Tournament: mid america cup | Round: Doubles | Opponent: princeton jg | Judge: panel
(1) ~Arthur Kroker, running out of jokes here. 2014. "Exits to the Posthuman Future."~ pat
When the final extinction event has taken place and that lonely morning finally comes when
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dig, or a human clone, for that matter, will drone?
CT Humanities. "First American Medicine Patent – Today in History: April 30 | Connecticut History | a CTHumanities Project." Connecticut History | a CTHumanities Project, 30 Apr. 2020, connecticuthistory.org/first-american-medicine-patent-today-in-history-april-30/.
Two and a half centuries later: Apps are being developed to track and exteriorize the human senses by syncing ourselves with technology, marketed as a way to monitor our health and transmit biological data.
~Arthur Kroker, running out of jokes here. 2014. "Exits to the Posthuman Future."~ sosa
There is a patent application for a new iPhone app that involves synching your heart
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simply by initializing your heart to the digital recognition software of the smartphone.
Kroker '14
~Arthur, running out of jokes here. 2014. "Exits to the Posthuman Future."~ pat
Digital cosmology? Its ontology is epigenesist, the belief that digital organisms proliferate by
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nothing now counts but the ersatz nothingness of data itself. Digital trauma.
Pellizzoni 15. Luigi, Associate Professor of Environmental and Political Sociology at the University of Trieste, Italy and co-editor of Neoliberalism and Technoscience. "Ontological Politics in a Disposable World: The New Mastery of Nature." 2015 sosa
Blurred Distinctions In an insightful study Eugene Thacker (2006) stresses that biotechnology is
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, which are foreign to traditional descriptions of organisms as eminently material entities."
James Ming Chen 13, Justin Smith Morrill Chair in Law, Michigan State University; Of Counsel, Technology Law Group of Washington, D.C. 5-15-13. "BIOPROSPECT THEORY," https://www.uakron.edu/dotAsset/989023a4-c9c1-49a6-854d-26ea7eb01cca.pdf brett
Conventional wisdom treats biodiversity and biotechnology as rivalrous values. The global south is home to most of earth's vanishing species, while the global north holds the capital and technology needed to develop this natural wealth. The south argues that intellectual property laws enable pharmaceutical companies and seed breeders in the industrialized north to commit biopiracy.1 By contrast, the United States has characterized calls for profit-sharing as a threat to the global life sciences industry.2 Both sides magnify the dispute, on the apparent consensus that commercial exploitation of genetic resources holds the key to biodiversity conservation. Both sides of this debate misunderstand the relationship between biodiversity and biotechnology.3 Both sides have overstated the significance of bioprospecting. It is misleading to frame the issue as whether intellectual property in the abstract can coexist with the international legal framework for preserving biodiversity. As a matter of legal gymnastics, any lawyer can reconfigure intellectual property to embrace all of the intangible assets at stake, including raw genetic resources, advanced agricultural and pharmaceutical research, and ethnobiological knowledge. The real challenge lies in directing the law of biodiversity conservation and the law of intellectual property toward appropriate preservation and exploitation of the global biospheric commons.5 Commercial development aids biodiversity primarily by overcoming perverse economic incentives to consume scarce natural resources that may turn out to have greater global, long-term value. We contest these issues not because we are rational, but precisely because we are not. Indeed, legal approaches to biodiversity and biotechnology are so twisted that they represent an extreme application of prospect theory. Nearly half a century before Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky published Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision Under Risk, 6 the 1979 article that became the foundational work of behavioral economics and the principal basis for Kahneman's 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics,7 the Supreme Court of the United States succinctly summarized a core tenet of prospect theory: "Threat of loss, not hope of gain, is the essence of economic coercion."8 In plainer terms, "losing hurts worse than winning feels good."9 Stated in formal terms, prospect theory posits that most individuals, as an expression of innate risk aversion, fear potential losses far more than they covet potential gains.10 The law of biodiversity and biotechnology appears to reverse this presumption. Although