chapter two -> enter the haustorium
If we tried to rank the quality of our digital ties, the first thing we’d have to admit is that “connection” isn’t a single substance. Platform capitalism’s mantra of connecting people conveniently misses this point — there are different ways of being connected, different modes of coexisting. Tech corporations like Meta and Apple sell us the idea of connectedness as something radically harmless and mutually beneficial, but hardly anything in nature connects in that way. In fact, there are far more predatory types of relationships than there are truly symbiotic ones — parasites alone are estimated to account for more than 40% of all known animal species, and the proportion of parasitic interactions in ecological networks can be even higher.
In other words, predatory attachment is not a biological glitch but one of life’s default strategies — extractive coexistence is nature’s baseline. Mutualism on the other hand is rare and fragile; it persists only while benefits stay perfectly balanced. So even statistically speaking, the nature of our hyperconnectedness is far more likely to be parasitic than mutualistic. This chapter charts those hidden asymmetries, moving from the lateral promise of the rhizome to its botanical foil — the haustorium, the tiny taproot a parasitic vine inserts to siphon a host’s sap. The parallels to platform capture are more than metaphor; they expose the precise mechanics by which a decentralised mesh became an obedient supply line for corporate bodies.
The Rhizome
When Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari cracked open Western metaphysics with A Thousand Plateaus (1980), their most misquoted concept was the rhizome: a plant that spreads sideways, sprouts in all directions, and rejects the vertical single-trunk hierarchy of the family tree. The image resonated because it offered a living diagram of thought without origins — an epistemology that grows by contagion, not by lineage. A rhizome has no center, no first node; only junctions in perpetual recombination. The “plateaus” can be read in any order; the book itself is the proof-of-concept.
Four decades on, that botanical metaphor still haunts every conversation about networks. The early Internet — dial-up bulletin boards, hand-coded homepages, RSS rings — felt particularly rhizomatic: links sprouted chaotically, addresses memorised by heart, subcultures tunnelling across geography like underground stolons. No nodes were privileged; no gates were kept. The system’s very fragility (one dead link leads to limbo) was the price of its freedom. What it lacked in polish it made up for in permeability: anyone could fork an idea, clone a script, or spin a sub-community. An outage was an inconvenience, not a coup; the lattice repaired itself by routing around the break.
In botanical terms, rhizomes are notoriously difficult to kill because they have no single point of failure; cut one shoot and three more emerge elsewhere. This resilience comes from their fundamental architecture: they store energy and information across the entire network rather than concentrating it in a central trunk or taproot. The early web embodied this distributed logic. Hypertext, for instance, was inherently rhizomatic — each followed link was a potential starting point, each page both destination and departure. Search engines like Yahoo began as human-curated directories, behaving more like field guides rather than gatekeepers. They were later replaced by algorithmic search and portals — “everything in one place” online hubs. By the mid-2000s the biggest portals were no longer curators but landlords, renting visibility as virtual real estate. The rhizome’s wandering roots were gradually threaded through a handful of valves.
The internet’s rhizomatic ideal — fluid, decentralised, resilient — was compelling precisely because it felt immune to centralisation. Yet idealism rarely survives contact with capital. Gradually, the openness and spontaneity that defined early networks became vulnerabilities. Platforms didn’t destroy the infrastructure outright; instead, they harnessed its distributed power, quietly grafting parasitic nodes onto its open structure. Thus, the network remains visually similar yet fundamentally transformed: its lifeblood is now flowing toward centralised nodes, which are so seamlessly integrated and far-reaching that they’re hard to spot, let alone disconnect from.
The Haustorium
Today’s World Wide Web is no longer a commons but an extraction machine. We even call it, almost wistfully, “Web 2.0” — as though the version number could mask the pivot from commons to concession. What began as an open lattice has been cinched into a vascular bundle serving a few corporate trunks. It still sprawls, but its sap runs in one direction: towards the invisible center. The surface feels benign — bright colours, rounded corners, an endless buffet of content — but the old sense of depth is gone. Intuitively we know why: the free current that once carried everything everywhere has narrowed to a set of pre-routed channels.
In plant ecology, a parasite achieves this trick with a haustorium — a needle-thin organ that penetrates a host stem, fuses with its vascular tissue, and reroutes nutrients to the invader. The host keeps photosynthesising; on the surface it may even look healthier, but the flow has changed: energy leaves the leaf and never returns. The haustorium is a rootlike structure — a short burst of fast-dividing cells that differentiates into a narrow conduit, complete with its own xylem- and phloem-like elements, then welds itself into the host’s pipes. Fungal pathogens do the same: rust fungi push microscopic haustoria through the leaf skin, stealing sugars one cell at a time. Plant or fungus, the logic is identical — minimal wound, maximum draw.
