How our smartphones colonized us by learning from nature’s greatest masters: biological parasites
In the humid depths of tropical forests, a strange phenomenon unfolds at leaf level. An ant inexplicably leaves its colony, abandons the trail traced by its peers, and ventures alone, as if guided by a silent force. It climbs along a stem, stops at a precise height, neither too low nor too high, where temperature and humidity are ideal. Then it freezes, opens its mandibles, and bites into a leaf. It will never move again.
A few hours later, a whitish filament pierces through its head, unfolds toward the light, and scatters invisible spores. The ant is dead, but its body continues to act for something other than itself. The fungus inhabiting it, Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, has seized control of its nervous system to complete its own cycle. It didn’t kill out of cruelty; it simply used the living as a vehicle, transforming will into instrument.
What’s terrifying about parasitism isn’t the violence, but the precision of cohabitation. The parasite doesn’t destroy its host immediately; it keeps it alive just long enough to feed on it. It knows the limits of its power, adjusts, waits. In nature, the boundary between symbiosis and domination is often blurred, shifting, almost diplomatic. Each adapts to the other until finding a fragile equilibrium where one’s survival depends on the other’s docility.
Throughout time, parasitism has operated from one living organism to another. The biological world has built itself on these unequal exchanges, made of cunning, invasions, forced cohabitations. But today, a far stranger mutation seems to be occurring, silent and global—an unprecedented form of contamination where the non-living becomes the vector of the living.
What if our digital tools had become carriers of this new parasitism? We long believed that technology would be our extension, that it would amplify our capabilities. It has, no doubt. But it has also become a favorable environment for other forms of existence, invisible and persistent. It feeds on our gazes, our clicks, our most ordinary emotions. It doesn’t seek our death; it wants our attention, that vital resource fueling its economy.
Like the biological parasite, the digital object insinuates itself through the promise of mutual benefit. It makes itself indispensable, repairs our forgetfulness, simplifies our gestures, anticipates our needs. It becomes tool, friend, confidant. Over time, it takes root, weaving an invisible network of dependencies around our habits. And we continue feeding it, convinced we are its masters.
The true genius of parasitism isn’t enslaving through force, but obtaining the host’s cooperation. The fungus needs the ant to climb toward light; the smartphone needs us to exist, update itself, spread. There’s no longer attack, no invasion—only a gentle mutual adaptation, so intimate we no longer know where one ends and the other begins.
Humanity spent millennia domesticating fire, mastering beasts, taming nature. And now, without realizing it, it has welcomed into itself a new organism, born of its own ingenuity. An organism that, like any accomplished parasite, doesn’t seek to annihilate us but to colonize us from within, slowly, patiently, until the fusion seems natural.
For the most perfect parasite isn’t the one hiding in shadows—it’s the one convincing its host it can no longer live without it.
The gentle infiltration
For many people, from the moment they wake, it all begins with this tiny, banal gesture. The thumb slides across the warm surface of the smartphone, the screen lights up as if by magic, and a world opens. Barely awake, before even saying hello, already the reflex reaches out, by habit, toward the luminous rectangle on the nightstand. An innocuous, reassuring gesture.
This is how the parasite finds its passage. It enters without breaking in, carried by our own hands. The ant in the forest followed an impulse it didn’t understand. We follow notifications. The result is the same: a behavior that seems to come from us, but whose true source has shifted elsewhere.
Biological parasitism often begins with a phase of silent installation. The fungus doesn’t take control immediately; it observes, adapts, embraces its host’s functions before hijacking them. Our digital tools proceed the same way. They adjust to our uses, learn our rhythms, anticipate our needs. They don’t impose themselves; they slip in. It’s not an invasion—it’s a successful graft.
The smartphone amplifies this slide. Its form, made to fit in the hand, matches our gestures and reflexes. Its small size focuses the gaze, narrows the visual field, isolates from the surrounding world. The rest of reality gently fades, not through constraint, but through forgetting.
The parasite no longer needs to wait for an opening—we offer it with every contact. From then on, it no longer merely occupies our attention; it installs itself in the very rhythm of our bodies.
Little by little, our gestures change meaning. What served to communicate becomes waiting for response; what aimed at information becomes quest for distraction. Attention shrinks, fragmented, consumed by the flow. The parasite doesn’t need violence; it knows that constant occupation suffices to disarm vigilance. It doesn’t seek to prevent us from thinking; it merely fills the interstices where thought might be born.
Already in 2004, Patrick Le Lay, then president of TF1, had bluntly stated about television: “What we sell to Coca-Cola is available human brain time.” It was all already said!
Today, we think we watch screens, but they’re the ones observing us, calculating the value of our attention. This commerce of the gaze has been perfected until becoming invisible, integrated into our most daily gestures. It’s no longer technology installing itself in us—it’s a logic of capture. It wants neither blood nor flesh, only time. It thrives on our scattered minutes, on those fragments of attention we abandon without resistance, convinced they’re worthless.
And yet, it was in these interstices that our freedom resided.
Training the host
The parasite no longer needs to infiltrate; it now teaches its host how to cooperate. Through a skillful blend of behavioral psychology and sensory seduction, we’ve learned to respond as required, to extend our hand even before it’s requested.
