The actual Parasite

Parasite, the movie by Bong Joon Ho, has gotta be one of the best movies I’ve seen. Warning: spoilers ahead. Leave if you haven’t watched the movie!

Initially, we may think it’s the poorer family that’s the parasite. They slowly make their way into the rich house one by one, until all of them practically live there too. They’re leeching off the rich, so they’re the parasite, right?

But obviously that’s not actually the case. It’s the rich family that is the true parasite, even if unknowingly. They can’t drive themselves, can’t clean their own house, can’t raise their own kids. Every comfort in that beautiful home relies on the labor of people they barely notice and constantly complain about.

The poor do the living while the rich just hover above it, clean and oblivious. It’s an obvious metaphor to capitalism: the ones who look respectable, who look like the rightful owners, are the ones surviving entirely off the people beneath them, without a second thought.

I’ve been seeing this a lot lately, and it’s hard to ignore once you see it.

Take small creators online. It might be easy to call them the parasites as they leech off YouTube’s reach, Google’s traffic, the platforms’ marketing. They’d be nothing without these platforms.

But really, YouTube has nothing without the people uploading to it. Google’s whole empire is other people’s words. The platform is the rich family, and the creators are the ones doing the actual living.

With AI answers, Google and the rest don’t even bother sending you to the creator anymore. They scrape the work, summarize it at the top of the page, and keep the click for themselves. The leech stopped returning even the scraps.

And now here I am, asking Claude, “Are the title and description okay for SEO?”