humans innately fear losses more than they value gains, worldwide policy appears to assign relatively little value to biodiversity as an invaluable, incommensurate, and indefinitely important component of global ecological health.11 Biodiversity loss is staggering and undeniable.12 Humans are responsible for the sixth great extinction spasm of the Phanerozoic Eon, a unit of geologic time spanning half a billion years.13 Cataclysmic loss of biological diversity is merely one of several ecological threats looming over Holocene humanity.14 In assembling this brief analysis, I hasten to add this observation: so far I have assigned no weight to global climate change, a threat that has raised the probability of human extinction to a non-negligible value. Risks as grandiose as these, sufficient in their magnitude to portend the end of civilization, possibly even the survival of humans as a species, support the most dismal of theorems in the dismal science of economics: "the catastrophe-insurance aspect of such a fat-tailed unlimited-exposure situation, which can never be fully learned away, can dominate the social-discounting aspect, the pure-risk aspect, and the consumptionsmoothing aspect."15 In plainer language, the dismal theorem posits that "under limited conditions concerning the structure of uncertainty and societal preferences, the expected loss from certain risks such as climate change is infinite and that standard economic analysis cannot be applied."16 By contrast, the global north and the global south alike have reached an apparent consensus that the primary object of the international debate over "biopiracy" is the appropriate profit-sharing protocol (including the possibility of no redistributive mechanism whatsoever) for gains from bioprospecting.17 Such gains, at best, are highly speculative.18 Even if profits from bioprospecting are ever realized, they will be extremely concentrated. No champion of redistributive justice on a global scale could defend a system of transferring northern wealth that would favor Brazil, Costa Rica, and Madagascar while neglecting Bolivia, Mali, and Afghanistan. There simply is no defensible basis for treating ethnobiological knowledge as the foundation of a globally coherent approach to economic development. Yet the global community continues to spend its extremely small and fragile storehouse of political capital on this contentious corner of international environmental law.19 Global economic diplomacy should be made of saner stuff. The fact that it is not invites us to treat the entire charade as a distinct branch of behavioral law and economics: bioprospect theory. Upon closer examination, prospect theory and related branches of behavioral economics do supply a powerful explanation for international economic law's systematic failure to reach the optimal solutions for biodiversity conservation. Prospect theory arises from three basic features of human beings' core cognitive system:20 1. All decisionmaking takes place relative to a neutral reference point, or "adaptation level." Outcomes exceeding this reference point are gains. Outcomes below the reference point are losses. 2. Loss aversion means that losses, when directly weighted or compared against gains, loom larger. 3. Diminishing sensitivity applies to upward and downward perceptions and to evaluation of changes of wealth. In concert, these three principles — neutral reference point, loss aversion, diminishing sensitivity — can be illustrated through a graph showing an asymmetrical sigmoid curve whose inflection point occurs at the neutral adaptation level, whose steeper slope below the adaptation level demonstrates loss aversion, and whose declining rate of change in both directions reflects diminishing sensitivity to gains and losses:21 19. See Chen, supra note 5, at 506. 20. See KAHNEMAN, supra note 10, at 282. 21. Id. at 282-83. One readily implemented way of parametrically modeling prospect theory with closed-form expressions and elementary functions is the cumulative distribution function of the log-logistic 2014~ BIOPROSPECT THEORY 23 "If prospect theory had a flag, this image would be drawn on it."22 The asymmetrical utility curve that emerges from prospect theory's reevaluation of conventional accounts of expected economic utility leads to some apparent contradictions.23 In mixed gambles, for instance, where a decisionmaker may realize either a gain or a loss, loss aversion leads to extreme, even costly risk aversion. This is the primary conclusion of prospect theory, the one most readily summarized by the slogan, "losing hurts worse than winning feels good."24 But prospect theory predicts affirmatively risk-seeking behavior in other circumstances. When a decisionmaker is confronted with nothing but "bad choices" — specifically, those "where a sure loss is compared to a larger loss that is merely probable" — diminishing sensitivity to losses will generate a greater willingness to absorb risk.25 Prospect theory therefore rests on two principal insights. First, humans "attach values to gains and losses rather than to wealth."26 Second, humans making decisions assign "weights . . . to outcomes ~that~ are different from 22. KAHNEMAN, supra note 10, at 282. Graph reproduced from Basic Concepts: Prospect Theory, THE DICKINSON COLLEGE WIKI, http://wiki.dickinson.edu/index.php/Basic_Concepts~~#Prospect_Theory (last modified May 3, 2007). 