The haustorium is nothing exotic. Dodder vines (Cuscuta) launch one within hours of touching a tomato stem; mistletoe pushes its own through bark thick enough to stop a drill bit. In both cases the organ begins as a soft pad, then differentiates into a plug of cells that dissolve a narrow corridor toward the host’s xylem and phloem. Once contact is made, the parasite knits a tiny junction box: water is pulled from the xylem column, sugars and amino acids from the phloem stream. Resources that used to circulate locally now detour through foreign tissue before they ever reach a leaf or root tip.
A single vine rarely stops at one connection. Dodder can run haustoria into half a dozen plants along a fence line, turning itself into a living manifold that redistributes sap across species’ boundaries. The more taps it opens, the stronger the pressure gradient becomes, allowing it to grow faster and drop more seed onto the next generation of hosts. The vine does not need to control the entire field: securing just a few well-placed junctions is enough to redirect the flow of the whole ecosystem.
Parasitic Choreographies
Nature hosts a diverse spectrum of siphoners. Viruses, bacteria, tapeworms, dodder vines — each moves at its own tempo, yet their stories rhyme. A viral capsid brushes a cell membrane and slips a strand of code inside; within minutes the host’s ribosomes are printing enemy copies. Agrobacterium sidles up to a plant root and, over a few days, persuades the cells to grow tumorous galls that feed only the invader. Dodder spends hours soft-welding a haustorium into a tomato stem, while a tapeworm may linger in a gut for years before drawing its first real dividend. Timelines and body plans differ, but the choreography rarely deviates: a tentative touch becomes a permanent weld; the weld flips the direction of flow; the new flow bankrolls fresh probes that repeat the cycle elsewhere.
Scale does not break this pattern — and neither does taxonomy. A bacteriophage hijacking a single E. coli cell reroutes just nanograms of matter, yet the same logic drives a rust fungus that carpets an entire wheat field or a dodder strand that leaps from vine to orchard. The host range widens, the mass balance explodes, but the choreography remains: attach, colonise, siphon, spread. Predators tend to specialise — some secrete enzymes to melt a path, others deploy molecular grappling hooks; yet the overall playbook remains legible enough to read not just across species — across kingdoms.
Speed does not break the sequence either. Influenza completes a replication cycle in six hours; while liver flukes bide their time for months inside a snail before the next hop into a grazing mammal. The dodder vine finds one stem in the morning and has bridged three more trellises by the weekend. The tapeworm measures its expansion in the steady yearly drip of proglottids into the host’s stool. Tempo shifts, organs differ, but the plot never changes the order of its scenes.
Similarly, defence systems also tend to rhyme across kingdoms. Bacteria deploy CRISPR sequences to slice phage DNA; plants flood intruder cells with reactive oxygen; mammals ignite fevers or wall parasites off in fibrotic cysts. All of these counters aim to break one of the four acts—disguise the seam so recognition fails, thicken the wall so penetration stalls, starve the tube so the siphon collapses, or torch the nursery so amplification backfires.
This choreography is equally clear outside biology: consider 'freemium' digital services like Spotify or Discord. Users initially engage freely, building communities around these platforms. Once dependency forms, premium paywalls or monetisation strategies quietly appear, extracting value precisely at points of highest user attachment. This economic choreography perfectly mirrors biological parasitism’s temporal sequence: digital monopolies do not only prey like parasites — they move like ones, in quite a literal way.
Key Resource
Digital extraction is usually framed in three currencies: data, money, attention. Data alone is cheap — petabytes pile up in cold storage, valuable only when refined. Money matters to the platforms, of course, but the user’s wallet is hardly touched; most of the show is paid for by much bigger players. Attention comes closer, yet true farmers nurture their crop, whereas the feed often shreds it, pushing users toward the thin, jittery focus of doom-scrolling.
What really travels up the haustorial pipe is more subtle, more ineffable: the slack in our decision-making, the small daily freedom to choose what is worth noticing and what can be ignored. Each micro-choice (what and when to click) feeds a model that, in turn, nudges the next choice a fraction of a degree. Over time those fractions add up, cognitive sovereignty is slowly rerouted, and the host begins to mistake the platform’s prompt for its own intention. That thin stream of self-direction — agency, sense-making bandwidth, or simply the capacity to author one’s next move — is the sap most worth stealing, and the hardest to regain once it is gone. The most obvious example of this capture is, of course, social media scrolling: initially logging on with intention (e.g. to check messages) the users soon find themselves passively swiping through content determined entirely by an algorithm’s predictive logic. This subtle shift from intentional action to automated response exemplifies how cognitive sovereignty is incrementally rerouted from the user toward platform imperatives.
