The ownership of natural systems has been the subject of wars for millennia. But these are mere territorial disputes. Ownership of designed ecosystems is a matter of intellectual property rights. Designing an ecosystem that can sustain human life, one in which circularity is maintained, where all waste products are eternally converted into goods, is a significant intellectual challenge that will require a great deal of investment. That investment needs to be protected from freeloaders who would just copy what others have done without making any investment in developing the knowledge to do it. We have already seen this with some of the controversy around GM crops, such as farmers being sued for ‘copying’ seed.
But how might we see this ownership, as inhabitants of an ecocyborg? First, your living space would definitely be leased or rented. This is true for many people anyway, so at face value, no major implications except for those who are used to thinking in terms of home ownership. However, leasehold payments, which are used to keep the grounds attractive, are being exploited by some developers as a revenue stream. You might find you need to be able to continually generate economic value in order to sustain your rent. Life-as-a-Service, which currently is more lifestyle-as-a-service, could become rather more literal, especially if we develop cyborg functionality that allows you to be put into suspended animation, or otherwise shut down and rebooted later, whenever your skills and knowledge are worth paying for.
Building on LaaS as an idea, besides being able to sustain yourself, there is the question of your offspring. If you decide you want children, will you violate the licence terms of your habitation? Perhaps you will need to pay for a habitation upgrade in order to remain on the right side of your contract. The ecocyborg will also need to be able to sustain this additional life. It only has a certain designed carrying capacity, and if this is breached, there will be consequences for other inhabitants. To avoid any awkwardness, maybe the drinking water or food contains contraceptives, and these are switched off once you have the finances in place to support your habitation upgrade.
Third, there would need to be careful agreements about the ways in which you could personalize your space. Perhaps there would be predefined options you would choose from; or maybe some OEM certification process confirming interoperability with your ecocyborg. We already have planning law (in the UK at least) that imposes aesthetic as well as functional constraints on what you can do with your property. But gated communities take things further, with restrictions on plants you can grow, colours you can paint your house, pets you can have, and even leaving your garage door open.
Fourth, there might be constraints on who you have to visit. Our bodies interact constantly with the environment, exchanging chemicals, genetic material and viruses. For example, the food we eat and our gut flora entail a direct exchange of genetic material with our environment. People might even need some sort of modification to their genome to ensure compatibility with the ecocyborg they inhabit, or medication. There could be a need for visitors from ecocyborgs made by different manufacturers than yours to undergo a lengthy decontamination and quarantine process after visiting you.
It is the exchange of material from one ecocyborg to another that I imagine could be the most problematic. Concern about invasive species already imposes constraints on what you can take from one country to another. But rather than being an inconvenience (to humans — for native flora and fauna invasive species are an existential threat) as is the case currently, invasive materials in an ecocyborg could threaten its human life support systems: Did the designers of the ecocyborg consider the possibility of this material being brought into their system? If so, in what volume?
Industries would of course also be interested in knowing each others’ secrets and designs. This is where the exchange of material is so potentially dangerous to intellectual property. A visitor from an ecocyborg on the other side of the world could take material home and allow their ecocyborg manufacturer access to knowledge developed and owned by your manufacturer; and vice versa of course. You might then find there were constraints on where you could go as an inhabitant of your chosen ecocyborg. The ecocyborg might be designed to take steps to defend itself, using enzymes, nanobots, and terminator genes, but these too would be desirable intellectual property for rival ecocyborg manufacturers to try and get hold of.
In short, ecocyborgs are corporate spaces, owned and managed by their manufacturers. Inhabitants of ecocyborgs cannot be the owners in the traditional sense we have today of owning the property you live in and having the right to do what you like with it. In ecocyborgs, property is theft … from the manufacturers.
The Ecocyborg Manifesto 