newspeak

Open Cures: A Protocol Outline for Mitochondrial Protofection.

The model advocated for open (source) development is predicated for the authors and biologists on the software industry. Good! But at the same time, as a historian, I cannot help but recall prior instances where peer production and collaboration have occurred. But the difference is this: never before has so much of our culture (“our”) been “owned” or faceted by the claims of property. It’s as if the Lockean promise of America (land of no property, just land) has evaporated, leaving only the claims to what was and is and will be there. (Thus goeth the future, too: it’s been commodified into the present banality of expectation.)

What is left, of course–for there is no and never has been a land without property (remember not the Alamo but the Indians? They were here, in America, even before the Europeans named them so wrongly and then killed them disease, slavery, war.)–what is left is the need to consider property as the domain of collaboration, not a patent for exclusion, with the thing available only as a bracketed commodity on the market, to those who can afford it.