Are We Now Living in a Parasite Culture?

I don’t like thinking about parasites. My only personal experience occurred at the American Airlines terminal in LaGuardia a few years ago.

I was seated at one of the tables in the Food Court, eating a Dunkin’ chocolate-frosted donut. And I noticed a bit of chocolate stuck to my finger.

I tried wiping it off with a paper napkin. But the chocolate didn’t move.

I tried again—but no luck. The chocolate was clearly stuck to my finger.

That’s when I realized it wasn’t chocolate—it was a nasty tick sucking blood from my hand. Yes, this happened at the Food Court of LaGuardia Terminal B of all places!

Somehow I’d become the meal myself.

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How strange is that? I live in a countrified neighborhood where deer often graze on my front lawn (six of them simultaneously in the video below). But I don’t get a tick until I fly into New York.

I did two things that day.

First, I managed to extract the tic myself (not easy)—I stopped the bleeding and bandaged my finger. Second, I decided to fly into JFK instead of LaGuardia on all future New York trips.

I’ve kept that vow. And I try to forget the incident—especially when eating donuts.

But I’ve been thinking more about parasites recently. That’s because so many cultural institutions now resemble them.

You might even say we live in a society where parasitical behavior is rewarded more than actual creativity.

In the animal kingdom, 10% of known species are parasites. And for most of my lifetime, the same was probably true for the creative economy.

We’ve always had parasites in the culture business. I’m referring to unsavory characters who make a living from plagiarism or piracy or some other scam. Maybe they sell bootleg records. Or peddle hacked Netflix passwords on the dark web. Or forge a Leonardo da Vinci painting.

I’m not naive. I’ve shopped at street markets overseas where vendors peddle fake Nikes, fake Levis, fake Rolexes, fake everything.

Years ago when I did strategy consulting to Fortune 500 clients, we would sometimes devise parasite strategies (that’s exactly what we called them). But we did this simply as a thought exercise—we never actually presented these ideas to clients.

Professional managers disliked these kinds of strategies back then (not anymore, as we shall see below). So we came up with these approaches simply as a way of grasping what others might do to us.

Game theory (for example, the Prisoner’s Dilemma) will teach you many of these. But the basic rules of a parasite strategy are quite simple:

1. You allow (or convince) someone else to make big investments in developing a market—so they cover the cost of innovation, or advertising, or lobbying the government, or setting up distribution, or educating customers, or whatever. But…

2. You invest your energy instead on some way of cutting off these dutiful folks at the last moment—at the point of sale, for example. Hence…

3. You reap the benefits of an opportunity that you did nothing to create.

There are many examples in the real world. An extreme case is a dictator who lets a foreign company build a factory, and then seizes the assets. But if we had time, I could describe a wide range of parasite strategies, many of them quite legal.

The key fact is that large professional businesses rarely engaged in these practices, until quite recently. They were the province of pirates and discounters and boiler room operators.

And the parasites certainly didn’t live in billionaire mansions in Silicon Valley.

“Consider the case of the woman who attracted 713,000 TikTok followers and generated 11 million views for her videos—and got paid $1.85.”

Nowadays, parasite businesses are the largest corporations in the world. Their technologies do many harmful things, but lately they have focused on serving up fake culture, leeching off the creativity of real human artists.

Just take a look at the dominant digital platforms—and consider how little they actually create. But the amount of leeching they do is really quite stunning, especially when compared with the dominant businesses of the past.

• What does Facebook really create? Almost nothing. It relies on 3 billion users to create content (ugh!—their word, not mine), and then monetizes these people and their unpaid labor.

• What does Google really create? Almost nothing. Just look at how it destroys newspapers, while doing zero journalism itself. The comparison with a parasite could hardly be more apt. It feeds off the news, but never adds to it.

  Then look at every one of Alphabet’s other business units, and ask the same question. What’s getting created here by the company itself? Very little—but this enormous business is a genuine innovator in parasitical software and business models, leeching off others so successfully, that it now has a market capitalization of $2 trillion.

• What does Spotify really create? Almost nothing. One person—a single individual—recently redesigned the Spotify user interface from scratch, and came up with something better. But the folks at Spotify don’t worry about their lousy app, because they’re so busy sucking blood from the creative economy, to which they contribute not one whit. Meanwhile, their CEO is now richer than any musician in the history of the world.

