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The Price of Pollination

In 1990, Tri-Star Pictures released one of the greatest films in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s back catalogue: Total Recall. Set in 2084, the story follows Douglas Quaid, a construction worker who undergoes a memory implant designed to make him believe he is a spy. When the procedure goes awry, Quaid finds himself actually hunted by agents of a shadowy organization. His journey leads him to Mars, where he becomes entangled in a resistance movement fighting a tyrannical regime. It’s the kind of film that defies easy summary, like many of Arnold’s classics, yet one everybody should see.

One notable plot point within the film is the commercialization of air. Because Mars lacks a breathable atmosphere, its inhabitants live within controlled biodomes, where oxygen is owned and rationed by the planet’s ruler, Vilos Cohaagen. Like food, water, or shelter on Earth, air becomes something people must pay for. Failure to do so results in restricted supply or, in extreme cases, complete deprivation. As such, the film turns a basic, taken-for-granted necessity into a tool of control and profit. Something with which I think many of us might relate.

The film came to mind when I recently read about research at the University of Oxford: the development of a “superfood” for honeybees. By engineering a yeast-based extract, researchers created a dietary supplement that, when introduced to bee colonies, increased larval production by up to fifteenfold and significantly improved overall colony health. Taken at face value, this is unequivocally positive as people tend to like honeybees. However, it also carries hints of danger. As Karl Marx observed, capitalism is marked by a tendency to transform more and more aspects of life into commodities. That is, things produced for exchange on the market. Thus, what was once simply part of the natural world becomes something that can be owned, priced, and sold. So, even pollination begins to appear as a process that might be drawn into the logic of the market.

Now, I don’t want to get so down on the bee superfood straight away. After all, bees, and particularly honeybees, occupy a unique place in our cultural imagination. They are symbols of industriousness, cooperation, and prosperity. In Manchester, for instance, the bee serves as an emblem of the city’s industrial heritage and collective spirit, a symbol adopted during the 19th century to reflect values of hard work and unity. Against this backdrop, any development that supports bee populations is likely to be viewed positively.

More critically, however, is the ecological reality. Bee populations, like those of many insects, have been in decline for decades. According to the Royal Horticultural Society, factors such as habitat loss, climate change, widespread pesticide use, and a shortage of suitable breeding sites have all contributed to this trend. The consequences extend far beyond bees themselves. As key pollinators, they play an essential role in sustaining plant life. Without them, natural pollination becomes increasingly difficult, and in some cases, impossible. This places entire ecosystems under strain.

It is not just the ecological impacts that should concern us. The majority of our crops rely on pollinators. Thus, without bees and other insects, our ability to grow food is jeopardized. So, even if you’re not ecologically minded, this should be something you care about, as, put simply, you need to eat, and without pollinators, you probably won’t be doing much of that.

All in all, then, it might seem that the discovery of a superfood that promotes colony health is an out-and-out good thing. So, then, why did it make me think of Total Recall? Because, like most forms of nourishment, this “superfood” must be produced, distributed, and sold. It introduces the possibility that pollination, once a largely uncommodified ecological process, may become increasingly mediated by markets.

Historically, while farmers have always managed crops with care, pollination itself did not require direct purchase. Like sunlight or rainfall, it was a background condition of agricultural life: essential but not priced. Marx described the expansion of capitalism as a process that draws such gifts of nature into the sphere of exchange, capturing them and turning them into sources of profit. The growing reliance on technological or nutritional interventions for pollination suggests that this process may now extend even to the reproductive mechanisms of plant life.

What emerges is the prospect of a new frontier for commercialization: the monetization of a process that was once freely provided by nature. This is not merely a question of unequal access, though that is a concern. Wealthier farmers may well gain advantages by investing in technologies that enhance pollination. But the deeper issue lies elsewhere. It is the steady extension of market logic into domains that were previously outside it; the transformation of common ecological goods into revenue streams.

This concern becomes more present when one considers developments such as RoboBees: miniature robots designed to perform pollination duties. The dangers here are tenfold. Unlike biological bees, which require only viable ecological conditions, such technologies depend on manufacture, maintenance, and ownership. They would not exist outside systems of payment and profit. In this context, RoboBees represent not just a substitute for natural pollination, but its full incorporation into an economic framework

Now, I’m not saying that the scientists who created the bee superfood or the RoboBees had nefarious intentions. Measures that help promote bee and other insect health should be welcomed. But it would be naïve to ignore the commercial possibilities that accompany such innovations. The risk is not the technology itself, but the context into which it is introduced.

If the trajectory continues, we may find ourselves in a world where pollination, like air on Mars, becomes something contingent on the ability to pay. That is not yet our reality, but it’s not unthinkable. If Total Recall offers a cautionary image of life-sustaining resources brought under private control, the lesson here is more subtle but no less important. Rather than relying primarily on market-based solutions to ecological decline, we might instead prioritize addressing its root causes: restoring habitats, reducing pesticide use, and mitigating climate change. In doing so, we preserve not only bee populations, but also the principle that some of the most fundamental conditions of life should remain outside the reach of commodification.

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“Severance,” Identity and Work

split image of woman worrying

The following piece discusses the series Severance. I avoid specific plot details. But if you want to go into the show blind, stop reading now.

