Abstract

This essay builds on the literatures on ‘biocapitalism’ and ‘informationalism’ (or ‘informational capitalism’) to develop the concept of ‘bio-informational capitalism’ in order to articulate an emergent form of capitalism that is self-renewing in the sense that it can change and renew the material basis for life and capital as well as program itself. Bio-informational capitalism applies and develops aspects of the new biology to informatics to create new organic forms of computing and self-reproducing memory that in turn has become the basis of bioinformatics. The paper begins with a review of the successes of the ‘new biology’, focusing on Craig Venter’s digitizing of biology and, as he remarks, the creation of new life from the digital universe. The paper then provides a brief account of bioinformatics before brokering and discussing the term ‘bioinformational capitalism’