The Biggest Parasite

   I think that many of you will agree with me when I say that it seems important, right now, to have a strategy. A strategy for what? It’s not entirely clear. That is what feels so interesting and ominous.
   Sadie Plant describes the situation in 1995 thus: "We mutated to such an extent that we were unrecognizable to ourselves, banding together in units of a kind which, like everything, had been unthinkable before. We found ourselves working as slave components of systems whose scales and complexities we could not comprehend. Were we their parasites? Were they ours? Either way we became components of our own imprisonment. To all intents and purposes, we disappeared."
   I think of data worker Michael Geoffrey Asia's account of working as a chat moderator at outsourcing platforms for Meta and other tech companies in Nairobi: "Every moment of pretense fractured something inside my spirit, and my sense of self. I was losing touch with who I really was, a feeling that has never left me." The full purpose and scope of Michael's role was never made clear to him. He did chat moderation work through a platform known as New Media Services. He suspected that he was both training AI models and impersonating them for human users seeking intimacy in other parts of the world. He did the work at great psychological cost to himself and by extension his wife, writing, "The platform stripped me of my right to say no. I became a complete slave to the system, complying with every command... I was just a proxy, performing someone else’s fantasy."
   Naturally, the essence of Michael’s job was to disappear. He was paid to disappear under the veil of futurism, cutting-edge connection, deep digital love - and his employer surveilled him while he was on the clock to make sure that he was doing so: "Every message I sent was recorded. The platform tracked how fast I replied, which words kept users engaged, and what tone worked best. It felt like the company was collecting more than just labor, they were collecting patterns: how we joked, comforted, or flirted. All that data could easily be reused to build chatbots that sound more human."
   But who is the parasite in this situation - or rather who is not? It’s remarkable that Plant was able to foresee this confusion in the nineties. Is the parasite the data worker pretending to be somebody’s lover? Is the parasite the user exchanging money for connection? Is the parasite New Media Services, advertising attractive hybrid jobs to workers in Nairobi and other parts of the global south? Is the parasite the monopolistic Western tech giant, outsourcing its needs to New Media Services and others? Or, as Plant suggests, is parasitism merely the way that things work under this particular configuration?
   As a younger person, I was transfixed by Dagmar Buchwald's formulation of parasites and their potential in relationship to Ellison’s Invisible Man: "If the binary oppositions are read as proper vs. alien, center vs. margin, white vs. colored, visible vs. invisible, colonizer vs. colonized, the parasite intervenes in that it is both: the seemingly alien which has 'always' been a part of the proper, profits both from center and margin; moreover, it flourishes by oscillating between visibility and invisibility - a master of mimicry, it hides by merging with its environment and becomes only visible by its effects. And, of course, it colonizes the colonizers." But the difficulty with parasitism as a strategy is that it seems to mean and to necessitate not knowing where you stand, hence Michael's torment. Most people don't want to have to pretend to be somebody else in order to survive. Is a parasite ever happy? Is a parasite ever safe?
   I'm aware that there may come a time when each of us is asked to give those up - happiness, safety. Or rather, I'm aware that that time will come again. But, in the moments when they are still possible, what is our strategy?

Notes
Adepegba, C. O. Yoruba Metal Sculpture. Ibadan University Press, Ibadan, 1991.
Asia, Michael Geoffrey. 'The Quiet Cost of Emotional Labor,' edited by Milagros Miceli, Adio Dinika, Krystal Kauffman, Camilla Salim Wagner, and Laurenz Sachenbacher, 2025. (link)
Buchwald, Dagmar. '"Let 'em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open": "Doing the Para-Site" between Chaos and Control in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man.' American Studies, 2000. (link)
Plant, Sadie. Zeros and Ones. Fourth Estate, London, 1995. go back