The COVID pandemic has brought a spectacular prominence to the role of digital technologies in public health. However, the policy discourse about digital technology has been for the most part strikingly narrow. Even as there is a discussion of the impact of particular digital tools, there is relatively little deliberation on the broader issues of how these technologies are reconstituting core aspects of health systems and polities. How did we get to a narrow debate on a vast topic? One way to understand this irony is by turning to the history of an older technology, namely agricultural biotechnology. This article focuses on two dominant framings that significantly narrowed the debates on agricultural biotechnology: first, a narrative that had a relentless focus on agricultural biotechnology as a neatly delineated field that produced stable products, and second, the ascent of a language of ethics that elided structural explanations and addressed only downstream impacts. The brief foray into the early years of agricultural biotechnology is useful in understanding contemporary politics of digital technology.

中文翻译：

---

过于狭隘的政策辩论：农业生物技术对数字技术的启示

COVID 大流行使数字技术在公共卫生中的作用引人注目。然而，关于数字技术的政策讨论在很大程度上非常狭窄。尽管讨论了特定数字工具的影响，但对这些技术如何重构卫生系统和政体的核心方面的更广泛问题的讨论相对较少。我们是如何就一个广泛的话题进行狭隘的辩论的？理解这种讽刺的一种方法是转向一种古老技术的历史，即农业生物技术。本文重点关注两个主要框架，它们显着缩小了对农业生物技术的争论：第一，一种将农业生物技术作为生产稳定产品的清晰划定的领域的叙事，其次是一种省略结构性解释而仅解决下游影响的伦理语言的兴起。对农业生物技术早期的短暂探索有助于理解数字技术的当代政治。