Beware Of Parasites
I’ve known about parasites longer than I’ve studied them.
Not the kind you learn about in biology class. Not the ones with tentacles or Latin names. I’m talking about the kind you can see without a microscope. The kind that take what they need, leave behind what’s broken, and move on without a trace.
When I was growing up, there was an old coal breaker a few football fields from our house in northeastern Pennsylvania. By then, it wasn’t running anymore. It stood silent, rusted through, its windows broken, its purpose long since fulfilled. Or maybe just abandoned. The trains didn’t come anymore. The coal was gone. But the story was still there—how this place once sorted and crushed and sent the region’s wealth away, piece by piece, to somewhere else.
It had been owned by a man who didn’t live nearby. He didn’t have to. He had workers like my grandfather, who went underground day after day, ten to twelve hours at a time, six days a week, until his body gave out. The breaker closed. The mines shut down. But what lingered wasn’t just the memory of hard work. It was the aftermath. Poisoned soil. Empty storefronts. Families that stayed even after the purpose was gone. What remained wasn’t a community shaped by industry, but one hollowed out by it.
None of it required violence or force. Just distance and money. The kind of disconnection that lets one side keep taking while the other quietly falls apart.
I saw it happen again in my own lifetime. A businessman in our area started dumping junked cars along a creek bed. When that venture was successful, he opened a landfill. Before long, trash from New York and New Jersey was being hauled in by the truckload, dumped into the same valleys and woods where we used to play. It wasn’t loud. It wasn’t fast. But it followed the same quiet hunger I’d seen before. Take what you can while no one’s looking. Leave the mess, the smell, the residue for someone else.
So now, when I observe the transformation quietly unfolding around us—the way our attention is harvested, our choices shaped, our systems and institutions subtly reorganized—I don’t see something new.
I see something familiar.
In the natural world, parasites rarely announce themselves. They do not arrive with fanfare or malice. They are efficient, evolved, and invisible, feeding off a host while pretending to be part of its body. A tick does not knock. It attaches. A parasitic wasp lays eggs inside a caterpillar, whose body nourishes the larvae even as they consume it from within. Nature is full of these arrangements. Elegant, grotesque, and brutally effective.
But parasites don’t just live in the jungle or in petri dishes.
Many now live in Silicon Valley.
Not everyone in tech, of course. But there is a growing subset—a parasite class—that feeds on the systems we rely on without contributing to their health. They build platforms that exploit our attention, extract our data, and monetize our relationships. They claim to serve the user while quietly rearranging the ecosystem to serve themselves.
And like all successful parasites, they hide in plain sight.
The biologist Richard Dawkins once observed that the most effective parasites are not the ones that kill their hosts, but the ones that can control them. There are fungi that make ants climb to their deaths, worms that manipulate a fish’s behavior to make it easier to catch, and viruses that hijack a cell’s machinery to reproduce themselves.
In human terms, that control doesn’t come through force. It comes through frictionless design—a well-timed notification, a feature that nudges rather than commands. It comes from knowing what we’ll click before we do.
The most effective tech parasites don’t make you do anything. They simply make it easy to do what serves them. And hard to stop.
What makes this dangerous is not the technology itself, but the ideology behind it.
People like Peter Thiel, Curtis Yarvin, Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, and Mark Zuckerberg do not see themselves as parasites. They see themselves as visionaries. Builders. Realists. They will tell you that systems must be broken to be rebuilt. That the future belongs to those with the will to seize it. That democratic slow-walking is no match for exponential speed.
And that’s what makes them so effective.
Parasites, after all, don’t set out to kill the host. But they can. Especially when the host has no defenses.
In biology, hosts are not helpless. Evolution has gifted them with tools: barriers, immune systems, symbiotic allies, and the ability to adapt fast.
We need the same.
Our first barrier must be legal—laws that define what can be taken from us, what can be done to us, and by whom. In nature, the cell wall keeps the organism intact. In society, that job falls to the law. We don’t need more innovation; we need more accountability.
We desperately need attorneys who understand that algorithms can be as dangerous as collapsing bridges. When a structure fails and people get hurt, we hold engineers responsible. But when a platform bankrupts a family or radicalizes a teenager, we let it slide. That has to change. Lawyers are not just defenders of justice. They are the immune system. Without them, the host—all of us—doesn’t stand a chance. (I hope they understand this).
The second line of defense is awareness—a kind of civic immune system. The public needs to understand what’s happening, to recognize manipulation as manipulation. Education isn’t just about coding; it’s about decoding—the ability to see the agenda beneath the interface.
And then we must co-evolve.
Nature doesn’t just fight parasites. It outsmarts them. Hosts develop resistance. They form alliances. They get faster, more flexible, more selective. The healthiest ecosystems aren’t parasite-free. They’re resilient. They know how to keep exploitation from becoming extinction.
The irony is this: many of the technologists we now fear were once seen as symbiotic geniuses. They offered us something we needed—connection, convenience, a way to feel seen. But somewhere along the way, the relationship changed. The connection became addiction. The convenience became surveillance. And being seen became being sold.
This is not a story about villains. (Well, not entirely). It’s a story about imbalance.
Parasites are a natural part of every system. But when the host no longer recognizes the threat, when it mistakes the parasite for a partner, collapse is not far behind.
In biology, there’s a name for what happens when the parasite kills the host.
It’s called a dead end.
In human systems, we still have a choice. We can adapt.
Or we can keep feeding the thing that’s eating us.