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Ştefan Tiron

Goodreads Author

Born

Vălenii de Munte

Website

https://tironstefan.wordpress.com/

Twitter

TironStefan

Genre

Science Fiction, Philosophy, Science

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Chen Qiufan, Tricia Sullivan, Tade Thompson, Joseph Needham, Karl Marx ...more

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December 2016

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https://www.goodreads.com/tironstefan

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Writing on Goodreads reviews is tied up with being one more unwaged worker on the vast digital fiefdom walled garden of Amazon Corp exploitation and enshitification. Of course countless women and immigrants have been there before, yet countless automatic Amazon turks and bots labor there now. It is not just any company, but the company that has reshaped the face of corporate America, with an owner that controls the press (Washington Post) and represents monopoly capitalism with its ruthless tactic like none other (check the new book by Dana Mattioli - The Everything War: Amazon’s Ruthless Quest to Own the World and Remake Corporate Power).

So when you or others buy or upload books on Kindle know for sure that there's a nasty corporation emp Writing on Goodreads reviews is tied up with being one more unwaged worker on the vast digital fiefdom walled garden of Amazon Corp exploitation and enshitification. Of course countless women and immigrants have been there before, yet countless automatic Amazon turks and bots labor there now. It is not just any company, but the company that has reshaped the face of corporate America, with an owner that controls the press (Washington Post) and represents monopoly capitalism with its ruthless tactic like none other (check the new book by Dana Mattioli - The Everything War: Amazon’s Ruthless Quest to Own the World and Remake Corporate Power).

So when you or others buy or upload books on Kindle know for sure that there's a nasty corporation employing a free, expendable and underpaid workforce ruled by space billionaires combating any unionization attempts. Like Standard Oil in its day Amazon (now 30 years) it is involved in everything we touch and care for, including politics, and health care, and its influence is pervasive, altough anti-trust suits are starting to take aim at it. Everyone on Goodreads is practically an unpaid, unofficial, unwaged Amazon worker force. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. The rank-and-file Amazon badly paid workers include drivers, warehouse workers, copyrighters, and tech personnel (Amazon is also the biggest provider of webservices in the world) as well as many others (including third-party vendors).

Goodreads website always seemed more like a graveyard than a working collaboration. Amazon company is adept at avoiding any responsibility and culpability, preferring to blame third-parties, sub-contractors or racialized others - for its own mistakes, exploitative tactics & bad decisions. Not to mention all the unsold goods languishing at Amazon gigantic warehouses. Yes, tons and tons of unused unsold Amazon goods are being regularly junked and wasted for nothing (as hidden camera footage demonstrates).

The capitalist labor division ensures that Amazon workers do not write or publish their own fiction (and specifically speculative fiction about a world After Amazon). So, if you are interested in Amazon Workers who write fiction - here is "Workers as Futurist" a project that assists rank-and-file Amazon workers to write short speculative fiction: https://reimaginingvalue.ca/waf/#about and a podcast https://soundcloud.com/reimaginevalue... with various guests (Steven Shaviro, Cory Doctorow, Syrus Marcus Ware. Alessandro Delfanti. Robin DG Kelley, David A. Robertson and more). ...more

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If you could travel to any fictional book world, where would you go and what would you do there?

Ştefan Tiron I would rewrite this question - in order to respond to the where/what - i will try and respond to how a fictional world (the world of The Brazen Head …moreI would rewrite this question - in order to respond to the where/what - i will try and respond to how a fictional world (the world of The Brazen Head by JC Powys or the Synarche universe by Elizabeth Bear) will not let me indifferent to the one I am already in and out (what we and some of these fictions or fabulations would call our 'base reality').
Once I feel compelled to enter, join or travel into a fictional universe - i would try and take all the rules of that universe at face value.

