The headliner of the first night of CSICon was Adam Conover of Adam Ruins Everything, who used the idea of parasites in nature as a metaphor for some of the ways our critical brains are overcome without us ever knowing it.
Adam Conover
Without going too deeply into Conover’s standup act and ruining the jokes, I’ll just say that he proved that the algorithms of platforms such as Facebook and YouTube are not too dissimilar from invasive fungi that control ant brains and make them either climb up blades of grass so they can be eaten by cows or clamp onto a tree before exploding.