Alessandro Delfanti’s Biohackers sits at the point where science studies, hacker culture and political economy begin interfering with one another.

Delfanti asks what happens when scientific knowledge adopts the language and practices of hacking: openness, sharing, rebellion, decentralisation and suspicion of institutions. His subjects are scientists working around genomics, biotechnology and DIY biology, figures who position themselves against established scientific hierarchies while operating inside economies increasingly structured by patents, venture capital and commercial extraction.

In this work, openness does not automatically mean anti-capitalism. Delfanti traces how values associated with hacker culture — autonomy, collaboration, horizontality, free circulation — can function simultaneously as genuine challenges to proprietary science and as remarkably compatible working ethics for contemporary capitalism. The result is less a celebration of biohacking than an anatomy of its contradictions: who owns knowledge, what counts as public science, and how quickly rebellion can become a business model. Particularly good alongside writing on platform capitalism, intellectual property, digital commons and the politics of technological infrastructure.

Pluto Press, London, 2013. First edition, first printing. Paperback. Very good condition with only light shelf wear to covers and edges; internally clean and firmly bound.