Conor here: As Lenin wrote, “the rentier state is a state of parasitic, decaying capitalism, and this circumstance cannot fail to influence all the socio-political conditions of the countries concerned…” Maybe nothing has influenced it more than the most successful parasite of the modern age.
By Rachael L. Brown. She is the Director of the Centre for Philosophy of the Sciences and an Associate Professor at the School of Philosophy in the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University. She also has podcast on the philosophy of science. Also by Rob Brooks, an evolutionary biologist who thinks and writes about how evolved minds and cultures interact with the 21st-century world. Originally published at The Conversation.
Head lice, fleas and tapeworms have been humanity’s companions throughout our evolutionary history. Yet, the greatest parasite of the modern age is no blood-sucking invertebrate. It is sleek, glass-fronted and addictive by design. Its host? Every human on Earth with a wifi signal.
Far from being benign tools, smartphones parasitise our time, our attention and our personal information, all in the interests of technology companies and their advertisers.
In a new article in the Australasian Journal of Philosophy, we argue smartphones pose unique societal risks, which come into sharp focus when viewed through the lens of parasitism.
What, Exactly, Is a Parasite?
Evolutionary biologists define a parasite as a species that benefits from a close relationship with another species – its host – while the host bears a cost.
The head louse, for example, is entirely dependent on our own species for its survival. They only eat human blood, and if they become dislodged from their host, they survive only briefly unless they are fortunate enough to fall onto another human scalp. In return for our blood, head lice give us nothing but a nasty itch; that’s the cost.
Smartphones have radically changed our lives. From navigating cities to managing chronic health diseases such as diabetes, these pocket-sized bits of tech make our lives easier. So much so that most of us are rarely without them.
Yet, despite their benefits, many of us are hostage to our phones and slaves to the endless scroll, unable to fully disconnect. Phone users are paying the price with a lack of sleep, weaker offline relationships and mood disorders.
From Mutualism to Parasitism
Not all close species relationships are parasitic. Many organisms that live on or inside us are beneficial.
Consider the bacteria in the digestive tracts of animals. They can only survive and reproduce in the gut of their host species, feeding on nutrients passing through. But they provide benefits to the host, including improved immunity and better digestion. These win-win associations are called mutualisms.
The human-smartphone association began as a mutualism. The technology proved useful to humans for staying in touch, navigating via maps and finding useful information.
Philosophers have spoken of this not in terms of mutualism, but rather as phones being an extension of the human mind, like notebooks, maps and other tools.
From these benign origins, however, we argue the relationship has become parasitic. Such a change is not uncommon in nature; a mutualist can evolve to become a parasite, or vice versa.
Smartphones as Parasites
As smartphones have become near-indispensible, some of the most popular apps they offer have come to serve the interests of the app-making companies and their advertisers more faithfully than those of their human users.
These apps are designed to nudge our behaviour to keep us scrolling, clicking on advertising and simmering in perpetual outrage.
The data on our scrolling behaviour is used to further that exploitation. Your phone only cares about your personal fitness goals or desire to spend more quality time with your kids to the extent that it uses this information to tailor itself to better capture your attention.
So, it can be useful to think of users and their phones as akin to hosts and their parasites – at least some of the time.
While this realisation is interesting in and of itself, the benefit of viewing smartphones through the evolutionary lens of parasitism comes into its own when considering where the relationship might head next – and how we could thwart these high-tech parasites.
Where Policing Comes In
On the Great Barrier Reef, bluestreak cleaner wrasse establish “cleaning stations” where larger fish allow the wrasse to feed on dead skin, loose scales and invertebrate parasites living in their gills. This relationship is a classic mutualism – the larger fish lose costly parasites and the cleaner wrasse get fed.
A bluestreak cleaner wrasse at work cleaning the mouth of a goatfish. Wayne and Pam Osborn/iNaturalist, CC BY-NC
Sometimes the cleaner wrasse “cheat” and nip their hosts, tipping the scale from mutualism to parasitism. The fish being cleaned may punish offenders by chasing them away or withholding further visits. In this, the reef fish exhibit something evolutionary biologists see as important to keeping mutualisms in balance: policing.
Could we adequately police our exploitation by smartphones and restore a net-beneficial relationship?
Evolution shows that two things are key: an ability to detect exploitation when it occurs, and the capacity to respond (typically by withdrawing service to the parasite).
