Preston Maness ☭<p>Well, I'm reading through it now, mere days before the book report's deadline (life has been kicking me while I'm down this past month; just lemme have this one). Keeping in mind that this was published in 2015, and likely worked on in 2013-2014, I'd say, so far (I'm finished with the first two, of eight, chapters), that the authors are... wildly optimistic in their prognostications. Their faith in capitalism is thoroughly baked into -- and yet completely unspoken in -- what I have read so far, and it borders on naïveté. Ethical questions are barely even raised, and there is no investigation made into them at either the textual or subtextual level.</p><p>As a former software engineer, their hope in Big Tech -- and particularly companies like Facebook and Google (the authors go so far as to nonchalantly suggest that a "genomic 'Facebook'" might one day exist, without casting any skepticism or aspersion toward that idea at all) -- is particularly misplaced when viewed through the lens of a decade of hindsight into the mess that surveillance capitalism has wrought. <a href="https://tenforward.social/tags/23andMe" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>23andMe</span></a> has been presented as a success story, a particularly tragicomical specimen in light of its recent financial troubles and questions over ownership of the genetic data should it go bankrupt.</p><p>And that leads into what I suspect will be my primary gripe with the book: its (suspected) dearth of considerations for the licensing of genomic data and technology, about who gets to benefit from amassing such a corpus of genomic information, and on what terms. I have found myself at multiple instances, just in the first two chapters, already exasperatedly asking the authors: haven't y'all seen or read anything put out by <span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://mastodon.ar.al/@aral" class="u-url mention" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">@<span>aral</span></a></span> on the questions of data ownership? Is the field of <a href="https://tenforward.social/tags/bioinformatics" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>bioinformatics</span></a> truly sleepwalking into the exact same quagmires that the <a href="https://tenforward.social/tags/FreeSoftware" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>FreeSoftware</span></a> world contended with, all without ever reading anything put out by <span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://mastodon.xyz/@rms" class="u-url mention" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">@<span>rms</span></a></span>, by the <span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://hostux.social/@fsf" class="u-url mention" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">@<span>fsf</span></a></span>, by the <span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://social.sfconservancy.org/users/conservancy" class="u-url mention" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">@<span>conservancy</span></a></span>, or by the <span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://mastodon.social/@fsfe" class="u-url mention" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">@<span>fsfe</span></a></span>? Is our species, in yet another instance, going to prioritize private profit at the expense of public good? Nay, even publicly subsidize a for-profit sector that has no obligations to the public in turn?</p><p>If genetics truly is the source code of life, and our existing licenses for such source code are truly so "permissive" (or even non-existent) then our species is in very sorry shape indeed. To avoid a <a href="https://tenforward.social/tags/cyberpunk" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>cyberpunk</span></a> future, I implore and entreat that we take inspiration from nature's viruses, and adopt viral, copyleft licensing for our collective genetic source code as a species. Genomics must belong to everyone, lest it become yet another tool of oppression. "Free Genomics, Free Society," as it were.</p><p>I see the nascent optimism of authors Field and Davies and raise them an equal dose of pessimism, administered one decade later.</p><p><a href="https://tenforward.social/tags/biocode" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>biocode</span></a> <a href="https://tenforward.social/tags/genomics" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>genomics</span></a> <a href="https://tenforward.social/tags/genetics" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>genetics</span></a> <a href="https://tenforward.social/tags/foss" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>foss</span></a> <a href="https://tenforward.social/tags/FreeGenomics" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>FreeGenomics</span></a> <a href="https://tenforward.social/tags/CreativeCommons" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>CreativeCommons</span></a> <a href="https://tenforward.social/tags/ODBL" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>ODBL</span></a> <a href="https://tenforward.social/tags/PublicMoneyPublicCode" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>PublicMoneyPublicCode</span></a></p>