Jun 09, 2025 12:30:00

Are smartphones a 'parasite' for humans?

Smartphones are indispensable to modern people, but Associate Professor

Rachel Brown , Director of the Centre for Philosophy of Science at the Australian National University, and others argue that 'smartphones are like parasites to humans.' Brown and others explained why smartphones can be considered parasites and what can be seen by viewing smartphones as parasites.

Smartphones: Parts of Our Minds? Or Parasites?: Australasian Journal of Philosophy: Vol 0, No 0 - Get Access
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00048402.2025.2504070

Your smartphone is a parasite, according to evolution
https://theconversation.com/your-smartphone-is-a-parasite-according-to-evolution-256795

When we think of parasites, many people probably think of head lice that live on the human scalp and suck blood, or tapeworms that live in the human digestive tract. However, Brown and his colleagues say, 'The largest modern parasite is not a blood-sucking invertebrate. It has a smooth, glassy exterior and is addictive by design. Its host is every human on the planet who has access to Wi-Fi,' and they claim that the smartphone is the largest modern parasite.

Evolutionary biologists define a parasite as a species that benefits from a close relationship with another species (the host) while at the same time incurring costs to the host. For example, head lice are a species that depend entirely on humans for their survival, living off human blood. If a head louse leaves its host, it will die immediately unless it happens to end up on the scalp of another human. Despite this relationship, head lice provide no benefit to humans other than the intense itching they cause in exchange for blood.

In contrast, smartphones provide a variety of convenient functions, from getting around town to contacting others, setting reminders, and managing your daily health. This alone may seem to bring many benefits to humans, but at the same time, many people are obsessed with their smartphones, becoming like 'slaves' who keep scrolling through the screens endlessly.

'Far from being a benign tool, smartphones are a parasite for technology companies and advertisers, siphoning off our time, attention and personal information,' they write. 'Smartphone users are paying the price in the form of sleep loss, impaired offline relationships and mood disorders.'

Not all closely related species are parasitic, and many organisms that live on or inside animals are beneficial. For example, bacteria that live in the digestive tract of animals can only survive and reproduce in the intestines of their hosts, ingesting various nutrients that pass through the intestines. However, these bacteria provide various benefits to the host, such as 'improved immunity' and 'improved digestion.' This mutually beneficial relationship is called '

mutualism ' rather than parasitism.

Our relationship with smartphones also started out as a mutualistic one. Smartphones have proven to be useful for helping us stay in touch with each other while on the go, consulting maps to find our way to our destinations, and looking up useful information. Philosophers have spoken of this relationship not in terms of mutualism, but as an extension of the human mind, just like notebooks, maps, and other tools.

However, Brown and his team argue that the relationship between smartphones and humans has evolved from a harmless mutualistic one to a parasitic one. This is not an uncommon change, and it is not uncommon in nature for a symbiotic relationship to turn into a parasitic one, or vice versa.

As smartphones have become indispensable to modern people, some of the most popular apps offered by smartphones have become more faithful to the interests of 'app developers and their advertisers' than human users, Brown et al. point out. These apps encourage people to keep scrolling through their smartphone screens, keep tapping on ads, and keep their anger simmering. The personal data collected by people's use of smartphones about their hobbies, preferences, goals, etc. is used to further strengthen the exploitation of people.

To address these issues, Brown and his team argue that it may be useful to think of the relationship between smartphones and users as something like a parasite and a host. By looking at smartphones through the evolutionary lens of parasitism, they can think about where this relationship is headed and what can be done to stop smartphones from becoming parasitic.

For example, in Australia's

Great Barrier Reef , cleaner fish such as the cleaner wrasse are known to eat dead skin tissue and parasites from larger fish.

During this process, the fish being cleaned by the cleaner fish stays still so as not to get in the way of the cleaning and not get swept away. Cleaning by cleaner fish is a classic mutualistic relationship, as the larger fish benefits from having unnecessary parasites removed, while the cleaner fish benefits from food.

But sometimes the cleaner fish will 'cheat' and bite the host, breaking the relationship from mutualism to parasitism. The cleaned fish will then punish the cleaner by chasing it away or refusing to clean in the future. These behaviors suggest that reef fishes provide an important 'guard' to maintain the balance of mutualism.

By Doug Finney

As can be seen from the example of the cleaner fish, in order to maintain a mutualistic relationship, it is necessary to have the ability to detect exploitation when it occurs and the ability to respond by ceasing services to the parasite. The relationship between smartphones and humans, which has turned from a mutualistic relationship to a parasitic relationship, may be able to be restored to a beneficial relationship for humans if the detection and response to exploitation are successful.

Of course, detecting smartphone exploitation is not easy, because the tech companies that develop the features and algorithms to make people addicted to their phones don’t want you to realize they’re exploiting you.

In addition, modern people have come to rely on smartphones for even minor daily tasks, making it difficult to take measures such as 'leaving your smartphone in an unreachable place for a long time.' Companies and governments also provide various services via mobile apps, and smartphones are required to access bank accounts and government services.

Brown and his team believe that individual choice alone cannot repair the relationship between users and smartphones. To bring the relationship between humans and smartphones back to a mutually beneficial one, government-led regulation and other measures are needed to limit the exploitation that technology companies can legitimately do.

The 2024 Australian law banning the use of social media by people under the age of 16 is one step toward limiting the exploitation of technology companies. Brown and others argued that regulations should also be put in place on app functions that are considered addictive, as well as the collection and sale of personal data.

Australia passes world's first law banning use of social media by people under the age of 16, targets X, TikTok, Instagram, etc. but excludes YouTube - GIGAZINE