For Our Consideration: Social Mycelialism
A theoretical framework for building community and fighting fascism. With mushrooms!
Shit’s not sustainable.
That’s pretty clear. I doubt you’ll find anyone on either side of the political divide who’d tell you they think everything’s going right on track. According to a recent Gallup poll, personal satisfaction is at an all time low. These are the worst of times, and also the worst of times. It’s the one thing we can all agree on.
The reasons for this are likely complex, but not so complex that I can’t flatten them down to three main points for the purpose of a take:
Society is more fractured than it’s ever been. We feel closer to the social media accounts of people across the country than we do to the people who live across the street.
There is no baseline acceptance of reality. We’re all getting not just our news but our basic scientific knowledge from different and opposing sources.
Understanding of societal interconnectivity has been obliterated. We’ve lost the ability to see how much we rely on one another (even strangers) for… well, everything.
Each one of those issues, could be the subject of its own very depressing essay, but no thank you to that. At least for today. What I’m much, much more interested in right now is imagining a way out of this tar pit before we sink all the way in and are lost to history. Like most species before us.
What follows is a very brief and wildly incomplete mapping of an idea I’ve been working through (mostly while faded). I just want to get the basics down, so later I can dig deeper into its possibilities and refer back to this without having to start from scratch.
A thought experiment.
I’m going to present to you a theoretical alternative to the current way we live.
Imagine small collectives of people who work together or play together or live together, not because they have to, but because they want to. Imagine you’re in one of these collectives. You spend a lot of time with these people because you have common interests and common goals, and your shared relationship enriches all of your lives. You all look out for one another, because you want to. Because it’s to all of your benefits to do so.
Maybe you’re not in just one of these collectives. Maybe you’re in a few. Or a bunch. There’s probably some overlap in membership between your various collectives. But there are probably some people with whom you only share one collective. With all of the collectives you’re in—we’ll call it your amalgamated collective—you’ll be connected to a lot of people, so that’s bound to happen a fair bit. And you’re the Kevin Bacon of your amalgamated collective, connecting all sorts of people who’ve never even met. But if you knew that this one needed something that that one could provide, you could bring them together.
Here’s the thing, though: All of those people are their own Kevin Bacons. And you’re now connected to all of the people in their amalgamated collectives by extension. And if everybody understands that what’s best for the people in their collective is also best for them (maybe not in this very moment but in the long run), then by the transitive property, they understand that what’s best for the friends of their friends is also best for them. And you can keep building that understanding outward until you’ve built an immense network of small and intimate, interconnected and overlapping, collectives working together for everybody’s wellbeing. Literally.
Once you have that network going, you could conceivably use modern technology to supercharge the connectivity between people in collectives several Kevin Bacons away. Two people with zero friends in common could be connected through the shared understanding of the raw natural power of community. For all manner of reasons. All manner!
A conglomeration of amalgamated collectives, working with modern, reasonably priced technology could create community-driven-and-controlled online marketplaces to compete against the top-down autocratic models that provide our current enshittified situation. It could help pool wealth and resources, and then work to keep that capital within the community and out of any venture capitalist’s pocket. It can organize political action at the local level, which is where we all actually live. It can bring us together to more effectively shield the more vulnerable and marginalized of us. It could help us fill in a lot of the gaps where Capitalism and Democracy have failed us. It could help us not so much take back the machine but build our own.
Cool story, Dennis. I also have masturbation fantasies.
Yeah, I get that. It seems like a fun thing to muse about, but something that won’t ever happen. Like The Winds of Winter. But what I didn’t mention up there in that last section was this:
Everything I suggested is something that already exists.
No reinvention of wheels necessary. We don’t even have to shape new wheels to fit our purposes. We can just go to the wheel store. All the wheels we need are right there on the shelves.
The collectives are the clubs, groups, families and friend circles to which we already belong. They’re the people that we already want to spend our time with. Or, at least, those are the initial collectives. If this were to prove itself an effective community tool, I imagine more would grow organically. And new kinds would form, with different purposes and goals.
The technology that connects them is not social media. Not as we currently understand it. Not the kind in which profit-driven algorithms—working at the behest of a small group of pasty antisocial billionaires—decide which of my friends see which of my posts and when. It would be something closer to the original internet. A federation of information hubs, like Mastodon—locally owned and controlled—communicating with one another on a voluntary basis, with no capacity for outside, top-down control. And now, with the AI they can’t stop smashing into our faces, we can do it at a scale unimaginable ten years ago.
We also already have concepts like time banks, in which community members trade services in temporal, not monetary, coin. One hour of time spent mowing Old Man Gilbert’s lawn could be redeemable for an hour of Gurdy down the street helping you fix the electrical outlet in your bathroom. And then she could use it at Chuck’s tattoo parlor, getting the lightsaber on her forearm filled in.
There’s all sorts of community connective tissue that’s just waiting for the right catalyst to bring it to life for everybody’s good.
This is Social Mycelialism. Or it can be.
At least, that’s what I’ve been calling it. If anybody smarter and more capable than me wants to take this idea and run with it under some other name, that’s on them. I just want to get the idea out there. The idea being that this stuff is just out there waiting for us to pick it up and use it. It’s right there at our feet.
The name comes from mycelium, the root-like, branching fungal structure that ties our ecology together, breaks down dead matter for its nutrients, and ensures resources are properly shared for the good of the entire biosphere. It’s there, working all the time, but you never notice it’s there until a mushroom comes to fruition, peaking its cap above the ground litter.
So, like I said earlier: Shit’s not sustainable. And we are living in some supremely enshittified times. But, don’t forget…
Mushrooms grow great in shit.
Much more on this to come…