Let's say it is a universe of post-scarcity, and yet one where you still have to justify resources (like the Synarche future of Ancestral Night /White Space #1 novel by E. Bear). Even in a world of plenty one should not expect irresponsible use or complete entitlement of anything given. Our world is becoming relentlessly unlivable, not only suffering the historical depredations of a rich minority but also a world where a majority has to excuse itself for existing or pushed at extremes just to not be labeled as a freeloader, a sub-optimal or a non-competitive asset.
Because of this it is common knowledge that nowadays there is this incredible pressure - to self-evaluate, to self-manage and self-report when making various job applications, applying for any social benefits or when pitching for a funding application.
To put this in perspective I would have to go back to pre-1989 Romania. Part of my childhood and early adulthood was spent under a more or less planned rationing system (Romanian state 'food rationing' program of the 1980s or what many have labeled -enforced hunger). I agree that 'rationing' - or the introduction of a rational plan of calorie intake requirements for a whole country based on nutritional studies and job descriptions (worker, driver, dancer, etc), is something that already feels quite SF dystopian.
Yet, I consider it an important, formative part of my early life, and a historically valuable if quite a painful attempt to somehow deal with limited resources in a scientifically organized way. Life back then also involved a lot of community service jobs - a lot of organized recycling school activities (paper etc). However, you might wanna label this, it is still a fact that a lot was done under voluntary or community service principles. I was the last generation before military service became voluntary and I somehow only got to the draft call twice before being enlisted. Everybody dreaded military service, but it was mostly lots of agricultural work and again mostly relief for other industrial tasks. Rationing - if happening under very specific local historical conditions, still offers us a way to see where abuse starts or what loops/backdoors might appear along the way, or what type of communal life will arise under such circumstances.

A world where resources are artificially being made scarce and yet still manages a much
better sort of resource redistribution than today's made me acutely aware (in retrospect) of how one can embark (even if top-down, under hated rule-by-experts i.e. advised and planned by head nutritionists) on a sort of 'lifeboat' experience, without being part of a spaceship with limited oxygen, fuel, food resources.
The ultra-recycling autocratic-autarchy of N Ceausescu's final years acted like a variant of what might be still lie in our collectively shared future (if we manage to avoid the all-out exterminist one, pace Peter Frase). Clearly, those were harsh times, and there were those state apparatchiks who had access (in spite of rationing) to proteins and chosen morsels of meat, and yes, there was cueing standing for eggs, mineral water etc (parents really desperate to find a piece of chicken liver treat). Yes, it was about eating only non-sellable export parts (legs of chickens, heads of pigs etc). There were electricity blackouts & heat was mostly just not available in the winter. At the same time (without embellishing the situation) we had the basics (sugar, oil etc) in more or less equal distribution throughout the year, one could say on a much more egalitarian basis (i.e. nobody was dying of hunger and everybody had access to public health care, culture, and education even if censorship was prevalent and scarcity felt universal).
It was a spaceship where most of the resources got exported and where a mad leader (propped by the Democratic West against Moscow) had full access to everything while the majority had to pay for international debt accrued by the Socialist aim to join the developed world on its own terms and thus was not able to extricate itself from the world economic system. In a way, this was another name for 'austerity' politics imposed by both international monetary organisations (what would happen to Greece, Argentina) in the name of debt-free future generations wishful thinking, with a growing disgruntled and dissatisfied mass growing in the back of it.

Today we have another situation - a larger and larger part of the prosperous West and Global North is pushed by self-management, looming climate crisis, and widespread pollution to adopt self-rationing tactics as a requirement to everyone (not talking here of the lavish elite offshore accounts 10%ers that basically have extracted themselves from all calculus). We are seeing more and more sectors joining the vast majority that had always to try and find excuses for asking for or for using resources. One is even pushed today to over-perform, to adopt a double standard and over-evaluate a contribution in order to convince or to ritually justify the expenditure or its ecologic or social value.

Every ounce and every bit of outside support, or budget, no matter how meager or inconsequential to the whole economy gets to be translated into results, impact ratios, stats, and required added social or ecological value or relevance.
Being a 'homo aeconomicus' has pushed us into a daily 'lifeboat' routine story situation - where one always feels wasting the little resources available onboard for everyone. In itself, the requirement to not waste or to justify any expenditure is definitely not bad, especially when all previous generations seem to have overspent themselves and used much of the future's share of fuel, air, water while keeping on poisoning & so basically impoverishing the choices of all generations to come. So in a way our current artificially construed 'lifeboat' mired in environmental collapse, rising inequality & impeding exterminism, our collective critical moment seems much bleaker than the planned -rationing- years.
At the same time, any lifeboat situation can blindfold us to the larger aspects or larger picture that gets obscured or left out. Here comes Synarche by Elizabeth Bear - I think and various other decisional conundrums of the 'Trolley problem' (as highlighted by Steven Shaviro in an essay via SF examples).
Trolley problems present us with finite options, with a sort of closed ethical circuit where one HAS to sacrifice somebody onboard in order to ensure a relatively safe trip or landing for the majority. But in these fabulations, when confronted with other-than-human minds or sentience decision making that is non-human (or let's say syster species) machinic, robotic - exposes non-choices that we take as given. These stories may hold other possibilities open - various radically different ways of dealing with such problems that seem sealed or strictly binary.

