Mushrooms, Myopia, and Some Major Change
Like a partially blind person clapping in a pharmacy trying to echo-locate the contact lens fluid, I’ve recently been wondering about the filtered and algorithmic structure of online community. Sure, the intarwebz have lead to an explosion in our ability to be seen and heard, but we all too often only speak to, listen to, or look at those whose views and bodies align with our own. Call it ‘human nature’ exacerbated by the newsfeed, part of our need to indulge in necessary illusions and emotionally potent oversimplifications.
I think this can be especially true of the bitcoin and blockchain community. It is still a relatively small community of evangepreneurs (yes, I did just make that up) and visionary business people who think they are building world-changing technology. In amongst the genuinely innovative and evolutionary stuff, it is often all too easy to get lost in the hype and forget some of the very real, and very big, challenges faced on the road to global adoption and scalability and security and understanding and acceptance and usability and and and…
So, rather than talking technicalities, or losing my mind about the latest edition of Twilight Saga: The Blocksize Edition, today I want to take a trip into ‘The Mushroom at the End of the World’ instead. This entirely enchanting work by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing deals with spaces disturbed or destroyed by the forces of capitalism, epitomised by global commodities chains and the way such systems reduce labour, environment, and contextual produce into alienated (and therefore legible) inventory. However, far from being bleakly apocalyptic, the book follows the entangled and precarious life-forms and various ways of being that come to inhabit such broken, in-between space, chief among them the matsutake.
Just as these pungent fungi fill a niche in patches no longer usable for the development of inventories and the accumulation of capital, I would argue that bitcoin — and blockchain tech more generally — is slowly filling the ‘grey economic space’ overlooked by international conglomerates. Perhaps ours is a story not of grand disruption, but of a slow, unseen process of incubation in dark and forgotten places followed by an autumnal blooming in broken ground where only those capable of paying attention might find a unique kind of treasure. I mean, obviously bitcoin is disruptive, but there’s disruptive and disruptive. The first aims to upend a system that is already destroying the world simply because it is perceived to be wrong and unjust. It aims for revolution. The second aims to act symbiotically with fringe elements that still manage to eek out a meagre existence in a destroyed world and therefore add some value back into the cycle of life. It aims for evolution.
Through tracing the encounters and entanglements each small part of any narrative we care to tell has with any other part — as well as with the wider global picture — Tsing poses the haunting questions:
“What if precarity is the condition of our times — or, to put it another way — what if our times are ripe for sensing precarity? What if precarity, indeterminacy, and what we imagine as trivial are the center of the systematicity we seek?”
In case you’re feeling left behind by the overwhelmingly un-psychedelic nature of what is being said here, Tsing defines precarity as
“the condition of being vulnerable to others. Unpredictable encounters transform us; we are not in control, even of ourselves. Unable to rely on a stable structure of community, we are thrown into shifting assemblages, which remake us as well as our others. We can’t rely on the status quo; everything is in flux, including our ability to survive.”
I would suggest that, for people exposed to bitcoin for the first time, it is precisely such an unpredictable and transformative encounter. I would argue that it continues to be transformative way beyond that first encounter and places those who dive down the rabbit hole in weird and wonderful states of flux. Just ask Alice.
Apart from tin hats, or fire dances to cleanse our sins, how are we to survive this post-capitalist — perhaps even post-human — world? Tsing chimes in again:
“The ‘survival’ featured in US television shows or alien-planet stories is a synonym for conquest and expansion. Please open your mind to another usage. This book argues that staying alive — for every species — requires livable collaborations. Collaboration means working across difference, which leads to contamination. Without collaborations, without contamination, we all die”
Again, the examples of unique kinds of collaboration and generative contamination abound in blockchain’d space. There are few people more actively involved in thinking of intelligent and sustainable ways to survive the world we have created for ourselves.
The reason that there are plants growing on dry land (rather than just in water) is that over the course of the earth’s history, fungi have digested rocks, making nutrients available for plants. Fungi (together with bacteria) made the soil in which plants grow. Fungi also digest wood, otherwise dead trees would stack up on every forest floor. That is what bitcoin does too, it contaminates and then digests — slowly — a corrupt financial system, through a symbiotic relationship with living (merkle) trees, and allows people to see the wood once more for what it really is. And if some rocky regulators or politicians get in the way, well, it seems likely they’ll become nutrients for the next generation of plants to grow out of the distributed system that now exists and flourishes beneath the forest floor.
“Many fungi live in the soil, where their thread-like filaments, called hyphae, spread into fans and tangle into cords through the dirt. If you could make the soil liquid and transparent and walk into the ground, you would find yourself surrounded by nets of fungal hyphae. Follow fungi into that underground city, and you will find the strange and varied pleasures of interspecies life”
This is really the metaphor that keeps on giving, if you’ll indulge me just one moment longer. Bitcoin is precisely that financial fungus with the potential to make capitalist dirt both more liquid and transparent. To allow more people to walk the ground and see it for what it is, to interact with the vast networks through which money moves in this strange and varied world.
Imogen Heap has been on this trip for a while with her idea of Mycelium. This also uses an underground, indeterminate fungal body as a metaphor for the various networks involved in any work of art (performer, producer, sound engineer, cover artists, promoter, etc.) and how each player’s payout can be automated and managed securely and transparently by smart contracts on Ethereum.
Such are the pied pipers of our age, people who understand that who we are emerges only through encounter and that participatory data architectures and p2p networks amplify such encounters exponentially. The human who, for me, most embodies the art of encountering others and emerging as living being in the process is the late modern composer, John Cage. Unsurprisingly, he was a massive fan of mushroom hunting.
Tsing references this delightful talk and adapts the poem to what I consider to be the defining questions of 2016: “What mushroom? What person?”
What chain?
