There’s an interesting YouTuber that I’ve been watching who discusses her ideas on the ills of society. And a lot of what she talks about overlaps with the themes that I’ve been exploring… memetics, social contagion, systems shaping behavior, the tension between authentic community and algorithmic culture, etc.
Her new book; Cordyceps: The Neural Network that Controls You by Marina Karlova is a psychological and philosophical self-help book that argues most human behavior is not fully self-directed, but shaped by an invisible “parasitic” social conditioning system. The title uses the real cordyceps fungus (which hijacks insects and controls their behavior) as a metaphor for culture, trauma, institutions, social expectations, ideology, media, and internalized shame. The cordyceps metaphor is dramatic, but underneath it is a very old question:
“How much of what we think, want, and value is actually ours?”
That question can be found at the root of a surprising amount of philosophy, religion, psychology, and even my own work about networks and culture.
The core idea of the book is that many people mistake socially programmed reactions for their authentic selves. Karlova argues that anxiety, low self-esteem, guilt, compulsive conformity, people-pleasing, identity confusion, and even certain forms of psychological suffering are not necessarily signs that a person is “broken,” but signs that they have been shaped by what she describes as a kind of parasitic neural network.
According to the book, this network is reinforced through childhood conditioning, social systems, media narratives, reward-and-punishment structures, and collective expectations.
Rather than focusing on traditional therapy or self-improvement techniques, the book frames liberation as a process of “seeing the system.” Karlova suggests that once people recognize how much of their inner life may have been externally programmed, they can begin separating authentic desire from conditioned behavior.
In that sense, the book rests somewhere between psychology, social criticism, existential philosophy, and internet-era anti-conditioning literature.
A major theme running through the work is the idea that modern society itself functions like a behavioral operating system. Social media, politics, status competition, productivity culture, and ideological tribalism are portrayed as mechanisms that keep people reactive, emotionally dependent, and disconnected from authentic meaning. The metaphor overlaps with broader contemporary discussions around memetics, mass psychology, algorithmic influence, and social contagion.
The book may resonate well with readers who feel alienated from mainstream psychological models or who believe modern systems subtly manipulate identity formation.
She uses the “neural network” language more as a conceptual framework than a literal neuroscience model; so the book is probably best understood not as hard psychology, but as a provocative interpretive lens on modern life and social conditioning.
Which is how I prefer to look at it anyway.