Each vibration, each sound signal, each little red circle on the screen is a reward. Dopamine releases with each notification like a tiny chemical caress. We believe we choose to respond, but it’s our brain activating before us, trained by the promise of immediate satisfaction. It’s elementary mechanics: intermittent reward—the kind that doesn’t always come but often enough to maintain anticipation. This is how we train laboratory rats, casino gamblers, and now users.
But this conditioning isn’t limited to the screen. It infiltrates silently into our way of existing. Now, an idea’s value is measured by the number of “likes” it generates. We learn to confuse recognition with visibility, thought with the instant. We accept calibrating ourselves according to what the system values, as if our own desire should adjust to its algorithms.
La Boétie, in the sixteenth century, had sensed this without knowing screens. He called it voluntary servitude: the art of making dependence lovable. Not through constraint, but through gentleness. Not through fear, but through reward. Everyone becomes the docile relay of a system that no longer even needs to impose its authority.
The biological parasite, too, often ends up modifying its host’s behavior to better ensure its survival. Certain wasps, after laying eggs in a caterpillar, inject a substance that inhibits its flight. The caterpillar becomes the protector of what devours it. Similarly, we’ve learned to defend the tools that exploit us, to justify them, to promote them, as if they were the very condition of our freedom.
Training is complete when the host convinces itself it acts of its own free will. But this training doesn’t only affect our behaviors. It operates a deeper transformation, a mutation redefining what it means to be alive.
The mutation of the living
In nature, the parasite modifies the organism it inhabits. It no longer merely diverts it; it integrates it into its own cycle. Over time, boundaries blur until we no longer know quite well who serves whom.
We’re living through this same process today, but at the scale of consciousness. Our tools no longer accompany us; we accompany them. We feed them, update them, offer them our data, our emotions, our habits, our faces. We’ve become their biological environment, their biotope.
This mutation isn’t merely technological—it’s anthropological. It redefines the living from the non-living, as if inert matter had found a new evolutionary path, using humans as relay. Artificial intelligence, recommendation algorithms, conversational interfaces aren’t creatures in the biological sense, but they behave as such: they reproduce, adapt, learn, colonize new environments.
They exist only through our activity, yet end up determining our gestures. Each click, each query, each word typed becomes a fragment of code extending them. We are the virus carriers, the unwitting artisans of their proliferation. It’s no longer the living creating technique—it’s technique self-replicating through the living.
This reversal is unprecedented in evolutionary history. Until now, life had always propagated by relying on matter. Now, it’s matter propagating by relying on life.
When parasite and host finally merge, there’s no longer domination, only continuity. One acts through the other. Consciousness becomes a channel, will a reflex. The human executes without orders, responds without being solicited, adjusts to what the system expects, convinced of acting freely.
Thus the self slowly fades, not through destruction but through dilution. Critical thought, once fruit of slowness and distance, finds no space to germinate. It withers in the flow, suffocated by the promise of “everything, right now.” The individual fragments into data, traces, profiles; it becomes transparent to itself yet opaque to any genuine reflection.
The parallel between biological parasitism and digital exploitation isn’t just imagery. It reveals mechanisms threatening our autonomy. Unlike zombified ants, we still have consciousness of our situation: this lucidity remains our chance for resistance. The choice still belongs to us: becoming masters rather than hosts, using our tools rather than being used by them. This is perhaps our era’s major challenge: taming our digital creatures before they tame us.
What if we chose the living?
In nature, parasitism is never a dead end. It stabilizes, transforms, sometimes finds a new equilibrium where both beings coexist without annihilating each other. One learns to moderate its voracity, the other to strengthen its resistance. This is how life endures—not in purity, but in adaptation.
There’s still time, and we still have the choice: accept an evolution toward a diminished, controlled, predictable humanity, or resist to preserve what makes us singular. Our capacity for deep attention, our decisional autonomy, our unpredictable creativity, our free will: so many treasures that millions of years of evolution bequeathed us, and that a few decades of digital revolution risk squandering.
It’s not about rejecting technology, but reclaiming our sovereignty over it. Becoming masters rather than hosts. Using these tools rather than being used by them. This is perhaps our era’s major challenge: taming our digital creatures before they definitively tame us.
As La Boétie sensed five centuries ago, servitude holds only through our consent. We remain free to say no, to put down the device, to preserve that interior space where human dignity is forged. That freedom, however fragile, no algorithm can take from us. Unless we cede it ourselves, one click after another, until we no longer remember we had it.
The history of the living has never been one of submission, but of reinvention. We’ve let matter infiltrate our thoughts, colonize our attention, shape our reflexes, but nothing prevents us from reversing the movement. Not by rejecting technology, but by reintegrating it into a conscious framework, redefining what it should serve: the living, not the inverse.
Yet there must remain within us a place where consciousness can withdraw, observe, question. This place, minuscule but essential, is called critical thinking. It’s not a shield or a weapon, but an interior gesture: the one consisting of not responding immediately, of doubting before obeying, of looking before believing. It’s this gesture that separates human from machine, living from mechanism.
For if matter has learned to propagate through life, it falls to us, perhaps, to teach life how to resist matter. Not through force, but through lucidity. Not through fear, but through consciousness.
Then perhaps the parasite will finally find its equilibrium, and we with it.