Severance follows a group of employees at Lumon Industries, a biotech company of unspecified purpose. The main characters have all received a surgery before starting this job. Referred to as the “severance” procedure, this surgery causes a split in the patient’s personality. After surgery, patients awaken to find that while they have factual memories, they have no autobiographical memories – one character cannot remember her name or the color of her mother’s eyes but remembers that Delaware is a state.

However, the severance procedure does not cause irreversible amnesia. Rather, it creates two distinct aspects of one’s personality. One, called the outie, is the individual who was hired by Lumon and agreed to the procedure. However, when she goes to work, the outie loses consciousness and another aspect, the innie, awakens. The innie has no shared memories with the outie. She comes to awareness at the start of each shift, the last thing she remembers being walking to the exit the previous day. Her life is an uninterrupted sequence of days at the office and nothing else.

Before analyzing the severance procedure closer, let us take a few moments to consider some trends about work. As of 2017, 2.6 million people in the U.S. worked on-call, stopping and starting at a moment’s notice. Our smartphones leave us constantly vulnerable to emails or phone calls that pull us out of our personal lives. The pandemic and the corresponding need for remote, at-home work only accelerated the blurring of lines between our personal lives and spaces, and our work lives. For instance, as workplaces have gone digital, people have begun creating “Zoom corners.” Although seemingly innocuous, practices like these involve ceding control of some of our personal space to be more appealing to our employers and co-workers.

Concerns like these lead Elizabeth Anderson to argue in Private Government that workplaces have become governments. Corporate policies control our behavior when on the clock and our personal activities, which can be easily tracked online, may be subject to the scrutiny of our employers. Unlike with public, democratic institutions where we can shape policy by voting, a vast majority have no say in how their workplace is run. Hence this control is totalitarian. Further, “low skilled” and low-wage workers – because they are deemed more replaceable – are even more subject to their employer’s whims. This increased vulnerability to corporate governance carries with it many negative consequences, on top of those already associated with low income.

Some consequences may be due to a phenomenon Karl Marx called alienation. When working you give yourself up to others. You are told what to produce and how to produce it. You hand control of yourself over to someone or something else. Further, what you do while on the clock significantly affects what you want to do for leisure; even if you loved gardening, surely you would do something else to relax if your job was landscaping. When our work increasingly bleeds into our personal lives, our lives cease to be our own.

So, we can see why the severance procedure would have appeal. It promises us more than just balance between work and life, it makes it impossible for work to interfere with your personal life; your boss cannot email you with questions about your work on the weekend and you cannot be asked to take a project home if you literally have no recollection of your time in the office. To ensure that you will always leave your work at the door may sound like a dream to many.

Further, one might argue that the severance procedure is just an exercise of autonomy. The person agreeing to work at Lumon agrees to get the procedure done and we should not interfere with this choice. At best, it’s like wearing a uniform or following a code of conduct; it’s just a condition of employment which one can reject by quitting. At worst, it’s comparable to our reactions to “elective disability”; we see someone choosing a medical procedure that makes us uncomfortable, but our discomfort does not imply someone should not have the choice. We must not interfere with people’s ability to make choices that only affect themselves, and the severance procedure is such a choice.

Yet the show itself presents the severance procedure as morally dubious. Background TV programs show talking heads debating it, activists known as the “Whole Mind Collective” are campaigning to outlaw severance, and when others learn that the main character, Mark, is severed, they are visibly uncomfortable and uncertain what to say. So, what is the argument against it?

To explain what is objectionable about the severance procedure, we need to consider what makes us who we are. This is an issue referred to in philosophy as “personal identity.” In some sense, the innie and the outie are two parts of the same whole. No new person is born because of the surgery and the two exist within the same human organism; they share the same body and the same brain.

However, it is not immediately obvious that people are simply organisms. A common view is that a significant portion, if not all, of our identity deals with psychological factors like our memories. To demonstrate this, consider a case that Derek Parfit presented in Reasons and Persons. He refers to this case as the Psychological Spectrum. It goes roughly as follows:

Imagine that a nefarious surgeon installed a microchip on my brain. This microchip is connected to several buttons. As the surgeon presses each button, a portion of my memories change to Napoleon Bonaparte’s memories. When the surgeon pushes the last button, I would all of and only Napoleon’s memories.

What can we say about this case? It seems that, after the doctor presses the last button Nick no longer exists. It’s unclear when I stopped existing – after a few buttons, there seems to be a kind of weird Nick-Napoleon hybrid, who gradually goes full Napoleon. Nonetheless, even though Nick the organism survives, Nick the person does not.

And this allows us to see the full scope of the objection to the severance procedure. The choice is not just self-regarding. When one gets severed, they are arguably creating a new person. A person whose life is spent utterly alienated. The innie spends her days performing the tasks demanded of her by management. Her entire life is her work. And what’s more troubling is that this is the only way she can exist – any attempts to leave will merely result in the outie taking over, having no idea what happened at work.

This reveals the true horror of what Severance presents to us. The protagonists have an escape from increasing corporate protrusion into their personal lives. But this release comes at a price. They must wholly sacrifice a third of their lives. For eight hours a day, they no longer exist. And in that time, a different person lives a life under the thumb of a totalitarian government she has no bargaining power against.

The world of Severance is one without a good move for the worker. She is personally subject to private government which threatens to consume her whole life, or she severs her work and personal selves. Either way, her employer wins.