A pair of Australian professors is arguing that, evolutionarily speaking, our smartphones meet all the criteria of a parasite, and we should start treating them like one.
Writing in The Conversation, in a piece adapted from a paper published in the philosophical journal Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Associate Professor of Philosophy Rachael L. Brown and Professor of Evolution Rob Brooks explain that in nature, parasites like head lice or fleas benefit from their host (us) while offering nothing in return but discomfort and disease. In contrast, gut bacteria offer a mutually beneficial relationship.
For a while, smartphones seemed like the mutualistic kind of companion: they got our data and we got convenience. But things have changed. The relationship, they argue, is now one-sided. Smartphones are feeding off of us, giving us very little in return other than FOMO that keeps us coming back.
The companies that make these smartphones are designing them to feed off of our time, attention, and especially our private data. Their business model depends on it. They couldn’t survive without it. They have to keep you scrolling, doom-scrolling, watching, and hate-watching, almost exclusively for their benefit, and you can do almost nothing to fight against it because they’ve made you dependent on it.
It’s not like lice, where you can kill ’em all with shampoo and a fine-tooth comb. Smartphone apps are engineered to be addictive. You think you’re using them, but they’re using you to harvest data using every nasty psychological trick in the book, and all to sell your input to advertisers, who then use that data to develop whole new ways of exploiting you.
The researchers offer a solution, in the form of fish. Specifically, the cleaner wrasse fish of the Great Barrier Reef. Larger fish allow the cleaner wrasse to nibble at their bodies to remove parasites and dead skin cells. But, every once in a while, the cleaner wrasse takes a slightly bigger bite than they should, tipping the scales of the relationship from mutually beneficial to parasitic. The cleaner wrasse has to be punished for biting off more than they should chew, a punishment that comes in the form of being chased off by the larger fish to give them a little fright.
In the human world, this translates to holding these companies accountable through government regulation that bans exploitative features and data mining, all to restore balance to a relationship that has tipped way more into parasitic than mutually beneficial.
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