The Cyborg Fish and the management of cod in Canada, Norway and the European Union - How objects become manageable

Robo Fisher	Cyborg Fish	Cybernetic Organisations
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Jahn Petter Johnsen

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Petter Holm
Peter S. Sinclair

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The Cyborgisation of the North Atlantic Fisheries

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Cod fishing in Lofoten

Although natural resources have been exploited since the beginning of humanity, modern resource management is a recent phenomenon. The huge variety in type of resources, adaptations, knowledge systems, institutions, and practices in natural resources exploitation have made it difficult to get the harvest of common property or free-for-all-resources under political and managerial control. The fish as well as the fishers were for all practical purposes unmanageable. From the late 1960s, when it became apparent that important fisheries resources were about to be overexploited, the process to transform fish, people and technologies so as to make them manageable was intensified. In fact an Invisible Revolution (Holm 2001a) started. The Cyborg Fish (Holm 2001b) is a metaphor for the outcome of this process, where complex and heterogeneous networks link together nature, society, technology, science, markets, and policy in new ways and create the Robo fishers, Killing machines, Cyborg Fish (Johnsen et al. 2005) and other creatures. They are all partly artificial products, calculated by different methods, metered out in a variety of units, and used for the regulation of a wide range of processes and at different stages of such processes. The Cyborgs, which in this context signifies cybernetic organisations, link together a wide range of scientific, political, cultural, or technological practices Johnsen 2004. They are constituted by and constitute resource management that we call the Fishing Leviathan. The Fisheries Leviathan has become stronger and more powerful through its alliance with the Cyborg Fish and through the process of cyborgisation in the North Atlantic Fisheries.