When Extracting Is Not Subtracting: Accounting for Organism-technologies as Stakeholders in Microbial Resource Extraction through an Experiment in Discursive Biomimicry

Abstract

This paper concerns how digitizing biological resources enables disentangling information technologies from biological bodies and, thus, from response-abilities among creatures from which they are derived. Extracting (digital) information from (biological) bodies makes it possible to stabilize, freeze, circulate, and control that information independently from creaturely activities—multiplying, not subtracting from the originating material. Such extractions tend to attenuate human interdependencies with other creatures even while expanding the scope of their utility as resources, to the effect of limiting those who have a stake in their development to humans alone. Where conventional natural resource extraction does violence to places and those interdependent with them, digital resource extractions may instead do violence to human capacities to recognize and act on multispecies interdependencies. Here, I argue that choosing to realize connections among organisms and organismal resources makes it possible to envision how creatures may be stakeholders in their own development, with joined ethical and epistemic consequences. I trace that possibility through a case study of the essential laboratory yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae via the physical metaphor of snowflake yeast, an S. cerevisiae variant that maintains multicellular connections as it reproduces.

Extractions: Data Infrastructures and the Public Good

“…At the same time, these multispecies assemblages often result in and enact different versions of "anthropo-econo-centrism" (Schrader 2012). Contributions to the special issue address these bio-digital and info-economic tensions through empirical cases on biodiversity prospecting (Delgado 2021), biobanking (Aarden 2022), modeling for a digital fish (Bauer 2024), biodigital yeast technologies (Szymanski 2021), and extractions through the digitalized electricity grid (Rommetveit et al 2021).…”