Un concepto que solía pertenecer al mundo de la informática (hacking) ahora se combina con las ciencias de la vida (bio). Sin gran dificultad, hemos empezado a ver la vida como un conjunto de datos, el ADN como un código, el cuerpo como una máquina y la mente como un software... todos susceptibles de ser leídos, manipulados y ahora incluso hackeados. ¿Pero manipulados por quiénes? Las comunidades de biohackers y DYIbio (do-it-yourself biology) quieren la biotecnología disponible para todos y la (...) información compartida abiertamente. En este trabajo, propongo una reflexión sobre qué está pasando y el posible por qué. En la primera parte, presento el biohacking como un fenómeno social, dando algunos ejemplos de biohackers y diferenciando tipos de biohackers. En la segunda parte, hago un acercamiento al Transhumanismo. La existencia de biohackers sólo es posible gracias a la creciente disponibilidad de información y biotecnología combinada con una cierta mentalidad. El principal objetivo es profundizar en la reflexión sobre la relación entre biohacking y Transhumanismo. Analizo el biohacking como una de las expresiones de este movimiento y uno de los fenómenos que contribuyen a él. Al final, ofrezco una reflexión sobre la cultura, deseos y miedos de nuestra sociedad, reconociendo también algunas de las preguntas que ellos provocan. (shrink)

Biohacking involves individuals determining, developing, and directing relevant activities to meet their personal biological goals. Biohacking fertility is a resilient method that trans and genderqueer people use to meet their reproductive and family-planning needs in the face of historic medical marginalization and oppression. In this study, nine participants were recruited from three different Facebook groups specific to queer and trans fertility, family planning, pregnancy, and parenting. Each participant’s posts and comments to their respective Facebook group(s) were analyzed, followed (...) by interviews with participants. A total of 1,155 Facebook posts were collected. Biohacking activity—understood as a web of activity including gathering information, applying knowledge to personal circumstances, and sharing personal experiences and knowledge—was found in each of the three groups. Participants identified these online groups as safer spaces to learn more about their own fertility and find community. Participants were active in these groups to biohack their fertility at home and to become empowered at the doctor's office or fertility clinic, ultimately achieving agency in their fertility and family planning. (shrink)

This essay explores how, for many minoritized peoples, cyborg ontology is experienced as dehumanizing rather than posthumanizing. Rereading Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto through a decolonial, transfeminist lens, it explores the implications of Haraway’s assertion that cyborg subjectivity is the “illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism” by examining the modern/colonial development and deployment of microprosthetic hormonal technologies – so often heralded as one of the technologies ushering in a queer, posthuman, post-gender future – as mechanisms of gendered and racialized subjective control (...) operative at the level of the biomolecular. (shrink)

What is ‘biohacking’? In fact, it refers to multiple things. Firstly, it refers to ‘hacking the body’, artificially enhancing one’s own body by technology and tinkering. A good example is the ‘grinder’ movement. Secondly, it also refers to ‘hacking the biology’, aiming to appropriate the methods and objects of the life sciences for our own benefit. This is at work in ‘Do-It-Yourself Biology’, inspired by synthetic biology. Both strands, however, share the same ambition to emancipate ourselves from traditional constraints (...) of biology and evolution – but they might also share the same problems. (shrink)

En Tecnoceno, Flavia Costa se propone abordar algunas de las preguntas centrales que plantea el acelerado proceso de tecnificación y mediatización que enfrentan las sociedades contemporáneas. El libro consta de una introducción, tres capítulos y un epílogo, centrándose cada capítulo en uno de los elementos del subtítulo: algoritmos, biohackers y nuevas formas de vida.

The focal point of my article is the work of biohackers: mainly Josiah Zayner, whose activism as a biohacker, as an artist and a public figure offers an interesting lens through which one can explore the contemporary genetic imaginary and our changing and varied approach to genetic engineering. The framework for this description is set by an analysis of cultural representations of contemporary science and technology, both in documentaries and in works of fiction. In the article, I trace and analyse (...) the ways in which biohackers’ activity is involved with the earlier ideas of cyberculture, most notably with the notion of biological life as information (possible to edit or ‘hack’) and to the image of a ‘hacker’. I recall the popular phrase of ‘playing god’, often quoted in relation to genetic imaginary, mainly as a warning against excessive interventions within nature. The phrase and the warning itself seem to have become insofar more important, as the scale of possible interventions had been raised by the advancement of genetic engineering. Finally, I discuss the relation of art and science in Zayner’s activity, within a broader context of relevant images of artists and scientists and their role within the changing realities of contemporary life. The article does not pretend to fully analyse or even describe the modalities and implication of biohackers’ activity. Its main goal is to shed more light on the current changes in collective imagination related to the rapid development of biotechnology and its cultural understanding. The public presence of biohackers, and especially Zayner’s activity, provides new visions of human agency in nature and of relation between art, science and social practice. (shrink)

