Shamans, Software, & Spleens
by James Boyle
Buy on AmazonWho owns your genetic information? Might it be the doctors who, in the course of removing your spleen, decode a few cells and turn them into a patented product? In 1990 the Supreme Court of California said yes, marking another milestone on the information superhighway. This extraordinary case is one of the many that James Boyle takes up in Shamans, Software, and Spleens, a timely look at the infinitely tricky problems posed by the information society. Discussing topics ranging from blackmail and insider trading to artificial intelligence (with good-humored stops in microeconomics, intellectual property, and cultural studies along the way), he has produced a penetrating social theory of the information age.…
Recommended by
"The most interesting part of Shamans, Software, & Spleens for me is an analogy that James Boyle uses between the privatisation of the human genome and the privatisation of the agricultural commons (an analogy which has since been taken up by quite a lot of activist groups working in this area). This parallel is a useful one: in both cases, what was previously a common good and regarded as natural suddenly becomes private property. The analogy works also because enclosing the land in the case of the agricultural commons, which removed the peasants’ traditional rights so that they no longer could hunt for animals, collect wood and so on, is similar to the way that patenting individual genes by private firms has meant that researchers can be hampered in their own research."
Body Shopping · fivebooks.com