – or at least wants to be consistently cheaper over time – that doesn’t matter when there are incumbent business and profit models to protect.

While there are justified safety concerns which need to be managed and regulated, turning edited DNA – including our own – into a commodity exclusively for profit, is entirely consistent with the logic of capitalism. As we have seen elsewhere, artificial scarcity has to be imposed in order to create a market – otherwise nobody can make a profit. Ishee ’s comments in response to the announcement perhaps ofer a sign, however, of what direct action might look like as the Third Disruption accelerates: ‘I feel like maybe the best thing is to just go ahead and produce the healthy animals and then just tell people … we cured this disease, but the FDA won’t let us.

Welcome to Elysium

Parallels can be drawn between David Ishee and his biohacking eforts in modern-day Mississippi and the film Elysium, set in 2154. In the latter, Earth has been ravaged by climate change and what appears to be a breakdown in the formal economy. As a result, the wealthy have departed for an ofworld colony named Elysium – a giant space-habitat orbiting the Earth. The diference in quality of life between its inhabitants and those left behind could not be more striking.

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One of the many benefits bestowed on Elysians is access to its Med-Bays, machines that can cure disease, seemingly reverse ageing and regenerate entire body parts. The central plot of the film revolves around Max Da Costa – a former car thief living among the ruins of Los Angeles – and his eforts to access a Med-Bay after being exposed to lethal amounts of radiation. Max’s quest is mirrored by the eforts of his childhood friend Frey, as she pursues a cure for her young daughter dying from Leukaemia. The only problem is the use of Med-Bays are exclusively limited to citizens of Elysium, and they don’t function with anyone else. That means the only hope for Max and Frey’s daughter is to change the operating system of the entire habitat, making its technology available to outsiders like them.

The film culminates with a hacker named Spider uploading a program from Max’s brain to reboot Elysium’s operating system and extend citizenship to those on Earth. Shortly after that is completed, robots depart to tend to the sick and dying. Rather than an act of charity they are simply upholding their protocol: of caring for Elysians.

While it might not be immediately obvious, Elysium is a film about rights. The tensions between universal human rights and the foreclosed rights of the citizen; between the right to private property and the right to access public forms of healthcare. For most people, intuitively anyway, the right to life for some eclipses the ‘right’ to unimaginable wealth for others. This is why the final scene of the film is a happy one, despite Max making the ultimate sacrifice.

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So as well as being a story about a plausible future for humanity, Elysium also ofers a parable for how the Third Disruption might develop. Its meaning is obvious: there is more than enough technology for everyone on Earth to live healthy, happy, fulfilling lives. What stands in the way isn’t the inevitable scarcity of nature, but the artificial scarcity of market rationing and ensuring that everything, at all costs, is produced for profit.

This dissonance will only become more grating over time, especially given the medical technologies identified above. That’s why we will need to change the operating system of our society too.

Perhaps we are already seeing the world that Elysium depicts. In December 2015 SpaceX landed its Falcon 9 rocket, making it the first reusable booster to successfully enter orbital space and return for a second flight. This was a signal moment in the history of space technology, with reusable rockets of critical importance in making the industry commercially viable.

A few months earlier, in September, images of a dead child on a Turkish beach made headlines around the world. Alan Kurdi had been born three years earlier in Kobani, a city in Syrian Kurdistan close to the Turkish border and a focal point in that country’s civil war. Having fled their home during a sustained siege by ISIS, Kurdi’s family returned there that January only to leave a few months later when fighting started once more. Like many of their compatriots Kurdi’s family sought refuge in Europe, and in the early hours of 2 September Alan boarded an illegal boat set for the Greek island of Kos with his brother and parents. Within minutes the vessel capsized. At 6:30 AM Kurdi’s body was found by locals in Bodrum. Within days his corpse, along with that of his mother Rehana and brother Ghalib, were returned to Kobani for burial.

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The family of Alan Kurdi, like thousands in the summer of 2015, sought to enter Europe in search of the sanctuary, dignity and opportunity they deserved as human beings. While the countries of Western Europe might not have the medical technologies of Elysium, the reusable rockets which were successfully piloted within months of Kurdi’s death make for an all-too-obvious analogue. A world which will soon have the technology to sequence the genome of every organism on Earth also permits thousands to drown in the Mediterranean every year.

While gene therapies and daily genome sequencing aren’t Med-Bays, they do have the potential to seriously disrupt the provision of healthcare, potentially eliminating conditions which debilitate or kill millions of people a year. More importantly these technologies, underpinned by exponential improvements and tendencies to extreme supply, not only allow us to keep pace with the unique health challenges presented by societal ageing, but even surpass them. While we are often told we can’t aford to maintain ever-older societies, and that socialised forms of healthcare are particularly unsustainable, it is the opposite which is true. Socialised forms of healthcare, as study after study show, are more eficient as well as being more equitable. It is only by keeping and expanding them, while integrating these new technologies, that society can progress. This fundamental truth, combined with healthcare that increasingly resembles an information good, has implications far more profound than free encyclopaedias or films. It could even spell the end of age-related and inherited illness altogether.

The alternative? That new forms of biological inequality map onto extant economic ones as the wealthy alter their ofsprings’ DNA to make them superior to the rest of us in every way, undermining the basis for modern human rights – that all humans are created equal.

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8 Food Without Animals: Post-Scarcity in Sustenance

Cattle are very ineficient animals in converting vegetable proteins into animal proteins. We actually lose a lot of food by giving it to animals as an intermediate.

Mark Post, inventor of cultured meat

We figured out how life really works and now we don’t need to cause death to create food.

Just Food Promotional Video

Food, Surplus and Disruptions

The First Disruption was a revolution in food more than anything else. While prior to it our ancestors possessed simple technologies such as fire and stone tools, before the arrival of agriculture their impact was limited. As a result, any census of human life even as recently as 12,000 years ago, would have shown little more than 5 million people covering the entire planet – equivalent to the population of modern-day Ireland.

Everything began to change as cultivating crops and breeding livestock enabled larger, more complex forms of society. No longer were our forebears subject to the whim of other predators, famine or natural disaster. Now they could prepare for the future, creating surplus during times of plenty as well as tools and forms of infrastructure to progressively expand their newly acquired abundance.

Given the frequency of scare stories surrounding genetically modified foods as embodying the worst aspects of modern technology, it is ironic that many staples we now take for granted were only developed through genetic modification during this period. Carrots, initially harvested in Afghanistan eleven thousand years ago, were once purple and white, while bananas – now the world’s favourite fruit – are sterile and incapable of setting seed, and have been ever since our ancestors began to cultivate them following the last Ice Age. While critics are right to say that a technological fix isn’t, in isolation, suficient to resolve issues of ecological degradation and food scarcity, in a very meaningful sense technology is precisely what underpinned the success of our species in the first place.

A Stretching World

But while the story of humanity’s rise is built on agriculture, and its unique ability to reprogramme the gifts of nature, it now appears that such genius has found the natural limits of our planet. These limits are more obvious than ever and are expressed in a number of ways. The most striking is a sixth mass extinction event, in which one in four mammals is set to vanish. At the same time 90 per cent of the largest fish in our oceans have disappeared, the glaciers that provide drinking water for billions are starting to run dry, and agricultural soils are becoming increasingly salty – degraded by the excesses of industrial farming. In short, the treasures of our planet – mineral, animal and plant – are being decimated, and the rate of their demise is only accelerating.

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