Cultured meat and responsible research when the future is an illusion for financial speculation

Abstract

Developments in cultured meat promise transformative societal and environmental impacts through remaking animals in the bioreactor. However, in contrast to many emerging technologies, the innovation niche of cultured meat is almost entirely sustained through private venture capital investment. The financial infrastructure of Silicon Valley, and its constantly shifting frontiers of hype and financial speculation is the foundation upon which cultured meat — as a product and as a vision — is based. In this paper we seek to reflect on the consequences of these financial dynamics for examining emerging technologies and future promissory discourses. Specially, we note how this financial context lends credibility to start-up founders and their future visions, who achieve legitimacy as the result of an entirely transactional arrangement: securing investment. It produces promissory narratives that are fabricated, from the start, to appeal to a set of private investors and financial interests. Equally, there are major incentives to deceive, in terms of technical possibilities, moral progress, and societal prospects, to sustain an illusion of imminent breakthrough and lucrative investment returns. The danger for futures analysis is in reifying promissory discourses that are inseparable from their ability to function convincingly as an investment pitch. In turn telling us little about possible socio-material futures because investment dynamics drive trajectories towards realising financial returns not promised social and ethical outcomes. There is a pressing need to involve voices beyond those of advocates and other immediately interested parties, and to develop critical and alternative narratives around these technologies. Otherwise, our own academic incentives to produce novel research creates the risk that scholarship becomes trapped in chasing only what is presently attractive within dynamics of financial speculation on innovations.