Parasite Load - Ben Landau-Taylor

Ben Landau-Taylor

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Parasite Load

Ben Landau-Taylor<br>Jul 20, 2026

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Every institution is meant to produce something. This might be something concrete, like cars or pants, or it might be intangible, like law or knowledge. An institution that succeeds at this task then accumulates wealth. The company tasked with producing cars accumulates wealth by selling them at a profit. Then the company is taxed and the taxes are given to the government agency tasked with administering law. Then the company’s CEO donates a hundred million dollars to the university tasked with producing knowledge.<br>In theory this all works great. As everyone does their jobs, civilization ascends higher and higher, with more material wealth and better-administered laws and more knowledge than before. The institutions, and the people within the institutions, accumulate money and power because they do useful jobs well. The physical wealth, the cars and pants and couches, get distributed to people in return for making contributions to society.<br>The car company is only able to make cars and sell them at a profit because it’s in a society which has lots of law and lots of knowledge, so it makes sense that the producers of material wealth will end up sending some of that material wealth to the institutions that produce these intangible goods, through some combination of law and custom. That’s what it means for everyone to participate in a functional society. If you squint a little bit and force everything into an econbrain framework then you can even see it as a kind of trade.<br>The problem is that piles of wealth attract parasites. If you fill your pantry with sugar then ants will try to get in. For an institution, this happens both internally—you are giving out steady high-paying salaries, so people try to get those salaries by doing work which superficially appears to help your company, or by lying about doing work and pocketing the money—and externally—you are giving money to institutions that educate the youth, so institutions try to get that funding by doing work which superficially appears to educate the youth, or by lying about doing work and pocketing the money.<br>Bigger piles of wealth and power and prestige attract parasites in greater numbers and with greater sophistication. I’ve seen small hobbyist communities attract clumsy affinity scammers who run away with a few thousand dollars in donations for fake cancer treatments. I’ve seen fashionable research organizations attract smooth-talking job applicants angling for no-show sinecure jobs and connections in the scene. I’ve seen the feeding frenzy of half-baked grant proposals when the FTX Future Fund sprayed out $100 million in donations before its funders were arrested for fraud. I’ve seen brilliant hucksters spin elaborate webs of lies and apparently-working “AI” technology to try to scam tens of millions of dollars from investors.<br>In isolation this is inconvenient, but not a disaster. You spend a fraction of your resources on detecting and purging parasites from your system. Your detection won’t be perfect, so parasites will consume a fraction of your resources on top of that. It’s a source of drag, and will kill some projects on the margin, but it doesn’t fundamentally change what’s happening. Every big group in the history of the human species has had some amount of this going on.<br>Things get really bad when the parasites become politically organized. This is the point where things metastasize. Once an institution contains a powerful faction who are appropriating the institution’s resources at the expense of the institution’s mission, rather than by fulfilling the institution’s mission, it has entered a terminal spiral which is nearly impossible to reverse. Isolated individuals stealing stuff can only do so much damage, and the amounts they can steal are limited by the need to avoid detection. On the other hand, factions can bend the institution’s priorities to boondoggles which are easier to steal from, and in advanced cases such changes in strategy crowd out even the attempt to do real work.<br>For example in 2021 San Francisco, where I live, launched the Dream Keeper Initiative, which describes itself as a “citywide effort to reinvest $120 million over the next two years from law enforcement into San Francisco’s Black and African-American communities”. In fact it was largely a pretext for city officials to solicit bribes in return for sending city funds to their friends. The former head of the program, Sheryl Davis, is currently being tried for conflict of interest and misappropriating public funds. Most brazenly, Davis funneled millions of dollars to Collective Impact, a nonprofit organization she founded and formerly led, which paid the executive director salary of Davis’s live-in boyfriend James Spingola while the two shared bank accounts and expenses. As of now, most of the corrupt nonprofits involved have not been...