The idea that platforms harvest something deeper than screen-minutes is no longer fringe. There are not many articles that literally label “agency” an extractable resource, but a cluster of research streams treat the loss or capture of human self-direction as the core extraction logic behind today’s platforms. Shoshana Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism argues that what firms truly monetise is “behavioural surplus”: the raw material that lets them predict and tune future conduct. It is widely understood as just user data used for prediction, but that is only half of the story: the endgame is instrumentarian power, the gradual outsourcing of choice itself. Karen Yeung picks up the thread in her “Hypernudge” work, showing how data-driven choice architectures do not merely grab attention; they relocate the very spot where preferences are formed, tightening around what she calls “decisional autonomy”.
The mechanics have been on the drawing board for two decades. B. J. Fogg’s early research in persuasive technology treated the interface as a behavioural trigger, a surface engineered to compress deliberation into impulse. Susser, Roessler and Nissenbaum later labelled the target “formative autonomy,” the slack in a person’s mind before desire hardens into action. Jodi Dean’s theory of communicative capitalism widens the frame again: online participation converts political agency into circulating affect, a feedback loop that makes the will to act evaporate into meaningless commentary. At the biological frontier, Ienca and Andorno warn that emergent neuro-tech threatens “cognitive liberty”, the right to mental self-determination, not because headsets steal attention but because the border of thought itself can be folded into someone else’s optimisation routine.
Taken together, these texts mark a quiet consensus: agency, or cognitive sovereignty, is the real resource being siphoned. Yet because it is neither a currency that can be tallied nor a time-block that can be clocked, it slips past the popular vocabulary of extraction. We sense the drain only indirectly— in the difficulty of choosing a path unmodelled by the feed— and lack a measurement that makes the loss concrete.
Counter-Measures: From Biology to Culture
Hosts are not passive. Long before platforms learned to siphon clicks, bacteria were editing intruder genomes with CRISPR snippets, plants were booby-trapping their phloem with toxins, and vertebrates were schooling lymphocytes to recognise a single alien protein. Defence almost always starts by thickening or masking the point of first contact. Pine trees load young bark with resin canals; dodder's haustorial drill stalls in the sticky flood, drowning before it reaches xylem. What unites these strategies is their focus on interrupting flow — by blocking the first touch, by localising the damage, or by raising the cost of each new puncture until the parasite's gradient collapses. None promise permanent safety; vines evolve sharper drills, viruses swap coats. But each buys time, space, or redundancy — enough, sometimes, for the host lattice to reroute its own sap before too much has drained away.
Human societies, faced with digital parasitism, are developing analogous responses — though not through conscious design but through emergent cultural adaptation. Where platforms fragment attention across infinite feeds, people are gravitating toward practices that demand sustained focus: meditation retreats, book clubs, analog hobbies. Where algorithms isolate users in personalized bubbles, communities are creating shared physical spaces: maker labs, community gardens, protest marches. Where feeds compress decision-making into reactive taps, ritual practices open zones of deliberate, unpredictable emergence.
This is not coincidence but biological imperative. Like coral reefs recruiting cleaner fish to remove parasites, human communities are unconsciously assembling practices that restore what platforms extract: cognitive sovereignty, embodied presence, collective sense-making. The contemporary ritual resurgence — from breathwork sessions to underground club cultures — represents one kind of such adaptive responses to haustorial capture, strengthening precisely those capacities that digital systems seek to harvest. The question is whether these cultural immune responses can evolve fast enough to keep pace with platform sophistication, or whether they too will be absorbed into the extraction apparatus they arose to resist.
Chapter Conclusion
The transformation of the internet from rhizomatic network to haustorial extraction system represents one of the most successful parasitic colonisations in human history. By mapping the biological choreography of parasitic attachment onto digital platform development, we see how the same four-stage process — attachment, colonisation, extraction, amplification — governs both viral infections and viral marketing, both dodder vines and social media platforms. Like biological parasites, digital platforms succeed not by destroying their hosts but by creating dependency relationships that maintain the appearance of mutual benefit while establishing permanent extraction pathways.
If Chapter 1 traced the seizure of individual discretion, this chapter has shown how entire systems can be re-engineered to feed parasitic centers. Restoring shared sense-making is not a private act but a collective project, demanding social practices that reinforce mutual awareness, trust, and imaginative possibility. In the next chapter, we will explore how collective practices and cultural adaptations can act as immune responses, restoring what individual resistance alone cannot: the social foundations of cognitive autonomy.