• What does TikTok really create? Almost nothing. This company relies on one million creators—none of them are employees. Most of them are working for hopes and dreams. TikTok is run like a Hollywood studio, but without cast, crew, directors, scriptwriters, or any creative talent whatsoever. But that hardly matters when you’re just a parasite living off unwitting hosts.

Consider the case of the woman who attracted 713,000 TikTok followers and generated 11 million views for her videos—and got paid $1.85 over the course of five months.

No that’s not $1.85 million—it’s one buck and eighty-five pennies. You can practically hear the lifeblood getting sucked out of the creator economy.

Listen to the influencer below explain how he generated 60 million views on social media—and his payouts barely covered the cost of the phone he uses to upload his ‘content’.

I’m told that there’s a parasite that hovers around the eyes of cattle—it literally lives off blood, sweat, and tears (like some parody of Churchill). That’s a metaphor for much of the digital economy nowadays.

Even well-paid influencers typically make money elsewhere—on branding deals, or merchandise, or spinoffs. That’s a lot easier than squeezing money from Meta.

Some platforms are more generous than others, but in every instance the parasite gets much richer than the creative talent.

Hence, for the first time in history, the Forbes list of billionaires is filled with individuals who got rich via parasitical business strategies—creating almost nothing, but gorging themselves on the creativity of others.

That’s how you get to the top in the digital age. Instead of US Steel, it’s Us steal. Instead of IBM, it’s IB Robbing U.

But when parasites get too strong, they risk killing their hosts.

There’s a parasite that hovers around the eyes of cattle—it literally lives off blood, sweat, and tears (like some parody of Churchill). That’s a metaphor for much of the digital economy.

Recall that only ten percent of animal species are parasites. What happens if that number grows to 30% or 50% or 70%? That must have catastrophic consequences, no?

This is precisely the situation in the digital culture right now. Google’s success in leeching off newspapers puts newspapers out of business. Musicians earn less and less, even as Spotify makes more and more. Hollywood is collapsing because it can’t compete with free video made by content providers.

It’s no coincidence that these parasite platforms are the same companies investing heavily in AI. They must do this because even they understand that they are killing their hosts.

When the host dies, AI-generated content can replace human creativity. Or—to be blunt about—the host will die because of AI-generated content. And then the web billionaires won’t even need to toss those few shekels at artists.

It’s every parasite’s dream. The host can die, but the leech still lives on!

But there’s one catch. Training AI requires the largest parasitical theft of intellectual property in history.

Everything now gets seized and sucked dry. No pirate in history has pilfered with such ambition and audacity.

• Facebook recently admitted that it scraped every social media post and photo in Australia since 2007—with no disclosure or opting out.

• Nvidia is even bolder, scraping “a human lifetime” of videos every day to train its AI, according to leaked documents.

• AI art generators have already violated billions of copyrights, according to a class action suit.

• Meanwhile AI music company Suno admits in a court filing that it has digested “essentially all music files” available on the web—to create a technology that replaces human musicians.

None of these companies offered this information voluntarily. The admissions came via court hearings, government investigations, leaked documents, and other indirect sources.

Parasites like to operate stealthily. They don’t want you to notice. That’s even a telltale sign of a parasite business—it operates in the dark, without transparency.

But this gets harder and harder as the parasite gets larger and larger.

By comparison, that tick sucking my blood at LaGuardia was a small annoyance. The parasites in the culture are now too big to fit inside the largest airplane hangar.

Can we get rid of them? It won’t be easy. Once they’re attached, they don’t want to let go.

But a good start would be:

1. Full transparency when AI is used, with disclosures required and attached to each work (not hidden in terms and conditions).

2. Financial penalties for businesses that pretend AI works were made by human beings.

3. A ‘Creators Bill of Rights’ which would limit platform exploitation of ‘content providers’ (who, for example, would retain copyright, have rights of termination and appeal, etc.).

4. Payments for the use of copyrighted material in AI training.

5. Opt out as the default, with no AI training allowed unless creators explicitly agree.

6. Fines for platforms that share AI work from users without taking reasonable steps to identify it.

7. Total transparency on how payments to creators are determined (not the vague runaround currently served up).

8. Actual enforcement of the Sherman Antitrust Act (and other anti-tying laws) so that quasi-monopilistic platforms can’t use their dominance in, for example, search or operating systems as a way of enriching other business units.

These are all obvious steps—it’s really just common sense.

Lawmakers could implement these immediately, and voters would overwhelmingly support these protections. The fact that this hasn’t happened already, suggests that our politicians just might be part of the parasite problem themselves.