A Difficult Battle
In the case of the smartphone, we can’t easily detect the exploitation. Tech companies that design the various features and algorithms to keep you picking up your phone aren’t advertising this behaviour.
But even if you’re aware of the exploitative nature of smartphone apps, responding is also more difficult than simply putting the phone down.
Many of us have become reliant on smartphones for everyday tasks. Rather than remembering facts, we offload the task to digital devices – for some people, this can change their cognition and memory.
We depend on having a camera for capturing life events or even just recording where we parked the car. This both enhances and limits our memory of events.
Governments and companies have only further cemented our dependence on our phones, by moving their service delivery online via mobile apps. Once we pick up the phone to access our bank accounts or access government services, we’ve lost the battle.
How then can users redress the imbalanced relationship with their phones, turning the parasitic relationship back to a mutualistic one?
Our analysis suggests individual choice can’t reliably get users there. We are individually outgunned by the massive information advantage tech companies hold in the host-parasite arms race.
The Australian government’s under-age social media ban is an example of the kind of collective action required to limit what these parasites can legally do. To win the battle, we will also need restrictions on app features known to be addictive, and on the collection and sale of our personal data.
Dr. Who has several cautionary characters at various levels of machine enhanced evolution:
Cybermen – who are simply kidnapped human brains implanted into more or less anthropomorphized robot bodies for troopification.
Daleks – who are a similarly enhanced alien species except complete, evolutionarily withered bodies encased in clunky but space travel/conquest capable tanks.
And Oodkind – an originally gentle telepathic, hive-minded alien species whose hand-carried “hindbrain” is too often replaced with a “translation sphere” to facilitate enslavement.
We are well on our way to becoming daleks and cybermen I guess scifi cautionary tales weren’t enough to prevent absorbing technology into our bodies. Will people start allowing computerized implants as well and just accept the technology as an evolutionary step or reject it as dangerous and toxic both physically and emotionally. The sci fi universe of Cyberpunk has a term for computerized insanity called cyberpsychosis but I don’t think we need body implants to reach that level of tech induced psychosis we have been there for a long time.
Are we addicted to the phones or the thing at the other end of the phone which is social interaction? In that sense the analogy is less parasite and more a big bag of candy that people can’t stop eating–whether it’s while walking down the street or driving their cars. The real enemy of the phones would be solitude.
Meanwhile as a parasitic business model it’s hard for me to see what most of those sorts of businesses get out of it unless you are a phone company or a maker of high markup hardware like Apple. As a delivery system for advertising it’s small and hard to type on and you are better off with our now giant televisions as a platform. I’m a gadget guy and don’t carry my phone as a rule but take my small laptop almost everywhere. It runs Linux which puts me in charge and not the walled garden jailer. Android is a bit more open than Apple and you can use those phones without the Play Store at all since apps are available in other ways.
And as a piece of pocket hardware with GPS, camera, even barometers, phones are rather amazing. It’s a mixed bag. The abuse, including by people standing next to me in the grocery story, is on us.
Thanks, Carolinian. I also recently changed to Linux Mint and will never go back to MS Windows. It’s so fast, so intuitive, and does everything I want it to do.
I have a ‘dumb phone’ and carry it just for emergencies in the Faraday-shielded pocket of my purse. No one knows the number except for my husband. Why do I need to go online when I’m out of the house? I guess I just don’t get it. I was an early adopter of computers in the 1980’s, but I saw what was happening and opted out of smart this and smart that.
It’s a good question, and falls into a fuzzy zone the authors also use. They use ‘addict-‘ twice in an essay framed as evolution. So, first, the phones are not parasites in a Darwinian sense, they can’t reproduce and there no direct descent with modification. There’s a line that could take them as drones from a hive, but it’s a better fit to go with them as extended phenotypes, which expand into niche construction.
Staying Darwinian, the question is the effect on reproduction of the user. The blithe answer is usage correlates (on average) with decreased reproduction rates. However, Apple phone users have used the incompatibility twixt systems as a selection function for higher wealth prospects. But winding down that path get complex in terms of variation between the groups, and truth is it’s a lot more like an addictive process. And the answer on that is, it’s not the social on the other end, people have spent days+ playing games with no one else. It can do social, but alternate uses may be more internally reinforced, like a flute that’s also an opium pipe.
