Archive for September, 2011
On the industrialisation and commodification of science
“But science itself has been industrialized and commodified. It is increasingly organized into large research centers with intricate division of labor. Research operates with costly complex primary instruments, but secondary instruments (models and theories) seem to fall into a myriad of
disconnected micro-theories. The objects of science appear in the form of separate ‘problems’ or ‘tasks’ given from outside. Above all, science is tendentially reduced to its immediate products or results possessing exchange value in the ‘science market’ and being essentially known or fixed in advance (as ‘customer’s orders’ or promises from the researchers).”Yrjö Engeström (1987) in Learning by Expanding
On integrity of the individual
“When I was born, humanity was 95 per cent illiterate. Since I’ve been born, the population has doubled and that total population is now 65 per cent literate. That’s a gain of 130-fold of the literacy. When humanity is primarily illiterate, it needs leaders to understand and get the information and deal with it. When we are at the point where the majority of humans them-selves are literate, able to get the information, we’re in an entirely new relationship to Universe. We are at the point where the integrity of the individual counts and not what the political leadership or the religious leadership says to do.”
R. Buckminster Fuller, Excerpt from an interview on February 26, 1983