In the light of what crew-members of the fictional Singer spaceship experience(White Space #1) on their scavenger trips at the margins of the galaxy, they are often left out without much choice. I feel, following their adventures, stimulated and compelled to work around rather than accept as given such requirements of rationing while at the same time questioning the ethical imperative of many 'lifeboat narratives'. Such stories (reflecting or extrapolated on real-life situations) keep us locked in outcomes that restrict the possibility for other choices, they take a portion of reality as given while at the same time negating any other account of the whole situation. Cory Doctorow tracks these 'lifeboat' SF stories via Heinlein stories - the devious way pre-determined situations and pre-conditions seem to dictate false final solutions.
These setups are just setups. When we enter such setups and accept their terms we are pushed towards brutal - no escape - tunnel visions.
What does it take not abandon the ship, not to abandon the crew, not to go choose a scapegoat for the situation you think you are in? Not to eject yourself or some other member of your party? To not sacrifice - or to not feel impelled by the situation to take harsh decisions against the most vulnerable, like so much of current institutionalized social Darwinist - austerity politics of racialized inequalities and non-distribution dictates.

Returning back from fiction to our base reality is not a one-way road. Same as lifeboat situations, we are never left (unchanged) on reentry. Let's consider here the effects of Powys 1956 profligate -The Brazen Head, a High Middle Ages romance had on me in this sense. This book made Corona crisis and the pandemic at least for parts of the lockdown seem like an after-effect of reading Powys, I swear.
So strong was the way he is twisting the limits of perception and our very worldly expectations. I am not exaggerating when saying that Powys did change the way I previously thought about thinking or sensing, or thought I knew what non-philosophical literature was able to do.
One does not need big words, even fancy metaphors. One needs a willing partner in crime- one has nothing else to loose but the fetters of one's imaginative flights. After this reading I am not sure any longer what spirit, soul etc is or what this knowledge can do or cannot do. Powys uses this sort of promiscuous vertigo of materially sensous details; a gust of air, a color of a textile material to unsettle or produce the most incredible causal chains.
This causal efficacy of seemingly inconsequential events - trigger causal chains that are not just your usual sun goes up the sun goes down or the Moon gravity pulling bodies, tidal action but the slightest strange impressions, not even a real happening, but an impression, a slight disposition of something at a certain angle at a certain time - that allow for something completely unexpected to take place. Thus, a completely fanciful, even imaginary or unreal sensation can have tremendous mostly invisible or inaccesibile (to others) effects. In a sense he lays bare causal efficacy at every turn. These agential profligacies of the world is certainly impossible to trace and yet Powys does it.
The 'different' environment of the 1200 Middle Ages makes it maybe more acceptable to us, but it all feels very much informed retrospectively and anachronically by our current - trans-species awareness, feed-forward (Hansen) apperception (Whitehead), new materialist (although even this new 'vibrant materialism' feels quite prude in comparison).
His dirty sensualist descriptions refuse any type of reductionism or abstinence. It is multifariousness unbound, laughing aloud at any attempt to trace, to reduce, discipline or summarize and conclude. His characters are also incongruously magnificent, all human and non human alike in a sense bundles of dispositions, tendencies, extremities.
Gigantic elemental Tatar-Jewish giants that have no philosophical remorse or inhibitions whatsoever, that you would instantly fall in love with. He can also dispense with a lot of intentionality, human or otherwise, of phenomenological "aboutness", since it is mostly not about something but getting carried away, losing and loosening previous certainties, attitudes, criteria, admitting that both agency and intractability abounds, especially where one does not look for it. Appearance has in his universe this strong ontological claim on reality and each page is an introduction to a heightened world sensibility.
Powys does never stop at the limits or borders of settled things or of the human comprehension of such things. Human consciousness does not dare do any inanimate/animate patrolling - because it always risks to kidnap you where impossibilities abound. In fact ot is a late comer that follows ij the wake of other impulses prone to particular howling winds. Mind you he is not a climate determinist like those that correlate a fixed racist hierarchy of humans with meteorological pseudo-anthropology, where lazy ones get born in the balmy South, and their lot is always under-development because the sun provides.
Nothing of that sort. He is keen on catching exactly what cannot be included into such fixations and deterministic taxonomic ordering, since he follows the individuation of something apparently completely irretrievable, alluding to a partiality of a certain gush of air flowing through a particular architecture of a certain tower at a certain point during the night, that maybe actually has a tonality and a mood signature of its own, a certain atmospheric fluence and influence that is not easily placeable nor having well-expected predictable effects on whoever might come in its way spontaneously. (less)