Background As citizen science continues to grow in popularity, there remains disagreement about what terms should be used to describe citizen science activities and participants. The question of how to self-identify has important ethical, political, and practical implications to the extent that shared language reflects a common ethos and goals and shapes behavior. Biomedical citizen science in particular has come to be associated with terms that reflect its unique activities, concerns, and priorities. To date, however, there is scant evidence regarding (...) how biomedical citizen scientists prefer to describe themselves, their work, and the values that they attach to these terms.Methods In 2018, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 35 biomedical citizen scientists in connection with a larger study to understand ownership preferences. Interview data were analyzed to identify the terms that interviewees used and avoided to describe themselves and their work, as well as the reasons for their preferences.Results Biomedical citizen scientists self-identified using three main terms: citizen scientist, biohacker, and community scientist. However, there was a lack of consensus among interviewees on the appropriateness of each term, two of which prompted conflicting responses. Self-identification preferences were based on personal judgments about whether specific terms convey respect, are provocative, or are broad and inclusive, as well as the desirability of each of these messages.Conclusions The lack of consensus about self-identification preferences in biomedical citizen science reflects the diversity of experiences and goals of individuals participating in this field, as well as different perceptions of the values signaled by and implications of using each term. Heterogeneity of preferences also may signal the parallel development of multiple communities in biomedical citizen science. (shrink)

Scientific and technological progress might change people’s capabilities or incentives in ways that would destabilize civilization. For example, advances in DIY biohacking tools might make it easy for anybody with basic training in biology to kill millions; novel military technologies could trigger arms races in which whoever strikes first has a decisive advantage; or some economically advantageous process may be invented that produces disastrous negative global externalities that are hard to regulate. This paper introduces the concept of a vulnerable (...) world: roughly, one in which there is some level of technological development at which civilization almost certainly gets devastated by default, i.e. unless it has exited the “semi-anarchic default condition”. Several counterfactual historical and speculative future vulnerabilities are analyzed and arranged into a typology. A general ability to stabilize a vulnerable world would require greatly amplified capacities for preventive policing and global governance. The vulnerable world hypothesis thus offers a new perspective from which to evaluate the risk-benefit balance of developments towards ubiquitous surveillance or a unipolar world order. (shrink)

This article discusses the key existential stakes of implementing biometrics in human lifeworlds. In this pursuit, we offer a problematization and reinvention of central values often taken for granted within the “ethical turn” of AI development and discourse, such as autonomy, agency, privacy and integrity, as we revisit basic questions about what it means to be human and embodied. Within a framework of existential media studies, we introduce an existential ethics of care—through a conversation between existentialism, virtue ethics, a feminist (...) ethics of care and post-humanist ethics—aiming to deepen and nuance our understanding of the human behind “human-centered” AI directives. The key argument is that biometrics implicates humans through unprecedented forms of objectification, through which the existential body—the relational, intimate and frail human being—is at risk. We interrogate these risks as they become visible at three sites where embodied humans are challenged by biometrics, and thus where the existential body is challenged by the biometric body. This occurs through reductionism (biometric passports nailing bodies to identities, removing human judgment and compromising agency at the AI border), enforced transparency (smart home assistants surveying human intimacies and invading intimate spaces in the bedroom) and the breaching of bodily integrity (chipping bodies to capture sensory data, challenging the very concept of bodily integrity through self-invasive biohacking). Our existential ethics of care is importantly not a solutionist list of principles or suggestions, but a manifesto for a way of thinking about the ethical challenges of living with biometrics in today’s world, by raising the right questions. We argue that a revitalized discussion of the basic existential stakes within human lived experience is needed and should serve as the foundation on which comprehensive frameworks can be built to address the complexities and prospects for ethical machines, responsible biometrics and AI. (shrink)

