Information Technologies and Global Politics: The Changing Scope of Power and Governance

4. INFORMATIONAL META-TECHNOLOGIES, INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, AND GENETIC POWER: THE CASE OF BIOTECHNOLOGIES

CHAPTER FOUR INFORMATIONAL META-TECHNOLOGIES, INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, AND GENETIC POWER: THE CASE OF BIOTECHNOLOGIES SANDRA BRAMAN INTRODUCTION Meta-technologies are politically critical because they vastly expand the capacity of state and non-state actors to exercise genetic power—control over the informational bases of the materials, structures, and ideas that are the stuff of power in its instrumental, structural, and symbolic forms. The increasing use of metatechnologies to exercise genetic power is changing the rules of the game in international relations by disrupting long-standing structures, changing the relative weights among classes of players, and turning attention from products to processes. Meta-technologies are always informational; as a class they include those that process biological information, biotechnologies, as well as those that process digital information, or digital information technologies. The analysis here looks across the issue areas of trade, defense, and agriculture to examine ways in which biotechnologies are being used, the impacts of these uses on relations among forms of power, and the consequences of their use for international relations. It concludes with a look at what this suggests for analysis of the other entrant in the class of meta-technologies, digital information technologies. INFORMATIONAL META-TECHNOLOGIES, INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, AND GENETIC POWER: THE CASE OF BIOTECHNOLOGIES The features that make information technologies so crucial to the issues, institutions , practices, and outcomes of international relations today are the characteristics that define them as meta-technologies, analytically distinct from the 91 industrial technologies that have dominated earlier periods of human history. Meta-technologies vastly expand the degrees of freedom with which humans can act in the social and material worlds. While industrial technologies use a limited range of inputs, often singular, in production processes of limited and often singular mode that produce a limited range of outputs, often singular, meta-technologies can handle multiple and multiplying types of inputs into production processes that are infinitely variable and thus produce an essentially infinite range of outputs. This change in human productive capacity is both qualitative and quantitative in nature. It is accompanied by a loosening of historical constraints on decision -making about production processes. Some types of path dependency and structural constraints can now be sidestepped altogether. Because the range of possibilities is so much greater than before, what has been learned in the past about how to make decisions does not always suffice. The underlying premodern and modern assumption that an equilibrium can be achieved—that there is a right answer—is irrevocably gone. In the world of digital information technologies, these characteristics translate into features such as interoperability, mutability, and a rate of innovation that makes ephemerality a commodity in itself. Biotechnologies, however—those technologies involved in the collection, processing, distribution, and use of biological information (DNA)—are also meta-technologies. The history of the information society , going back to its beginnings in the mid-nineteenth century, involved not only the much-discussed innovations in human communication technologies, but also the development of biotechnologies. In domains of negotiation as historically distinct as those of trade, defense, and agriculture, the meta-technological qualities of biotechnologies have meant that new types of players as well as interactions among them have become critical to the functioning of the international system. Looking at the impact of biotechnologies on international relations in all of these areas makes it possible to see commonalities across them. These commonalities are important and distinct enough that they can be said to comprise the beginnings of a global information policy regime. Most important among them is a shift in relationships among various forms of power, most notably the rise to dominance of a form of power historically relatively rarely used. The subjects of biological information and its processing via biotechnologies are relatively new to international relations. Braudel (1977) noted that while historians have long examined the accumulation of mineral and human resources, almost no attention has been given to plants. Even among those who have written on the narrower question of the impact of innovation on global agriculture, few have looked at questions raised by new plant varieties (Kloppenburg 1988). Yet microorganisms were first used as a technology, for leaching metals from low-grade ore and for fermenting breads and drinks, as early as 7000–5,000 B.C.E. (Krimsky 92 INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES AND GLOBAL POLITICS 1991). Lewis Branscomb (1993) and Poitras (1997) have begun the work of linking analyses of digital information technologies with those on...