The Economization of Life

introduction | bottlEs and curvEsA camera captures a bottle at three points in time.It is filled with Drosophila, also known as fruit flies, an organism that is born, reproduces, and dies in a flicker.In the first photo, the sparsely populated bottle, rich in food, finds generations of happy fruit flies reproducing and living long lives.In the second snapshot, the busy fruit flies multiply rapidly, sharply increasing their numbers until, in the third image of the bottle, the fruit flies are so numerous the container can no longer support them, a point in time when death rises, birth declines, and population growth stagnates.The bottle becomes a container of mass death.Looking at images of this jar today, I want to reach back, pluck open the lid, and release the fruit flies to other fates.Or I could take responsibility for feeding the flies, bred as dependent laboratory creatures by the scientific practices I care so much about.Or better yet I could smash the bottle, breaking the illusion that it is the container that conditions how the flies live or die.I want to imagine other ways of understanding aggregate life that do not demand a contained existence that ends in extermination.What would it take to smash the container?This book is a history of two aggregate forms of life being modeled in this bottle of fruit flies: population and economy.Together population and economy have rearranged worlds over the twentieth century.New ways of valuing of life have been tied to their fates.Population and economy have been built into the architectures of nation-states where practices of quantification have helped to install economy as our collective environment, as our bottle, as our surround.How does capitalism know and dream its own conditions through numbers and data?I hope that this book will leave readers feeling and thinking differently about population and economy as adequate analytic containers for assembling life toward other futures.Population became a new kind of experimental concern in the work of Raymond Pearl, the prominent and prolific American biologist who claimed that his 1920s experiments with fruit flies in bottles captured a law