Microbial Biofeudalism

The Reclassification of Microbial Life as Infrastructure (Part Two of a Three-Part Series)

This post is Part Two of a Three-Part series; see also:

• Part One: Reformatting Earth: the Biotech Coup

• Part Three: The Planetary Bio-Surveillance Grid

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“Pesticide Liability Shield” provisions have been passed in two U.S. states, and legislation is being rushed through seven others. This shield provides indemnity for companies who create agricultural treatments against claims of damage from their products.

But this is not a defensive move, so much as it one positioning for a roll-out of synthetic biology. And, viewed in light also of global microbiome governance efforts, it reveals that biotechnology is being reclassified as critical infrastructure.

This is a significant realization. Let’s talk about it.

Pesticide Liability Shield Legislation

The “North Carolina Farm Act of 2025” included a little-discussed provision that was actually drafted by Ag/Pharmaceutical giant Bayer. At first glance, it would appear to be Bayer’s effort to ensure they never again need to pay out $11 billion for claims (as they have for Glyphosate/Roundup). The language eliminates “failure-to-warn” claims, stating that labeling any product registered with the EPA as required is sufficient to have zero liability in the future, providing complete immunity from future lawsuits.

North Carolina is not alone. In fact, in April 2024, Bayer launched the “Modern Ag Alliance,” a nationwide coalition of more than 100 agricultural organizations (including state farm bureaus) to push similar legislation across the U.S. So far, 11 have actually introduced legislation that would achieve this liability protection, and two have already passed.

But Bayer has long ago turned its eye from chemicals to synthetic biology. In fact, they launched a $100M joint venture with Ginkgo Biotech to accelerate the creation of genetically engineered microbes. What Bayer’s legislation accomplishes is not merely legal cover for their chemical products, but preparatory protection for the rollout of this new class of biotech products: genetically engineered microbes.

We ARE the Microbiome

It’s worth first making this explicit: the microbiome IS life on Earth. One cannot separate the two. As we pass through the birth canal and enter the world, we inherit from our mothers a rich mix of microbes in a process called microbial seeding. These organisms go on to colonize our skin, the entire GI tract, our lungs: each becomes its own special colony with a function that is critical to human health.

We live in symbiotic harmony with these microscopic organisms. In fact, while an adult human is comprised of ~30 trillion human cells, we host ~39 trillion bacteria. We are more microbiome than human, having co-evolved for millions of years with this wonderful bacterial life support system.

To replace these microbes with synthetic biology is to hijack the operating system of life itself.

One bad splice, or unintended side-effect, and the life support system breaks. This is extinction-level tinkering. No wonder they need legal immunity.

Microbes as “Critical Infrastructure”

When DARPA spun off its “health-focused” branch, ARPA-H (Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health) in 2022, the founding language was quite clear: the agency was to spearhead projects “critical to national resilience and competitiveness.”

When Trump, on day two of his administration, stood by Sam Altman and Larry Ellison, announcing a half a trillion dollars would go to create new super data centers as part of investing in “America’s AI Infrastructure” — Trump’s words.

The subtext here from the administration is that AI/biotechnology is no longer seen as “products,” but as a critical infrastructure, one required for America to be a major geopolitical and economic player moving forward — and one which merits the same legal protections as other parts of our infrastructure, like phone companies and airlines.

DOD’s Tellus Initiative

The unspoken part here is equally rich: although Altman and Ellison spoke of detecting cancer or personalizing vaccines — all through AI/biotech — and as Bayer succeeds at inserting liability protection for Biotech products into state farm bills, furiously citing the need to “protect farmers,” the DoD’s work gives us a much better sense of what is actually going on here. In 2023 the DoD launched an initiative called Tellus, announced in 2023. In their own words:

DARPA’s new Tellus program will explore the development of an interactive, platform methodology for the rapid design of microbe-based sense-and-respond devices for monitoring DOD-relevant environments.

Specifically, DARPA seeks to establish the range of chemical and physical signals that microbial devices can detect, environmental conditions they can tolerate, and types of output signals that can be generated.

To this end, Tellus will focus on developing the methodology to enable the rapid design of agile, robust, reliable, and durable microbial sensors for environmental monitoring.

— via darpa.mil

This reinforces the sense we had in Part One that these GE microbes aren’t actually about crops or soil health at all. These “sensing and reporting microbes” are the mechanism for biosurveillance state described by the technocrats (“Tell Us!”).

And deploying them — without regard for soil, plant, or human health (indeed with indemnity from damages!) — is a priority.

World Microbiome Partnership

The World Microbiome Partnership (WMP) is an international forum founded in 2023 with funding from the EU Horizon 2020 to create a governance structure for microbiome manipulation across agriculture, medicine, and climate policy.

WMP participants include the WHO, the CDC, NIH, and biotech firms. They promote the idea that microbial communities must be governed like other strategic assets.

The WMP supports the One Health and Planetary Health agendas (the same ones behind both the EAT-Lancet commissions Planetary Health Diet and the UN's Food Systems Summit that promises to eliminate animal agriculture). The connections one can draw are innumerable between this WMP and, for example, the Gates Foundation’s heavily funded microbiome research, vaccine platforms, and food system interventions.

The key thing to understand is that the technocrats are reframing the microbiome as critical infrastructure: more like an energy grid or communication network than a sacred, living ecosystem.

As biotech companies deploy platforms to build GMO microbes to do everything from manufacturing to biomarkers to surveillance — the WMP seeks control of these novel systems, positioning microbial life as programmable, governable...and ultimately weaponizable.

This is Happening Now

One thing I want to stress: this is not some sustainable agenda for 2050 or a “someday mission to Mars.”

The liability shield for biotech, the global governance structure for microbes, the deployment of GE microbes to 15 million acres of US farmland, the Palantir-linked platform for new microbes as the DoD funds microbiome-based surveillance — all of this is happening now.

And it’s not a secret. This is why Yuval Noah Harari openly declares:

“We are acquiring abilities that have always been thought to be divine abilities—in particular, the ability to create life. And we can do with that whatever we want.”

If their efforts are to be stopped, now is the time to do so.

Summary

We are witnessing the global implementation of a framework that legislates, regulates, and funds the replacement of natural microbiology with a synthetic, engineered, mass-produced, programmable infrastructure. This isn’t theory or future tripping; it’s happening now.

The human microbiome, inherited from birth to birth across generations of our ancestors, will be irrecoverably lost, as Bayer’s CRISPR creations dominate. Once replaced, the microbes with whom we have co-evolved for millions of years cannot be restored. In a very real sense, a part of ourselves is being erased.

What exactly does this new biological infrastructure do? In Part Three, we’ll expose how “sensing and reporting microbes” are being deployed that will seize control over the natural microbiome, creating a planetary biosurveilance system observing and reporting from farm to shelf, from gut to wastewater, and beyond.

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