Hoofd, I.M. (Ingrid) on Tue, 25 Oct 2022 09:18:46 +0200 (CEST)


[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Re: <nettime> Technopolitics of the future


> As such as we can theorise that we are now all colonial subjects - whoever, wherever - and that in fact pharma-capital now primarily experiments on subjects in the home countries, such as the Pfizer-styled argument about vaccine apartheid entails: testing and trying was tested and tried on subjects in poor countries, now testing and trying is universal and it has become understood and perceived to be a privilege to be allowed to donate your body to clinical experiments.

Yes - and this what I also tried to communicate with a pandemic politics call for papers last year, remember - for which I got shot down by most of you? Nice to see this list is finally somewhat getting back to its critical senses.

Cheers, Ingrid.



-----Original Message-----
From: nettime-l-bounces@mail.kein.org <nettime-l-bounces@mail.kein.org> On Behalf Of mp
Sent: maandag 24 oktober 2022 15:16
To: nettime-l@mail.kein.org
Subject: Re: <nettime> Technopolitics of the future



On 24/10/2022 12:56, podinski wrote:
> re: mRNA developments
> 
> One really shouldn't be surprised by these dismal achievements to " 
> hack the body" and " under the skin surveillance"

Was/is mRNA a scientific achievement or a political measure, bypassing already/anyway rather weak (read: corrupt) approval procedures of medicine?

Anyone saw or read Dopesick? -- "Double the dose" sounds an awful lot like "booster campaigns".

Here's a Cambridge University science outreach programme writing in 2018:

"...There is still a lot of work to be done before mRNA vaccines can become standard treatments, in the meantime, we need a better understanding of their potential side effects, and more evidence of their long term efficacy..".

https://www.phgfoundation.org/briefing/rna-vaccines

How do you build "long term evidence" in less than three years? Is the scientific breakthrough a time machine?

Here's Adam Fejerskov's angle on paradigmatic changes, in:

'The Global Lab: Inequality, Technology, and the New Experimental Movement', Oxford University Press 2022

https://www.diis.dk/en/experts/adam-moe-fejerskov

Page 2:

"...Throughout the book, we will meet at least four main protagonists, together making up the core of the movement: philanthropists, economists, pharmas, and humanitarians. Private foundations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation experiment with new technologies and rad­ical change as they test innovative toilets or condoms or attempt to alter social norms in poor communities, basing their actions on what they see as ob­ject­ive models of change emerging from experiments, reducing the messy real world to formulae. Pharmaceutical companies have moved their experiments with new drugs to ‘emerging markets’ that provide abundant human subjects ready to partake in clinical trials to overcome diseases for which they often cannot afford treatment, pushing both experimental methodologies and stabilizing experimental practices as everyday care. The randomista economists likewise conduct randomized controlled trials and similar methodologies brought in from the natural sciences to experiment with solutions for social problems, driven by similar scientific desires of reducing complex realities to a set of logical causal chains. Finally, humanitarian actors, including private charities and United Nations (UN) organizations, pursue what they see as radical and innovative approaches to saving lives in disasters and emergencies through new technologies, from testing cargo drones and big data, to the ­registration and ordering of refugees through biometric data, iris scans, and blockchains- this is an introduction of emerging technologies that essentially functions as experimentation...".

The book was written before and during the pandemic, where of course "the lab" grew much bigger and the number of experimental subjects is now rather large:

"...68% of the world population has received at least one dose of a
COVID-19 vaccine. 12.76 billion doses have been administered globally, and 3.26 million are now administered each day.

22.7% of people in low-income countries have received at least one dose...".

https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations

As such as we can theorise that we are now all colonial subjects - whoever, wherever - and that in fact pharma-capital now primarily experiments on subjects in the home countries, such as the Pfizer-styled argument about vaccine apartheid entails: testing and trying was tested and tried on subjects in poor countries, now testing and trying is universal and it has become understood and perceived to be a privilege to be allowed to donate your body to clinical experiments.




#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission #  <nettime>  is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, #  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets #  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org #  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime>  is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: