Junkware
Thierry Bardini
U Minn, 2011
128 B246j
"Genetic determinism [including the flaw or paradox of 'junk dna'] is today's credo for brand-new religions, new kinds of cargo cults derived from the central dogma: transhumanists, extropians, and so on. It aspires to become the state religion of capitalism of the fourth kind. Man was but an open-source problem with a design solution...er, sorry, Overman is all but an open-source solution to a design problem. Who ends up writing the copyright notice, or else the open-source copyleft license, for the Successor of Man? is the question of the day. Alas, then came junk, and this seducing picture of a well-mastered future now seems out of focus..." ch. De-Coda
This book is thrilling. No other book takes the problem of junk (and especially junk DNA) so seriously; no other book takes the question of what molecular biology has done to us so thoroughly. Thierry Bardini’s answer is that we have literally become junk—Homo Nexus. In the age of genetic capitalism, we’ve moved beyond Deleuze’s societies of control and into an age of infinite repurposing. At the very moment that many are celebrating ‘remix culture’ Bardini's book provides a wild and weird wake-up call. We are junk, junk is us. Junkware will help us sort it out." —Christopher Kelty, author of Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software
Thierry Bardini is professor of communication at the Universite de Montreal