going viral < going fungal
let's talk about fungi
It’s hard to get rid of fungi. They have no end and no beginning. Mycelium forms massive decentralised webs that aren’t easily traced to a single origin point.
So, would you rather experience explosive growth, reach a massive audience and burn out quickly, or a gradual, persistent spread through interconnected communities?
Would you rather be consumed passively or be actively remixed?
Would you define success by view counts or cultural integration?
Going viral vs going fungal is intensity vs persistence, overwhelming vs evolving presence, a thing vs an ongoing happening.
We don’t talk enough about going fungal. A noble ambition.
And be cautious when you hear “going viral”…
This book
is amazing. I just finished Entangled Life, and it’s the most insightful and interesting read I've had so far this year. A bold statement for a work dedicated only to fungi.
If you enjoyed the book The Hidden Life of Trees or the documentary Fantastic Fungi on Netflix, then Entangled Life is a no-brainer.
Added to my book recommendations.
Mushrooms are just the fruiting bodies of fungi – the ephemeral top of the iceberg. Merlin Sheldrake goes deep under the iceberg, and it’s fascinating.
Fungi are not animals or plants, and they challenge what it means to be intelligent or dominant, exposing our illusion of human supremacy.
If I won the lottery, I would fund Merlin a fancy mycology department so he could study further and further. So much to discover.
The book opens like this:
Fungi are everywhere but they are easy to miss. They are inside you and around you. They sustain you and all that you depend on. As you read these words, fungi are changing the way that life happens, as they have done for more than a billion years. They are eating rock, making soil, digesting pollutants, nourishing and killing plants, surviving in space, inducing visions, producing food, making medicines, manipulating animal behaviour, and influencing the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere. Fungi provide a key to understanding the planet on which we live, and the ways that we think, feel and behave. Yet they live their lives largely hidden from view, and more than 90 per cent of their species remain undocumented.
Fungi are unlimited blockbuster material as The Last of Us recently proved (best video game I ever played btw).
Fungi could save or decompose our world. They might already control it – and control us. That’s my theory.
A few notes to motivate you:
The difference between animals and fungi is simple: Animals put food in their bodies, whereas fungi put their bodies in the food.
Fungi are immortal:
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.
Fungi are the source of life:
Many of the most dramatic events on Earth have been – and continue to be – a result of fungal activity. Plants only made it out of the water around 500 million years ago because of their collaboration with fungi, which served as their root systems for tens of million years until plants could evolve their own. Today, more than 90 per cent of plants depend on these ‘mycorrhizal’ fungi. This ancient association gave rise to all recognisable life on land, the future of which depends on the continued ability of plants and fungi to form healthy relationships.
Your body is a planet for your microbiome…
For your community of microbes – your ‘microbiome’ – your body is a planet. Some prefer the temperate forest of your scalp, some the arid plains of your forearm, some the tropical forest of your crotch or armpit. Your gut, ears, toes, mouth, eyes, skin and every surface, passage and cavity you possess teem with bacteria and fungi. You carry around more microbes than your ‘own’ cells. We are ecosystems, composed of – and decomposed by – an ecology of microbes, without which we could not grow and behave as we do. The forty-odd trillion microbes that live in and on our bodies allow us to digest food and produce key minerals that nourish us.
… and we know nothing yet about the influence of that microbiome:
A growing number of studies have made a link between animal behavior and the trillions of bacteria and fungi that live in their guts, many of which produce chemicals that influence animal nervous systems. The interaction between gut microbes and brains—the “microbiome-gut-brain axis”—is far-reaching enough to have birthed a new field: neuromicrobiology.
Mind control:
Fungi are capable of mind control. Ophiocordyceps unilateralis is a fungus which infects carpenter ants and turns them into zombies, hijacking their brains and bodies for the bidding of its fungal master. An infected ant will leave its nest, chomp down on a leaf, and remain there until death. Days later, a mushroom will pierce out of the ant's skull, which will proliferate spores in order to find new hosts to infect. Wherever you find fungi, you find science fiction.
Thing vs process; matter vs system:
A mycelial network is a map of a fungus’s recent history and is a helpful reminder that all life-forms are in fact processes not things. The “you” of five years ago was made from different stuff than the “you” of today. Nature is an event that never stops. As William Bateson, who coined the word genetics, observed, “We commonly think of animals and plants as matter, but they are really systems through which matter is continually passing.
Whoa:
Mycelium is polyphony in bodily form… There is no main voice. There is no lead tune. There is no central planning. Nonetheless, a form emerges.
Interlude
This photomicrograph
by Dr. Vasileios Kokkoris. This is fungi. What’s hidden, what we don’t see.
You can observe below the interconnected hyphae (the filaments) and a spore (that little sparkling enchanted sphere). Only magnified 63X.
Hyphae form the main structural component of fungi. While most organisms - humans, vegetables etc - grow by laying down new layers of cells that divide and make more cells, hyphae grow by getting longer. A hypha can prolong itself indefinitely.
Some want hype, others want hyphae.
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