23. See KAHNEMAN, supra note 10, at 285. 24. GRIZZARD, supra note 9; accord GARAGIOLA, supra note 9. 25. KAHNEMAN, supra note 10, at 285. 26. Id. at 316-17. 24 AKRON INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY JOURNAL ~7:19 probabilities."27 The combination of these two heuristics generates "a distinctive pattern of preferences" that Kahneman and Tversky have called the "fourfold pattern":28 The four-fold pattern Gains Losses High probability (certainty effect) E.g., a 95 chance to win $10,000 leads to . . . Risk aversion (annuities and sinecures) E.g., a 95 chance to lose $10,000 leads to . . . Risk seeking (rogue trading and other reckless gambles) Low probability (possibility effect) E.g., a 5 chance to win $10,000 leads to . . . Risk seeking (lotteries) E.g., a 5 chance to lose $10,000 leads to . . . Risk aversion (insurance) Let us examine more closely each of the four vanes in prospect theory's pinwheel of fortune. Three of these four behavioral possibilities have long been understood; prospect theory merely provided the means by which to describe them formally.29 The cell at top left describes how risk aversion leads people to lock in a sure gain below the expected value of a gamble. Annuities work on this principle, as do employment guarantees in unionized trades or on tenure-protected university faculties. The cell at lower right describes insurance: individuals will pay much more than the expected value of a loss to insure themselves against the disturbing prospect of a catastrophic loss.30 On the flip side of that transaction, insurance companies can pool risks assigned to them by risk-averse policyholders and profit from the spread between expected losses and premium payments. These risk-averse decisions reflect the core instinct of prospect theory. But there is also a risk-seeking side to this account of human behavior. Lotteries routinely exploit the possibility effect. When the potential payout is enormous, ticket buyers become indifferent to their miniscule chances of winning. This is the behavioral pattern reflected by the lower left cell. It is 27. Id. at 317. 28. Id. 29. See id. at 317-18. 30. See, e.g., Jim Chen, Modern Disaster Theory: Evaluating Disaster Law as a Portfolio of Legal Rules, 25 EMORY INT'L L. REV. 1121 (2011); Jim Chen, Postmodern Disaster Theory (Mich. State Univ. Coll. of Law Legal Studies Research Paper Series, Paper No. 11-17, 2012), available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2141591. 2014~ BIOPROSPECT THEORY 25 sufficiently powerful that banks and credit unions have resorted to depositor lotteries to induce lower- to middle-income customers to open and fund savings accounts.31 What Kahneman and Tversky found most surprising was the fourth possibility, the one described in the risk-seeking cell at upper right. When humans face the high probability of severe losses, they engage in affirmatively riskier behavior. Prospect theory identifies two reasons for this sudden shift in strategy.32 First, diminishing sensitivity means that humans react very adversely to a sure loss: "the reaction to a loss of $900 is more than 90 as intense as the reaction to a loss of $1,000."33 Second and perhaps even more significant, humans assign a much lower decision weight to an extreme loss than its rationally expected value as calculated by the laws of probability. The certainty effect, coupled with diminishing sensitivity, enhances the aversiveness of a sure loss and reduces the aversiveness of the gamble. This is the ugly corner of human decisionmaking where otherwise responsible parties find themselves tempted to take risks that can "turn~~ manageable failures into disasters."34 "Rogue traders" who have amassed appalling losses let it all ride on a single act of reckless arbitrage. That gamble may destroy a systemically important financial institution.35 "Because defeat is so difficult to accept," chief executive officers and field marshals suffer from a comparable inability to cut their losses and salvage what is left of their companies and armies.36 Bioprospect theory helps explain why international economic and environmental law reaches such perverse outcomes in its approach to biodiversity conservation and bioprospecting. Biodiversity policy is perverse because it disobeys the standard risk-averse pattern of human