As near to an answer I can get is that what we’re seeing is actually a state of pre-collapse. Tainter:
> To the extent that collapse is due to declining marginal returns on investment in complexity, it is an economizing process. It occurs when it becomes necessary to restore the marginal return on organizational
investment to a more favorable level. To a population that is receiving little return on the cost of supporting complexity, the loss of that complexity brings economic, and perhaps administrative, gains.
and
> Keep in mind that complexity emerges to solve problems. In regard to the economic crisis, part of the problem was insufficient complexity. Remember that complexity includes both differentiation of structure and increase in organization. The financial business had over the last few years innovated new structures—new fiscal products such as derivatives. This was not met by an increase in organization, which would have involved regulation and government oversight.
Regulating access for children would be an increase in organization, but that would contradict the institutional investment in users (more data better). As unlikely as regulating derivatives, or access to porn.
So the parasites are ubiquitous in the environment. At an individual level the best I got is scripture and prayer, meditation and the sutras. Critical thinking wastes too much time and energy in these conditions. A person has to first notice what their mind is doing (‘we can’t easily detect the exploitation.’) And also decrease the desire to be exploited. The last part can be really tough.
As a “gadget guy” myself I have to agree. I never even owned a so called “smart phone” until the late 2010’s. And never had a flip phone until around the mid-aughts.
The real parasites are those at the other end of the phone and applications, the phone is just the tool they use to insert themselves into your life.
As for my use of the phone itself, I’m not big on “apps”. I have very few, no games, and I find most of them helpful. Yeah, I probably get tracked, but in today’s world here in the US, I probably could be tracked through myriad ways even without carrying the phone, which I rarely do anyway, unless I’m on a long trip. Then GPS and Libby (my audiobook application) and radio.garden (my general internet radio application) and Podbean (my podcast application – hat tip to Lambert) are very pleasant to have around. And, for now, I’m willing to pay the price in being tracked.
Also, as Carolinian mentions, in today’s world where long term friends and relatives are spread all over the country, if not the world, chat – immediate social interaction – can a very pleasant and important add-on.
Oh yes, and Signal (no explanation needed).
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Side note: as a retired Linux Systems Administrator (who now wears a watch instead of a cellphone :), and home user almost exclusively, I’m well aware of the whole open source movement and many of the open source projects that have sprung up around the android (a linux) operating system. One of the better ones for android phones is an application called NetGuard. It gives the user control over every running application on your phone in determining which ones connect to the network, tower and wifi, and which ones can not. So, for example, the occasional times I do have my cellphone with me (cell tower access) and always at home (wifi), Chrome, among others, is 100% blocked (just one of many bloatwares that cellphone suppliers put on my phone that I cannot delete).
There are also a few distributions, depending on your phone model/mfg, that completely and effectively replace the android operating system giving you complete control over the phone.
I agree with the premise but disagree with the agency. The phones are not the parasites. The data brokers and tech firms are the parasites. The phones are just the way the parasite attaches to the host. There are real people doing this to other humans.
I stopped at a flip phone. I realize not everyone can do this, but it works just fine for me.
Great post, Conor!
I look at the screens and Phones in particular as our modern day Platonian Caves.
I’m a smartphone resister. I use it as little as possible with a “fake” gmail address that’s only used with the phone. (Besides that, I actually don’t use gmail or anything else google)
Still use my old fashioned GPS. I never browse on the web with my phone. If I’m in a waiting room, I’ll play an offline game like backgammon to pass the time.
However, for certain things, you have to use an “app” and you can’t use a desktop computer or the internet from your smartphone to access the service. An example is order pickup. I have to use the “app” to let the store know I’m there for pickup.
I still use a Palm PDA for the things I want a “smart” device to handle. It actually helps me do what I want, not what it wants me to do. I tried paper, but I need something that beeps at me when I have a deadline.
It will stop working in 7 years. It is wild to me that humanity has not come close to replacing even the simple Palm, much less building something more empowering.
Another nice thing about open source projects, tecnical people that feel as you (and I) do also spend time coming up with solutions that actually work very well.
When the time comes that your Palm Pilot no longer functions, solutions like this exist.
My old OnePlus 6T replaced 2 years ago and now wifi only works great as a “palm pilot” using this.