It is no longer possible—if it ever was—to imagine that the institutions and practices that create information sit outside of power, helping citizens to make democratic decisions. Instead, they are conduits and centers of economic and political control. Thus, it should not surprise that postgenomic calls for more open flows of information and more robust informed consent procedures failed to provide the grounds of public trust or ethical action. As the cultural critic Jodi Dean astutely observed at the beginning of this millennium: “No one today should accept a model of political life that
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