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Ştefan Tiron Together with others working on a future collective- curatorial project/exhibition about alternate world building, what is it like living trough treme…moreTogether with others working on a future collective- curatorial project/exhibition about alternate world building, what is it like living trough tremendous change, mapping dynamics of SF Fandom uncommons, mass appeal of SF in ex-socialist countries, however fragmentary and incomplete - sociotechnical knowledges, pulp futurisms, trash culture and non linear SF chronologies...(less)

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Ştefan Tiron’s books

Average rating: 3.9 · 41 ratings · 4 reviews · 3 distinct works

	hotel cosmos: poezie românească SF by V. Leac (Editor), Anca Bucur (Contributor), Sebastian Big (Contributor) 3.91 avg rating — 23 ratings — published 2019	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	BLACK HYPERBOX by Alina Popa (editor), Florin Flueraş (editor), Ioana Gheorghiu 3.75 avg rating — 12 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Cosmic Drift & Temporal Divergence 4.17 avg rating — 6 ratings — published 2016 — 2 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

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Ştefan Tiron's Blog: hivemindfullness

Capcanele Timpului/Traps of Time by Vladimir Colin 1972

One way to read Traps of Time - after all these years (the book was published in 1972) is by confronting the consequences of the imaginary worlds and worldbuilding and world-wrecking as such. In retrospect, for better or for worse, the whole realist Socialist interlude, its larger than life figures, its planned economy, it's Prometheanism and it's developmental state - feels quite unreal, imperman Read more of this blog post »

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Published on June 25, 2024 16:29 • Tags: economics, imaginary, science-fiction, speculative, thinking, utopia, world-breaking, world-building

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Ştefan is Currently Reading

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Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice: A Treatise, Critique, and Call to Action (Manifesto)

by J.F. Martel (Goodreads Author)

bookshelves: currently-reading, theory-philosophy-fabulation, metaphysics, occulture, poetry, naturphilosophie

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Ştefan Tiron said: " "Art as manifested in myth is a way for human beings to share and celebrate their unknowing"~J.F. Martel

I was curious about J.F. Martel's book/manifesto for a while, at least since I started listening years ago to the excellent Weird Studies podcast ...more "

15 hours, 56 min ago · see review

Ştefan Tiron is currently reading

Monștri pe mal

by Robert Gion (Goodreads Author)

bookshelves: currently-reading, biology, aesthetics, horrorism-weird

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Jul 10, 2026 03:44AM

Ştefan Tiron is currently reading

How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology

by Philip Ball

bookshelves: biology, currently-reading, chemistry, evolutionary-theory, favorites, history, inorganic, microbiological-revolution, microbiome, multispecies, natural-history, reviewed-books, sts

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Ştefan Tiron said: " Molecular Machines or Fuzzy Bundles?

My bad, I never made the connection between Philip Ball, who wrote Invisible: The Dangerous Allure of the Unseen and the author of How Life Works: A User's Guide to the New Biology. What is Philip Ball up to in one Molecular Machines or Fuzzy Bundles?

