Alisa Tsybina, Firat Baysöz, Clemencia Labin, Oliver Ross, Jeona Zoleta, Stefan Panhans, Michael Buthe

The concept of the parasite extends far beyond biological nature. It describes power and culture. Conquests achieved not through violence but through appropriation. Ideas that inscribe themselves into existing systems and transform them from within.³ Technologies that grow on established infrastructures until the old can no longer return. Entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Marc Andreessen enter political networks. They combine technological visions with ideological programs. They promise efficiency and progress while pushing back the state and expanding private structures. Markets and algorithms replace regulation. Technology becomes the guiding principle.⁴ What, in this logic, would paradise be? Not an original garden but a condition after disruption. A new order built upon the remnants of the old. A system that feeds on its host yet forces it into another form. For those who shape it, it becomes a site of greatest freedom. For the host, it may be a space of loss. The parasite’s paradise is always ambivalent. It lives off what it transforms, and it transforms what it lives off. It can flourish or collapse. The line between utopia and dystopia cuts right through the middle and today it is visible on the shiny surface of Silicon Valley.⁵
(Melike Bilir)

1. Michel Serres, The Parasite, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007 [orig. French 1980], p. 15. Serres develops the parasite as a figure that alters structures through disturbance rather than outright destruction.

2. Ibid., p. 15. “The parasite never lives alone.” Serres emphasizes that the parasite always exists in dependence on a host while simultaneously transforming it.

3. Cary Wolfe, What is Posthumanism?, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010, pp. 78–95. Wolfe reads the parasite as a model for cultural and medial transformation.

4. Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, New York: HarperCollins, 2015, pp. 324–356. Max Chafkin, The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power, New York: Penguin Press, 2021, pp. 210–243. Both works analyze the entanglement of technological entrepreneurship with political power.

5. Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006, pp. 135–182. Turner shows how Silicon Valley merges technological innovation with ideology and economic interests.