Ambivalence: combination of rebellion and profitable entrepreneurship
On the one hand biohackers act as rebels who challenge the status quo by advocating free access and sharing; on the other hand they may also act as profiteers who resist external interference from public regulations, corporate interests, or academic institutions, in order to accumulate economic profit as well as personal prestige (Golinelli and Henry 2014). Open source projects are not necessarily anti-capitalist, but may even extend the scope of capitalist exploitation (Delfanti 2011, 52; Delgado 2013, 72).
The combination of rebellion and profitable entrepreneurship can be illustrated by innovators from Silicon Valley, the breeding ground and test bed for internet multinationals such as Facebook, Google, Twitter, Yahoo, Airbnb and Uber. Many of these tech-celebrities have wholeheartedly embraced the libertarian credo of ‘Minimum Government, Maximum Freedom.’ A case in point is Peter Thiel, co-author of the 2014 book Zero to One about how to build companies that create new things. He is a co-founder of PayPal and an early investor in Facebook, LinkedIn and Zynga, with a net worth of $1.5 billion, who donated $2.6 million in support of presidential candidate Ron Paul, the ‘intellectual godfather’ of the Tea Party movement.
Recently, Andrew Keen has strongly criticized Silicon Valley’s libertarian ethos in his book The Internet is Not the Answer. The net, he argues, was meant to be “power to the people, a platform for equality”: an open, decentralised, democratising technology. Instead, it has handed extraordinary power and wealth to a tiny handful of people, while simultaneously, for the rest of us, compounding and often aggravating existing cultural, social and economic inequalities. Keen portrays the internet as a perfect global platform for free-market capitalism – “it’s a libertarian wet dream. Digital Milton Friedman.”4
Keulartz J, van den Belt H. DIY-Bio – economic, epistemological and ethical implications and ambivalences. Life Sci Soc Policy. 2016;12(1):7.