A new open science culture is emerging within the current system of the life sciences. This culture mixes an ethic of sharing with features such as anti-bureaucracy rebellion, hedonism, search for profit. It is a recombination of an old culture, the Mertonian ethos of modern open science, and a new one: the hacker ethic. This new culture has an important role in the evolving relationship between science and society. And it maintains a political ambivalence. Biohackers are rebel scientists and open (...) access advocates who challenge today’s Big Bio’s concentration of power. But at the same time they live in a new territory of accumulation that never excludes entrepreneurship and profit. (shrink)

Dominant forms of contemporary big-data based digital citizen science do not question the institutional divide between qualified experts and lay-persons. In our paper, we turn to the historical case of a large-scale amateur project on biogeographical birdwatching in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to show that networked amateur research can operate in a more autonomous mode. This mode depends on certain cultural values, the constitution of specific knowledge objects, and the design of self-governed infrastructures. We conclude by arguing (...) that the contemporary quest for autonomous citizen science is part of a broader discourse on the autonomy of scientific research in general. Just as the actors in our historical case positioned themselves against the elitism of gentlemen scientists, avant-garde groups of the twenty first century like biohackers and civic tech enthusiasts position themselves against the system of professional science—while “digital citizen science” remains to oscillate between claims for autonomy and realities of heteronomy, constantly reaffirming the classic lay-expert divide. (shrink)

The research enterprise depends on trust, especially trust in data reliability and ethical conduct of research. This trust is accomplished via systems, or “architectures,” that do the work of ensuring trustworthiness in research when individuals are not able to assess it for themselves. In the United States and many other countries, national laws or regulations constitute the research ethics trust architecture. But new research methods, such as citizen science, DIY biology, biohacking, or corporate research, avoid such regulations because they (...) draw on new means of funding, disseminating, and conducting research. This challenges the sufficiency of the traditional approach and requires us to revisit how we generate trust in the research enterprise. In this article, I discuss how new research challenges the existing trust architecture, offer some necessary elements of trust architecture in general, and use citizen science as a case study to illustrate how new, ethically meaningful trust architectures could be built. (shrink)

The quest for ecological sustainability—specifically via prioritizing degrowth—creates significant, often overlooked challenges for the chronically ill. I focus on type-1 diabetes, treatment for which depends on nonrenewables and materials implicated in the global proliferation of toxins that harm biospheric functions. Some commentators suggest obliquely that seeking to develop ecologically sustainable treatments for type-1 shouldn’t be prioritized. Other medical concerns take precedence in a post-carbon world marked by climate change and widespread ecological devastation. I challenge this view on three grounds. Its (...) proponents (i) fail to treat type-1 as the public health issue it is, particularly within the context of what Sunaura Taylor calls disabled ecologies. They (ii) deny persons with type-1 an equal opportunity to pursue survival. And they (iii) presume without warrant that treating type-1 is an all-or-nothing affair. Indeed, research by biohackers points to suboptimal but potentially workable ways to make type-1 survivable in a post-carbon future—so long, I stress, as their findings are cripped in a manner that foregrounds the demands of environmental justice. (shrink)

This empirically oriented contribution focuses on different data- and body-practices in the specific fieldof self-tracking. Based ona phenomenological differentiation between body (Körper in German) and embodiment (Leib in German) following Plessner and Merleau-Ponty, we reflect on the machine-like-body, the cybernetic control loop, the data-like-body and most of all practices of habitualization. In a multi-perspective approach, we do not only examine bodies and body-values, but also the manipulation of the body (e. g. in the field of biohacking), the relation between (...) the body and experiences in epigenetics, as well as the emergence of new bodily perceptions and senses. Thereby, we observe both tendencies towards alienated embodiment and possibilities to gain new accesses to the world by including embodied performances. (shrink)

Codes of ethics were drafted by participants in the European and North American Congresses of DIYbio, a single global organization of informal biotechnology practitioners, in 2011. In general, the existence of a code of ethics amongst a community is itself significant. Codes of professional ethics are common in scientific and engineering fields, as well as in DIY communities. It is also significant, and highly unusual, that DIYbio has maintained two separate codes of ethics years after their drafting. While agreement was (...) reached within the congress for each geographic region, with considerable commonality between the two codes drafted, they are far from identical. There are differences in the ordering of items, the wording of common items, and the presence/absence of items. I will argue that these differences are meaningful, and consider them with respect to cultural variation, ethics, and societal implications. Finally, I recommend that the entire DIYbio organization unite under a single code of ethics, and that one of the existing drafts is superior to the other for this purpose. (shrink)

