Abstract This article explores the critical limitations of the now decades-long shift toward digital culture in the material and cultural constitution of biotechnology. It does this by telling the story of three contemporary efforts to reimagine the logic of life on the logic of the digital and the struggles attendant to building the infrastructures needed to actualize that re-imagination and make it profitable. In tracing these stories, it lifts out how biotechnologists, once caught in the spell of the digital sublime, are having to confront the ways in which dreams of a data-driven and automated biology, far from eliciting an exalted future of health, wealth, and security, are simply reinforcing at the level of the organism a world already boxed in by algorithmic modes of reason and governed by imperatives of optimization. In the midst of these binds, this article points to a pathos which is beginning to stir at the bench as blue-collar technologists seek to activate an older feel for craftwork, and how this pathos signals a familiar but vital reciprocity between the maker and the made. It concludes that, in the end, breakdowns in the digital sublime make space for a more interesting biotechnical proposition, one in which the living thing being crafted has to be accommodated rather than rendered algorithmic: the cellular targets of biotechnical intervention must be coerced, cajoled, and enticed into playing along with our biotechnical imaginations. To act differently proves to be the real source of our trouble. The stories in this article draw on fieldwork conducted by the author through multiple experiments in collaborative anthropology. These experiments began in connection to a then-emerging brand of biotechnology called synthetic biology, were carried forward in view of a “post-engineering” approach to systems biology, and are currently (as of the writing of this essay) being conducted among biologists and technologists working to build “digital infrastructures” for the life sciences (i.e., digital tools for assembling, mediating, and synthesizing post-genomic biology).

中文翻译：

---

数字崇高

摘要 本文探讨了数十年来生物技术物质和文化构成向数字文化转变的关键局限性。它通过讲述三个当代努力的故事来实现这一点，这些努力在数字逻辑上重新构想生活逻辑，以及为实现这种重新构想并使其盈利而建立所需的基础设施所伴随的斗争。在追溯这些故事的过程中，它揭示了生物技术人员一旦陷入数字崇高的魔咒，不得不面对数据驱动和自动化生物学的梦想，远未引发健康、财富的崇高未来，和安全，只是在有机体层面加强了一个已经被推理算法模式框住并受优化命令控制的世界。在这些束缚中，本文指出了一种悲情开始在工作台上激起，因为蓝领技术人员试图激活对工艺的古老感觉，以及这种悲情如何标志着制造商和制造商之间熟悉但至关重要的互惠制成。它的结论是，最终，数字崇高的崩溃为一个更有趣的生物技术命题腾出了空间，在这个命题中，被制作的生物必须被容纳而不是算法化：生物技术干预的细胞目标必须被胁迫、哄骗，并被引诱与我们的生物技术想象力一起玩耍。事实证明，采取不同的行动是我们麻烦的真正根源。本文中的故事取材于作者通过协作人类学的多项实验进行的实地考察。