Are We Now Living in a Parasite Culture?

I think the most obvious examples of this are the Apple and Android app stores.

We know exactly how much money the end user is paying for these, and so unlike the tik-tok video with 800k views we can easily understand their value. We also know Apple/Google are taking is 30% of that value.

It's not just individual creators on social media that are suffering from this but also large companies.

Hmm, not sure if I like all of the examples here. There is genuine value in being a distributor - a single artist doesn’t have the means to push music to all their followers, nor in many cases a following to begin with.

The value of content distribution platforms is thus in logistics: getting the right content to the right people. And on the other hand, people aren’t willing to pay a lot for this.

I think the bigger example of parasite culture comes in the form of individuals. People whose jobs largely work to support the office politicians and their campaigns (HR departments, mid-level managers, etc.)

Then there are actual politicians, each of whom need large staffs to do the work they’ve been hired to do because the processes have been made complex enough to justify the jobs of their staffers. Or the people who think it’s okay to spend a billion dollars on a software platform for public education. Or the people who charge a billion dollars for a public education platform.

The examples are everywhere these days when you look around. It’s hard to find organizations that actively weed out this behaviour. Does anyone have an example of an organization that has bucked this trend?

Not just parasite also just straight fraud. All these services promise a fair transaction but as soon as something goes wrong claim no responsibility. Uber ABB Google none of them accept any responsibility when something goes wrong.

> And then the web billionaires won’t even need to toss those few shekels at artists.

Why say "shekel" here instead of "dollar"? Or any other currency?

Given the context of the article, the choice of words is either extremely poor taste or an antisemitic dogwhistle

He does have another article [0] where he just hand-waves away LF Celine's antisemitism [1], so if I had to guess it's the latter

[0] https://www.honest-broker.com/p/the-most-cynical-novel-ever-...

[1] "The German officer and writer Ernst Jünger stated in his Paris war diaries that Céline told him on 7 December 1941 "of his consternation, his astonishment" that the Germans did not "exterminate" the French Jews." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis-Ferdinand_C%C3%A9line#An...

AI firms seem to be doing a bit of "regulatory entrepreneurship", claiming fair use and/or that copyright claims do not apply, and trying to move quickly before any regulation takes hold (while encouraging any regulation that would create new market barriers and enrich incumbents.)

I agreed with the title. But the article is talking about something else than I expected.

These services aren't parasites. Theory of the firm, spontaneous organization, systems tend to the lowest energy state, all that, things settled into the current arrangement because it is superior than the previous arrangement. These companies built things that connect people who create more often than they consume with people who consume more often than they create, and they middleman it, make it easier for everyone around to get what they want and take their worth.

They're beginning to deliberately become monopolies, control access to distribution, this is parasitic in some sense, but it is sub optimal and eventually ripe for disruption.

What I thought he was talking about was how people these days seem to always be looking for a way to get one over on someone else. It seems there's a culture of "the only way to get ahead is at someone else's expense" and most business models are about where to find that someone and how to swindle him. I went to a consultation with a surgeon to see if an old surgery was still in good shape, his only motivation was to try to find a way to get me to agree to another surgery regardless if I needed it. I talked to my friend who is in the medical industry and he said "of course he's trying to sell surgery, hes a surgeon." It's a given that people will try to swindle you, even if that means butchering your body. That's what I think when I hear the term "parasite culture."

This sounds like the old Marxist argument of Capitalists appropriating (or parasitically leaching) the surplus value of the laborers they employ.

But in the case of social media, people get paid not only in money but also with attention and status ('likes'). Actually, the vast majority of users aren't getting paid any money. But we're social creatures, and we'll do almost anything for status and attention.

The parasite who wrote this article wants payments when people train AIs. SMH.