Mycelial Anarchy

The next stage of human evolution?

I ended my last essay on Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover with this lovely quote from Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life:

Mycelial coordination is difficult to understand because there is no center of control. If we cut off our head or stop our heart, we’re finished. A mycelial network has no head and no brain. Fungi, like plants, are decentralized organisms. There are no operational centers, no capital cities, no seats of government. Control is dispersed: Mycelial coordination takes place both everywhere at once and nowhere in particular. A fragment of mycelium can regenerate an entire network, meaning that a single mycelial individual—if you’re brave enough to use that word—is potentially immortal.

In this essay and the next, I want to address the underlying problems bedeviling today’s social networks, and how we might redesign them in accordance with mycelial principles. Before I can do this properly, I have to step back to provide the over-arching context for my thinking. Please bear with me!

In past work, particularly How Soon Is Now, I offered different ways — analogies, metaphors, meta-narratives — to understand our current situation and see beyond it. I often draw analogies with biological systems. For instance, if we look at the evolution of human societies over the last ten thousand years, it reveals the emergence of humanity as a planetary super-organism. Today, humanity is in continuous communication across the entire field of the species-mind. The whole Earth is transformed through our actions. This resembles how the brain of the fetus develops; the separate areas of the brain meshing together to unify before birth. To me, this strongly suggests we are undergoing an evolutionary process on a species level. If we don’t drive ourselves to extinction, we will emerge, eventually, as one unified, coordinated entity¹.

Today, most people believe that Capitalism is inescapable. But earlier indigenous societies survived for much longer periods of time without it. Gift economies were the basic form of exchange in many places across the world². If there was a world before Capitalism, there is no reason there can’t be a post-Capitalist world³.

To take the organismic metaphor again, Capitalism made sense during a temporary phase, similar to an adolescent growth spurt. An economic system based on debt, Capitalism forces constant development and innovation. This has devastating costs for the integrity of local communities and ecosystems. Capitalism is inherently unstable, unsustainable. It forces companies to maximize short-term financial profit without regard for longer-term security, ignores equally important needs such as the need for stewardship of fragile ecosystems and finite resources.

Similarly, elected national governments are a relatively new phenomenon, and in many ways not a healthy or satisfying way of organizing society politically. We apply obsolete 18th Century social technologies to deal with a 21st Century world. Today,  technology evolves very rapidly. We confront existential threats that did not exist when modern nation-states started a few centuries ago. Our government representatives must undergo a cumbersome election process every few years. This leaves them beholden to wealthy backers, special interests. The system no longer works.

Personally, I believe we need more democracy, not less. In the future evolution of our social and political systems we should seek to replicate the leaderless, decentralized, continuous, multi-channel free-flow demonstrated by mycelial networks. But to have more democracy we must also evolve different mechanisms for education and participation. It seems obvious that the Internet and blockchain provide the right medium for this to unfold. But these potentially emancipatory tools were hijacked and misused to serve the profit-making drive of late-stage Capitalism.

I find it helpful to recall that the distributed architecture of the Internet was a form of bio-mimicry, imitating the decentralized, holographic structures found in mycelial and neural networks, which hold memory and information, and respond immediately to threats. The Internet was built this way due to the threat of nuclear war. This is also interesting: Existential threats often seem to lead to evolutionary leaps in social organization and complexity.

Over a long span, biological evolution reveals an inveterate tendency to progress from competition, aggression, and domination to cooperation and symbiosis. Trees, for example, are millions of years older than we are. A tree is a symbiotic organism that provides shelter, food, etcetera, to many other species, from mycelium and lichen to birds, insects, and monkeys. Our own bodies are made of communities of micro-organisms⁴ that once fought each other for food in a difficult environment. Eventually they learned to build cooperative structures. These are now our organs, zipped up inside of these skin suits.

As a very young species, we are still in our competition/aggression/domination stage. But we are realizing this is not something we can continue and survive, particularly as exponential technologies become more destructive and powerful. We therefore need to evolve toward cooperation/symbiosis, as quickly as we can.