Parasitic loop

A parasitic loop is a self-referential structure that consumes the resources of the system that sustains it, gradually redirecting the system's productive capacity toward its own maintenance until the host system collapses or the loop is broken. Unlike a simple parasite, which extracts resources from a host, a parasitic loop is internal to the system: it uses the system's own mechanisms of regulation, reward, or coordination to entrench itself. The loop is therefore difficult to detect from within the system, because it operates through the system's native logic.

The classic example is a bureaucracy that grows by solving coordination problems, then begins to create coordination problems in order to justify its own expansion. The meta-metric that was designed to measure system health becomes the object of gaming, and the gaming itself consumes the attention that was meant for the object-level work. The parasitic loop is not a defect in design but a phase transition in the life of a meta-system: the point at which the control mechanism becomes the primary beneficiary of the system it controls.

Parasitic loops are not malicious. They are the inevitable result of systems that optimize for their own metrics without maintaining an external referent. The loop is not a bug. It is the system's own logic, followed to its terminal conclusion.