ABSTRACT

While the last decade has seen a rise in research on biohacking from the perspective of social studies of technology, anthropology, sociology, and legal studies, there remains a gap in the criminological understanding of biotechnology in general and biohacking in particular. To contribute toward such a perspective, the research project aims to establish how the construction of social norms, deviance, and ethical concerns are perceived and discussed in online biohacking communities. Adapting a cultural criminological approach, we see technological counter-cultures as focal for understanding how norms are reinvented around novel social practices. On the basis of a qualitative content analysis of more than 600 discussion threads from 7 online communities (including a mailing list, three forums, a Facebook group, and two subReddits), we outlined expressions of deviance and ethical considerations among do-it-yourself biologists, grinders, and members of the quantified self scene. The results showed that biohacking communities had a nuanced separation of the technological and ethical aspects of activities that are considered controversial in the public discourse, and an ambivalent relationship to the legal and informal normative realms.

摘要

虽然过去十年从技术社会研究、人类学、社会学和法律研究的角度来看，对生物黑客的研究有所增加，但犯罪学对生物技术，尤其是生物黑客的总体理解仍然存在差距。为了促成这样的观点，该研究项目旨在确定如何在在线生物黑客社区中感知和讨论社会规范、偏差和道德问题的构建。采用文化犯罪学方法，我们将技术反文化视为理解规范如何围绕新的社会实践进行改造的焦点。基于对来自 7 个在线社区（包括一个邮件列表、三个论坛、一个 Facebook 群组和两个 subReddit）的 600 多个讨论线程的定性内容分析，我们概述了自己动手的生物学家、研磨师和量化自我场景成员之间的偏差和伦理考虑的表达。结果表明，生物黑客社区在公共话语中被认为有争议的活动的技术和道德方面存在细微差别，并且与法律和非正式规范领域存在矛盾的关系。