I just found one of those articles that when I read certain passages from it, it gave me “the chills” because of how relevant and important it is, not just to the stuff I’m interested in. But to what’s happening in the culture at large, and also showing me another angle of how what I’m doing fits in with the greater whole, and offering me more possibilities, approaches, angles, and tactics to expand my mind with.

It’s about creating parasitic media to enact cultural change. It’s really really good. It blew a gasket in some part of my mind, actually. Broke open some door that I didn’t realize was closed. I love when that happens. Basically, its a really conceptual piece about how parasites are the perfect model for modern activists (and dont close your mind, and start thinking activists are annoying - cause im just talking about activists as people who take personal actions for their own ends). Because parasites are little systems that exist within larger systems, without giving any benefit to the larger system, and draining its resources - and that the best parasites are the ones that go undetected by the system, but can influence the behavior of that system in important ways.

I just want to put in one little paragraph that particularly fucked my mind up, then I will let you read the article or not, according to your interest. This shit makes my mind start shimmering and sparkling with all kinds of crazy ideas that feel really important:

One amazing example of parasitic control of host behavior can be seen in the lancet fluke, Dicrocoelium dendriticum. As an adult, the parasite lives in a cow’s liver. The fluke’s egg’s are spread by the cow through their manure. Snails feed on the manure and swallow the fluke’s eggs. The young flukes penetrate the wall of the snail’s gut and emigrate to the digestive gland. In the gland, the fluke’s produce more offspring which travel to the surface of the snail’s body where they are dispensed of by the snail through balls of slime which are left behind in grass. Ants swallow the balls of slime in the grass which are containers for hundreds of immature lancet flukes. The parasites slide into the ant’s gut before traveling around the rest of the body. Eventually they move towards the cluster of nerves that control the ant’s mandibles. Most of the flukes then leave to return to the gut while a few remain behind in the ant’s head. This is where some of the most amazing maneuvering occurs. As the evening approaches, infected ants do not return back to the colony with the other ants but instead climb to the top of surrounding grasses where they clench their mandibles on the blades and wait, motionless, until morning when they join back with the rest of the colony. These ants suffer from a period of temporary insanity where they are awaiting ingestion by a cow - which feed generally in the cool evenings. Once eaten by the cow, the cycle has been completed.