Fossil Poetry #6: DNA
Hello from London (Sophie) and Beijing (Yi-Ling). We’re back after a bit of a hiatus—it was winter!—and here to meditate on “DNA,” both the metaphor and the genetic material. Special thanks to Fossil Poetry reader Rebecca Hu for the suggestion.
SH: People love to talk about what’s in a “company’s DNA,” as though that’s an actual thing. There’s even a Wikipedia page for “Corporate DNA,” which helpfully explains that’s it’s business jargon for a company’s organizational culture. Some businesspeople have even apparently chosen to extend the metaphor, equating things like “company structure” and “decision rights” with the bases of DNA. (Adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine, in case it doesn’t roll off the tongue).
Corporate metaphors are almost always bad, but this one seems particularly pernicious. Very few things in life are predetermined, but DNA is one of them; it’s not entirely immutable, but it mostly stays the same. It carries instructions for our cells that we take with us from before birth to our eventual graves. Our DNA encodes a large portion of our futures and we don’t, at the moment, have any say in the matter. To equate features of a company—its ideology, its practices, its management structure—to DNA is to imply that there is something hard-wired about any of those things. It suggests, subtly and dangerously, that’s there’s something predetermined about corporations or their cultures.
The idea that a company has a DNA filters, directly or indirectly, into the cultures of harassment, misogyny, and racism, which were long believed to be entrenched in almost every industry. The concept of a “corporate DNA” gives us a sense that it was all predetermined, that nothing could have changed it. Uber? One might say it has toxic masculinity in its DNA. Only that isn’t true; it isn’t true at all.
I have always struggled with the concept of “toxic cultures” more generally. They certainly exist, and there are reason why it can be useful to think in those broad terms. But talking about the “culture” of a workplace, or a school, or a fraternity, makes its problems seem both more nebulous and more entrenched than they actually are. Companies have cultures because of the people who work at them, not because of something encoded into them. It might be useful to abandon some of our conversation about “company culture” and it would certainly be useful to abandon the idea that anything is predestined by corporate DNA.
YL: I am a Hufflepuff. For a while, I thought that I was a Ravenclaw but I took a test on the Pottermore website — thrice — and each time it told me otherwise. Just own it, my friend Ellen told me, be a proud Puff. To double-check this result, I took a more rigorous test (an x-y graph devised by a dear friend, see attached) which sorts you into a Hogwarts house according to a much more rigorous metric. It yielded the same results; I was still a Puff.
You see, I love the sorting hat. I love the Myers Briggs test (I’m an ENFJ.) I love asking people to choose a “super-objective” — a term from theatre that refers to a character’s core motivations, Power, Freedom, Love or Legacy. (I’m a Love.) I love spending hours, chin in hand, sorting every human that I know into broad-sweeping (and yes, I know, reductive) categories, of which, like the bases of DNA— C, G, A and T — there always seem to be four. In other words, I love getting to the essence of who we are, taking apart the building blocks of what makes me, me and you, you and us, us.
So obviously, I also get a kick out of entertainment genetics. A few months ago, charmed by an advertisement for 23Mofang, a Chinese genetic testing company, I decided to order a test off Taobao. A white, dish-sized package arrived at my doorstep. I spat into a vial, shipped my saliva off to a lab in Chengdu, and two weeks later, checked my phone.
The results were displayed on one slick smartphone app: I learned stuff about my health (risk levels of various diseases like gout and high cholesterol,) my ancestral origins (apparently, I’m 8% Korean) and my dietary constraints (apparently, I flush when I drink alcohol, surprise!) But I also learned things I didn’t even know were encoded in my DNA — like the fact that I have a “tendency for altruism,” and “high-episodic memory.” (Cue: eye-rolls from skeptical scientist friends.)
But take off your skepticism hats for a moment, and imagine a genetic test that could sort you into a Hogwarts House. Like Harry spat into a vial, and 23&4Quarters told him that he was 92% Gryph and 8% Slyth? What if my Puffness was not a narrative that I told myself but a quantifiable metric, encoded in my DNA? Two months ago, a Chinese scientist CRISPR-edited the HIV gene out of two newborn babies. What if there were a world in which he could’ve edited my Puff-gene and replaced it with a Slytherin one? How far are we from that world, really?
Reading and Writing:
SH: I wrote about net art for the New York Times, nostalgia and technology for The New Yorker (featuring some old selfies), and a beautiful show at SFMOMA for The Economist. For the new UK-based publication Tortoise, I did a long feature on urban exploring (climbing up buildings) and the criminalization of public space. I also wrote a few mini-meditations for Popula: on the faces of Google Street View, the genre of the California photograph, how we tell weather stories in the face of climate change, and Narragansett, the beer of New England. I read Henry Green’s novel “Party Going,” which I couldn’t recommend more highly and this extremely good piece on what will happen to meat in England after Brexit.
YL: Trekked to a contemporary art museum under a sand dune and wrote this review for the Economist, wrote this feature for the Guardian on the cultural revival of the Northeastern Chinese “Rustbelt city” of Harbin, and consumed a lot of Sino-Russian food, which yielded this profile and listicle for Goldthread. Mulled on the Chinese internet’s resemblance to a Bonsai garden in this column for Technode. Devoured Sally Rooney’s “Conversations with Friends,” and stressed over the messiness of all interpersonal relationships and Kai Fu Lee’s “AI Superpowers.”