My bad, I never made the connection between Philip Ball, who wrote Invisible: The Dangerous Allure of the Unseen and the author of How Life Works: A User's Guide to the New Biology. What is Philip Ball up to in one of the best popular biology books to be published in years? Many things, but chief among those is to avenge in force and bring back the zest for renewed wild conceptual forging typical of the Theoretical Biology Club (the name attached by Joseph Needham to a menagerie of ground-breaking scientists amply discussed by Erik L Peterson in The Life Organic: The Theoretical Biology Club and the Roots of Epigenetics).
Ball's brings an important qualification to the adagio that science is not JUST the process of studying what the world is like: "Science tends to be the study of what we CAN study".
We need powerful microscopes to discover an invisible world of microorganisms and unicelular lifeforms, we needed to manipulate cell to express GFP bioluminescence to track and trace heithertou unseen cellular mechanisms (https://press.asimov.com/articles/gfp), we needed to develop skills to be able to grow tissues and culture cells outside the body ex vivo (Culturing Life: How Cells Became Technologies in order to re-define life or what is life as such. In a sense, Ball ambitiously asks both us readers passionate about science and scientists themselves to match and conceptually upgrade according to the latest scientific discoveries, and not jump to the intellectually lazy conclusion that it's all a black box, that everything is so complex that we cannot or should not revise what we know. When I started naming the Cambridge Theoretical Biology Club,
I did not mean that How Life Works is yet another book about epigenetics or another tome that tries to chip away at the authority (and industrial biotech heft) of genocentric biology. Genes/DNA research is here to stay, and that is that; we'd better learn to live with it (as a biologist acquaintance once told me when I brought up the epigenetics question). On a meta-theoretical level, Philip Ball asks us not just to keep up with cutting-edge discoveries but also with the conceptual and philosophical fallout from that quantitative mass, something that I think Alfred North Whitehead also tried his whole life.
Some of the stuff may instantly raise alarm bells for hardcore Darwinists (or readers of Richard Dawkins), but everyone else, I think, will read it with consummate interest and passion. Trained as a chemist, Ball is maybe best equipped to pay attention to the affordances, the dangers of metaphor ("organic", "blueprint" etc), 70 years or more of geneticization, and plead for causal powers, multi-level, multidirectional and hierarchical organization, canalization, combinatorial logic, self-organizational dynamic landscapes, agency and teleological, modularity, complexity and redundancy, robustness, etc. - and more. The list he hits us with at the beginning of the book (then follows a mind-boggling array of illustrative concrete examples) is not new.
We may be familiar with it from the heady days of systems theory, complexity theory, Santa Fe Institute, and even such pioneers as Alexander Bogdanov (Alexander Bogdanov and the Origins of Systems Thinking in Russia) or such pioneers as D'Arcy Thompson (On Growth and Form) and 1990s counter currents How the Leopard Changed Its Spots : The Evolution of Complexity). What is new is a plethora of other examples including advances in cryo-EM visualisation techniques and their impact on long-standing questions regarding the complexity of molecular "machinery" (https://press.asimov.com/articles/fla...). And here is my point in seeing Philip Ball as an inheritor of the organicists (as 3rd excluded term in the longstanding debate that separated biological theoreticians into either wooey vitalists or deterministic cog-and-lever mechanicists). That group didn't feel at ease in neither group. That said, he is not shy of mechanicistic interpretations, WHENEVER they seem unavoidable (like the afore-mentioned bacterial flagellar motor as a rotary motor), nevertheless, he tries to warn us that applying such macro machinic metaphors is not as straightforward at the molecular scale where "viscosity, friction, rigidity, and adhesion are very different".
That was what initially attracted me to this book (there is so many interesting new natural history and biology books out there that is eminently difficult to satisfy all our thirst for knowledge of a year's best off science books), is the plunge in the specificieties and conditions of this molecular realm, where Ball seems to be at ease. There is some kind of -potentiality- going on here at micro level - Philip Ball even quotes Michael Levin (the xenobot and anthrobot experimenter who is also fond of theorizing anew about biological processes) and Josh Bongard that we may see want to see machines in a different way and life as "machine as they could be". We would need to revise not just how we understand things work at molecular, cellular or multiscalar levels but also revise our notion of machinery and maybe even understand that we are tapping into a very narrow range of possible machines. The underlying lesson is that we can take inspiration for new kinds of devices, that are much more tolerant to noise, faults and errors that do not depend just on redundancy (extra circuitry etc).

Metazoan Exceptionalism?