conduct and follows instead the contrary axis of risk-seeking behavior. The fate of the biosphere presents either (1) a low probability of immense gain (through bioprospecting) or (2) a high probability of immense loss (through global climate change). The lottery effect readily explains the overvaluing of commercial bioprospecting. Pharmaceutical companies and protesters accusing them of biopiracy have this much in common: both sides are bedazzled — irrationally — by the possibility that some lucrative cure for cancer may lurk in a Brazilian rain forest.37 The looming loss of global biological diversity, on a geologically significant scale, poses an even more disturbing prospect. The magnitude of ecological losses is increasing at an alarming rate, even more so once we move past the relatively narrow frame of biodiversity and contemplate the possibility of complete disruption of global climatic systems. As the costs and the likely futility of mitigating action increase,38 humans find their own heuristics shoving their collective decisionmaking processes further onto the frontier of desperation where risk-averse acts such as insurance lose their appeal and yield ground to active risk-seeking. System 1 — the rapid, automatic decisionmaking system that has propelled humanity from Pleistocene competitiveness to Holocene dominance39 — may be pushing Homo sapiens sapiens to the edge of extinction by its own talented hand. The global collapse of biodiversity is the ultimate ecosystem service provided by indicator species: "never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."40 Bioprospect theory provides the blueprint by which humanity might eschew the remote prospect of wealth, if only momentarily, and focus on how it might better manage anthropogenic ecological disasters before they become full-blown, irreversible cataclysms of global proportions.
As the cybernetic order progresses, the virtual class utilizes violent and combative strategies like IPRs to restructure society into a digital superhighway paved by our own flesh
Kroker and Weinstein '94
~Arthur, (post?)human meth pipe, and Michael Weinstein, Purdue University. 1994. "Data Trash."~ sosa – ask for the PDF
Privileging the question of ethics via virtuality lays bare the impulse to nihilism that is
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relay, and (our) disappearance into pure virtualities its ecstatic destiny.
Hui '19
~Yuk, teaches at the Bauhaus University in Weimar and is a visiting professor (PhD supervision qualification) in philosophy and technology at the China Academy of Art. 2019. "Recursivity and Contingency."~ pat
We would now like to return to Lyotard's critique of system and to offer a
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there will be no longer any thinking, and no longer anything contingent?
The aff generates interventions into the affective structure of imperialism – that jams empire's communication networks and creates new resistances.
Tiqqun '1
~French leftist philosophical journal, founded in 1999 with an aim to "recreate the conditions of another community." Probably not you. 2001. "The Cybernetic Hypothesis," https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/tiqqun-the-cybernetic-hypothesis~~ pat
These questions, seen from the neutralized and neutralizing perspective of the laboratory observer or
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, in urban or peri-urban non-places — is unpredictable.
Dyer-Witheford and Matviyenko '19
~Nick Dyer-Witheford, Information and Media Studies at University of Western Ontario, and Svitlana Matviyenko, Critical Media Analysis in the School of Communication (SFU). 2019. "Cyberwar and Revolution: Digital Subterfuge in Global Capitalism."~ pat
While tactical resistance can involve any and all of the "memes of production"
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cyberwar on cyberwar and fostering the caring corporeality that is opposite of cyberwar.
Thacker, Eugene. "The global genome - biotechnology, politics, and culture." (2005). |Harun + Sosa|
In addition, it is important to recognize that the rise of biowar does not
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as a population: health, sanitation, birthrate, longevity, race."
We control a uniqueness question with regards to how the virtual collapses all thought and flesh into the digital archive – what we do now in response to this end of history and the recombination of human experience is the only discussion left.
Kroker and Weinstein '94
~Arthur, (post?)human meth pipe, and Michael Weinstein, Purdue University. 1994. "Data Trash."~ pat – ask for the PDF
Virtual reality sells the illusion of displacement. It allows you to jump out of
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digital technology, becoming the world-historical process animating the will to virtuality