This book surveys the distinctions that underlie the unbound potential and existential risks of life expansion and radical modifications posed by a transhuman world. Humanness is in flux as human bodies are being hacked and altered in their quest for super wellness, super intelligence and super longevity. Now is the time to discuss how best to think about dealing with bodies that have been hacked to exceed natural physical limits or more technically, species typical functioning. Enter the advent of transhumanism (...) to take uncertainty by the horns. According to transhumanists, death is unnecessary and medical conventions undermine the possibility to radically evolve. To biohackers, there is no need to wait to explore the risks that conventional medicine dares not. This book is of interest to anyone interested in tapping into this growing movement of modifying the human body as it is right now. (shrink)

As biomedical citizen science initiatives become more prevalent, the unique ethical issues that they raise are attracting policy attention. One issue identified as a significant concern is the ethical oversight of bottom-up biomedical citizen science projects that are designed and executed primarily or solely by members of the public. That is because the federal rules that require ethical oversight of research by institutional review boards generally do not apply to such projects, creating what has been called an ethics gap. -/- (...) Working to close this gap, practitioners and scholars have considered new mechanisms of ethical oversight for biomedical citizen science. To date, however, participants’ attitudes about ethics and oversight preferences have not been systematically examined. This information is useful to efforts to develop ethical oversight mechanisms because it provides a basis for evaluating the likely effectiveness of specific features of such mechanisms and their acceptability from the perspective of biomedical citizen scientists. -/- Here, we report data from qualitative interviews with 35 stakeholders in bottom-up biomedical citizen science about their general ethics attitudes and preferences regarding ethical oversight. Interviewees described ten ethical priorities and endorsed oversight mechanisms that are voluntary, community-driven, and offer guidance. Conversely, interviewees rejected mechanisms that are mandatory, hierarchical, and inflexible. Applying these findings, we conclude that expert consultation and community review models appear to align well with ethical priorities and oversight preferences of many biomedical citizen scientists, although local conditions should guide the development and use of mechanisms in specific communities. (shrink)

This volume contributes to postphenomenological research into human-technology relations with essays reflecting on methodological issues through empirical studies of education, digital media, biohacking, health, robotics, and skateboarding. This work provides new perspectives that call for a comprehensive postphenomenological research methodology.

En las últimas décadas el campo de la creación artística ha constituido un espacio privilegiado de reflexión, crítica cultural, cuestionamiento ético, y experimentación tanto estética como técnica en el que se han ensayado las más variadas visiones de la evolución, de la transformación de las relaciones con la naturaleza y de la auto-comprensión del ser humano. Dentro del debate abierto por la biología sintética, este artículo aspira a remarcar que tanto el bioarte como el arte genético, el arte transgénico y (...) el biohacking, constituyen poderosas herramientas de debate social cuyas dimensiones éticas y estéticas deben ser revisadas y tratadas detalladamente. (shrink)

We have, in the 21st century, moved into a new series of fascinations with biosensing, where our autonomic systems or an autonomic ‘self’, largely out of bounds for our own knowledge and understanding before now, are available. ‘Autonomic’ refers to the nervous system of a physiological self, but the extent of our autonomic selves would not otherwise be knowable or known but through sensory tracking devices now available to us. Biosensing, biohacking, biometrics and biopower are all part of a (...) contemporary movement of intimate and intensified measure and are terms that Dawn Nafus's collection Quantified: Biosensing Technologies in Everyday Life deals with. The book discusses questions of measurement and tracking with the use of sensory technology and methods. This review considers where this collection sits in the literature and theoretical debates. (shrink)

The speed and scale of the COVID‐19 pandemic has highlighted the limits of current health systems and the potential promise of non‐establishment research such as “DIY” research. We consider one example of how DIY research is responding to the pandemic, discuss the challenges faced by DIY research more generally, and suggest that a “trust architecture” should be developed now to contribute to successful future DIY efforts.