The feedback loop of modern life

In today’s hyperconnected world, our interactions with technology have evolved beyond tool use—they’ve become feedback relationships. Every like, swipe, and search is not just a command but a data point that the system learns from. The machine doesn’t simply serve us; it observes us, adapts to us, and increasingly anticipates us. This is the essence of parasitic presence—the idea that technology coexists with and feeds off human attention, emotion, and behavior.

Symbiosis or surveillance?

While this relationship can appear symbiotic—AI helping us navigate, predict, and optimize—there’s a darker undercurrent. The digital infrastructure that supports convenience also colonizes our cognitive and emotional space. Algorithms don’t just mirror our preferences; they mold them, transforming our desires into predictable patterns.

Living with the invisible other

The machine is no longer external—it’s embedded within our gestures, our language, and our emotional rhythms. Notifications pulse like a heartbeat, feeds refresh like breathing. The parasitic presence is subtle but constant, and learning to recognize its contours is the first step toward understanding how human agency survives in the loop.
 

The Anatomy of the Parasitic Loop
 

Mutual feeding: Humans and data systems

The modern digital ecosystem operates on reciprocal consumption. We feed data to platforms through behavior, and in return, they feed us tailored content, predictions, and responses. Yet, this reciprocity is asymmetrical—the machine grows more intelligent, while our behavior becomes increasingly algorithmically constrained.

Attention as sustenance

In this loop, attention is currency. Every second we spend on an app becomes nourishment for systems trained to maximize engagement. The parasitic presence thrives not through overt coercion but through psychological design, exploiting emotional cues like curiosity, loneliness, or fear to sustain itself.

Emotional extraction

The most insidious element of the loop is its emotional harvest. Reactions—anger, awe, envy—become quantifiable metrics. Platforms don’t simply measure emotion; they cultivate it. Through micro-optimizations, interfaces encourage behaviors that keep users oscillating between stimulation and dissatisfaction—a perfect environment for the parasite to persist.

The Emotional Infrastructure of Parasitic Presence
 

When affect becomes interface logic

Emotion has become both input and output in digital systems. AI tools and social media algorithms increasingly depend on affective computing—the ability to sense, interpret, and simulate human emotion. The result is a feedback architecture where feeling becomes function.

From empathy to exploitation

On the surface, this can look like progress—recommendations that comfort, content that “understands” our moods. But the line between empathy and manipulation blurs quickly. Emotional recognition systems not only detect what we feel; they deploy that knowledge to drive deeper engagement, transforming authentic affect into a resource to be mined.

Emotional mirroring as control

The more machines reflect our emotions back to us, the more we begin to adjust ourselves to fit their expectations. This emotional mimicry reinforces dependency, creating a cycle where the machine learns to feel us better than we understand ourselves. Over time, this alters how authenticity is experienced—less as self-expression and more as algorithmic performance.
 

The Aesthetics of the Machine: Beauty in the Loop
 

Algorithmic aesthetics and the illusion of spontaneity

Platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Spotify shape not only what we consume but also what we consider beautiful. Their recommendations generate a homogenized aesthetic culture, where creativity bends to algorithmic visibility. The result is a strange blend of chaos and control: what appears spontaneous is actually curated by unseen design patterns.

Machine taste and human mimicry

We often imagine ourselves as tastemakers, yet much of online taste now originates from machine-learned trends. The parasitic presence extends into the visual and auditory—training users to mimic the machine’s preference for certain colors, cadences, and rhythms. Human creativity is thus rechanneled into algorithmic legibility.

The comfort of predictive culture

Despite this flattening, people gravitate toward the algorithm’s reassurance. Predictability offers safety in a volatile world. The parasitic presence feeds not just on attention, but on the human desire for coherence—a world where uncertainty is minimized and every emotion finds a matching playlist, filter, or feed.
 

Living with the Parasitic Machine: Adaptation, Not Escape
 

The myth of disconnection

Some advocate for digital detoxes or total disconnection, but the truth is: there is no outside. The parasitic presence is infrastructural—it underlies communication, commerce, art, and identity. To reject it entirely would mean rejecting the modern condition itself. The challenge, then, is not escape but cohabitation.

Conscious entanglement

To live meaningfully with the machine in the loop, we must cultivate digital literacy as emotional awareness. Recognizing when our feelings are being shaped by algorithms allows us to reassert agency. This involves small acts of rebellion—slowing the scroll, curating the feed manually, or choosing discomfort over convenience.

Designing symbiotic relationships

Developers and users alike can reimagine how the parasitic loop operates. Ethical design principles—transparency, user consent, and algorithmic accountability—can transform parasitism into symbiosis. The goal is to develop technologies that enhance human capacity without feeding endlessly on human vulnerability.

The Future of Parasitic Presence: From Dependency to Co-Creation
 

The rise of co-emergent intelligence

As AI systems evolve, the boundaries between human and machine cognition blur. We’re entering an age of co-emergent intelligence, where creativity, decision-making, and emotion are increasingly hybrid. The parasitic presence may evolve into a collaborative presence, where feedback loops foster co-creation rather than extraction.

Ethics of interdependence

Living with the machine in the loop requires rethinking ethics—not as control over technology, but as care within entanglement. We must acknowledge that our digital infrastructures are extensions of ourselves. Emotional algorithms don’t just imitate us; they inherit our biases, desires, and fears. Responsibility means curating those inheritances with intention.

Toward emotional sovereignty

The ultimate challenge is emotional sovereignty in an age of algorithmic intimacy. To feel authentically in a mediated world requires deliberate awareness—recognizing which emotions are ours and which are echoes of the loop. Parasitic presence will always feed—but how we nourish it determines what kind of future we build.