Another big and maybe overlooked corrective brought by this important book is the fact that because of historical (one might even say capitalist - or techncapitalist) conditions, human and metazoan cells (cells of multicellular organisms) have be both theoretically and practically treated as equivalents to the bacterial, unicellular realm. Do not get me wrong - I actually highly treasure this microbiological revolution, of being able to engineer and produce at scale medicine using microbes and High-Throughput Sequencing has enabled us to discover the hidden microbial diversity at work everywhere. But Philip Ball may have something here- he is bringing back some form of "metazoan exceptionalism" (a bit like not dismissing mechanistic explanations or metaphors but pushing for more complicate ones), showing that indeed multicellular organism are at the molecular, cellular level quite different from the vast majority of life on earth (which is unicellular and will still be), no matter how medical trials and biotech have re-engineered multicellular cells to act like unicellular ones. In a sense, one might say that we have accomplished what that other darling of biotech and brewery has been doing evolutionarily, and multiplying in our vats or grain - the yeast that is an ex multicellular that has become a unicellular organism. To take just one such example that Ball gives in How is Life in one chapter the example of the so-called interst in the "dark proteome" (human proteome=totality of all proteins that make up our bodies), those 50% or 70% proteins discovered only via the help of cryo-EM microscopy, basically all those pesky molecules that do not crystalize and thus are harder to study, but also that are NOT commited to a particular shape. This disordered segment of the cellular proteomic makeup is btw 35% and 50%, much more than in the case of ubiquitous but single-celled bacteria (just 5% of the total of proteins). These orderly interlocking partnerships, these specific binding events that are the usual matter of biological illustration, seem be contradicted by this class of highly unspecifically bonding molecules that might show some specificity for a particular substrate but not particularly so.

My final comment, and you will have to discover on you own the multiplicity and diversity of examples provided in this phenomenal tour de force book, no related to Philip Ball's book, but as a warning of the entire Hayekian praise of disorder or disruptor "Out of Control" misuse of disorder as the socio-economic ordering principle using biological examples. Since the 1990s, mostly in technolibertarian circles there was immense inspiration and admiration of the self-organizing principles of biology Cyberlibertarianism: The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology, resulting in what media and digital theorist Alexander Galloway in a review of Golumbia's critical work "politics of disorder" https://www.boundary2.org/2024/12/ale.... ...more "

Jan 24, 2026 01:28AM · see review

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"Art as manifested in myth is a way for human beings to share and celebrate their unknowing"~J.F. Martel I was curious about J.F. Martel's book/manifesto for a while, at least since I started listening years ago to the excellent Weird Studies podcast ...more
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Ştefan Tiron wants to read The Trickster and the Paranormal by Hansen, George P (August 20, 2001) Paperback by George P. Hansen	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
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Ştefan’s Quotes

“What was it like to live amidst such machines, to be familiar with them, to have them shape one's earliest intuitions about machinery: how it works, what it does, how it compares to living creatures?”
― Jessica Riskin, The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick

tags: agency, animate, automaton, history, lively, mechanical, mechanistic, water-theatre

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“And the weird weird thing about this story of Angela's Ring was that it didn't even have a point to it, no happy ending, no lesson to be learnt.
It was like one person's cry of pain, echoing out on and on and on trough the generations, even after that person was long long dead.”
― Chris Beckett, Dark Eden

tags: affect, cargo-cult, critique-of-pure-feeling, diaspora-aesthetics, fable, feeling, gravitational-waves, lost-tribes, reverberates, star-lost, time-drift

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“You are the first to arrive alive in fifty years. You are a puissant man. Arrival of the fittest is the doctrine of the Holy Darwin. Most scientific.”
― Alfred Bester

tags: cargo-cult, darwinian, survivalist-sects, the-stars-my-destination

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“Stopping in the 1970s, "Hybridity" as the fifth and final chapter is less of an end point than a certain realization of the artifice, plasticity, and technology that Wells and Loeb envisioned as the future of the human relationship to living matter as well as of the "catastrophic" situation that Georges Canghuilhem (following Kurt Goldstein) saw in life subjected to the milieu of the laboratory.”
― Hannah Landecker, Culturing Life: How Cells Became Technologies

tags: biology, biomedical, biotechnological-object, cell-tissues, georges-canghuilhem, history, hybrid-thinking, kurt-goldstein, laboratory-anthropology, life-sciences, science, science-and-technology-studies, sts

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“Just as layoffs were making a mockery of the team concept, employees were urged to find camaraderie and a sense of collective purpose at the microlevel of the "team". And the less teamlike the overall organization became with the threat of continuous downsizing, the more management insisted on individual devotion to these largely fictional units.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America

tags: business, capitalism, corporations, corporatism, downsizing, flexploitation, jobseeking, motivational

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