Steve Fuller has a new book, Humanities 2.0, which looks at the historical and philosophical currents underlying the creation of a new biotechnological species. At one point he notes:
…the idea is very much one of planning for both the production and the consumption of fundamental developments that have yet to occur, thereby blurring the ‘basic/applied’ research binary that has dominated post-World War II science policy discourse. The term of art ‘anticipatory governance’ has been introduced to capture this novel sense of science-by-public-relations (Barben et al. 2008), though a clear precedent may be found in Steve Woolgar’s (1991) idea of ‘configuring the user’ of new software by co-opting potential users (and dissenters) in the early design stages so that the product hits its target market.
The technoscientific industrial complex builds both ends–the product AND the consumer. Our desires are as constructed as the products we buy. Humanity 2.0 does not simply mean the futurist fantasies of a Kurzweil, where we will be able to download our intelligence into silicon media. It also means the further enframing of all human experience within the compass of economism, as our desires to be downloaded will also be molded.