Emulating Nature’s Evolutionary Resource Allocation Algorithms in Economic Systems Design
[A draft chapter proposal submitted for a special issue of Interconnections: Journal of Posthumanism on the “Fungal Turn”]
Jeff is a researcher and engineering communicator at BlockScience, where much of his work expands on the design and analysis of dynamic resource allocation algorithms in novel applications for the production of open-source public goods.
A “fungal turn” is indeed taking the world by spore — although, if we connect deeply enough with the prehistoric transitions of this planet we call home, it becomes clear that the rich tapestry of life’s collective history has always been stitched together with the hyphal threads of the humble mushroom. Since the dawn of life on this planet — and especially in times of great geological shift — fungi have played a pivotal role in the networked redistribution of life-sustaining resources on a global scale.¹ Everything alive today owes a debt of gratitude to the upward trophic flows of energy resulting from the infinitude of resource-sharing interconnections among mycelial economies over time immemorial.²
For millennia, we understood this economic interconnection intuitively. For most of humanity’s time on this planet, we existed inseparably within communal ecosystems of redistribution and respect for nature, in alignment with the ebb and flow of the seasons. When our indigenous ancestors walked the land freely, they counted among their kin not only their sisters and brothers of the flesh, but also their brethren of fur, feather, scale, bark, and hyphae. Like the mother trees who intelligently redistribute their photosynthesized sustenance among their hungry kin through underground mycelial networks,³ indigenous peoples commonly lived within egalitarian networks of mutual aid and solidarity with each other, that ensured no one’s basic needs went unfulfilled.⁴
But then, not long ago — a mere blink in evolutionary timescales — our collective imagination became clouded with the ethos of separation. Where the living thread of mycelia stitched things together, rationalist scientism encouraged us to cut them apart, to dissect and analyze them in isolation. Armed with these ideologies, old empires leveraged new energy sources and exponential communications technologies to become larger, faster empires, always seeking to impose dominance beyond their borders. This was often achieved through the overt violence of war, although perhaps even more effectively through the invisible and more insidious violence of an imposed monoculture of colonizing currencies.
In fact, the history of modern economics goes hand in hand with the history of imperialist expansion, right alongside the oppression of diversity and indigenous voices.⁵ The invention of ‘homo economicus’ spawned the irreducible ‘rational actor’ whose ‘natural motivations’ to take care of the individual above all else inevitably scaled up to undermine the health of the collective — threatening our continued existence on this planet along with it. “There is no such thing as society,” quipped someone unimportant on their mission to disempower the collective.⁶ But this is just a false egregore that those in power would have us believe, in order to consolidate power in Westphalian state monoliths. When we succumb to the belief that there is no alternative but the (horrendously inequitable) systems we live in, that becomes our shared reality of apathy and disempowerment.
But a simple glance to nature shows us the folly of these words. Aside from the neoliberal interpretations of Darwinian competition painting nature as ‘red in tooth and claw’, on closer inspection, it becomes clear that cooperation, redistribution, and mutual aid are far more dominant forces in sustaining the web of life.⁷ Among the most ubiquitous examples of positive-sum economics found in nature is that of the pluralistic and polycentric mycelial network.⁸ What more natural phenomenon to emulate in the design of effective resource allocation strategies, than the sustenance provided via mycorrhizal interconnections between fungi and the innumerable lifeforms with which it intimately intertwines? What more important ability to learn than that of the saprophytic fungi, the great composters of nature, such that we may decompose our failing neoliberal systems and upcycle their nutrients into whatever comes next?
The time is upon us for the highest leverage exploration of all — that of our liberation from the hubris of imperialist economics and its drive for endless growth at all costs.
As for what comes next, we have ample precedent in the literature of the commons to draw inspiration from. Elinor Ostrom spent her life studying the production and maintenance of common pool resources in local communities acting on their own behalf, and distilled a set of principles that were necessary to facilitate and sustain those productive social systems.⁹ Ostrom also identified several key challenges inherent in the scaling of those systems to larger groups beyond the Dunbar limit, where social bonds and agreements between members weaken beyond effective levels.¹⁰ These challenges are even being explored in the application of novel distributed ledger technologies to address the shortcomings of large-scale commons-based peer production.¹¹
It is from this vantage point that we begin to glimpse a possible future where purpose-driven economies could become more like localized ecologies, right-sized to their context and responsive to the needs of their participants. These micro-myco-economies could be interoperably networked, such that scale can be achieved without any single economy needing to subjugate or dominate another. With new tools for dynamic preference allocation in distributed networks¹², and their application to more fluid and adaptive forms of proportional governance¹³, we stand at the cusp of a new era of political-economic experimentation whose potential is stymied only by the intentional inertia of the status quo, and our collective nescience of the plethora of alternatives at our fingertips.
And so the time is upon us for the highest leverage exploration of all— that of our liberation from the hubris of imperialist economics and its unsustainable drive for growth at all costs. We are in urgent need of new economic models that can facilitate managed degrowth and support localized production in the real economy, rather than feeding the frenzy of the speculative casino that we call modern finance. We are in urgent need of new societal signal processing systems with improved sense and response capabilities to important stimuli, such as the widescale destruction of Earth’s habitable ecosystems. Lucky for us, fungi may hold answers for us in these areas and many more. Mushrooms are often first responders on the scene of ecological destruction, paving the way for transformation and the new life that follows — they could also be pointing the way to new tools that could help us transition into an era of edge-based coordination around shared challenges, which are growing day by day.
If we listen and act in service to nature and each other, these new fungally-inspired tools may just offer us the opportunity to turn away from the disharmony of neoliberal economics and re-embrace the common sense of natural ecologies, with their redistributive flows sustaining healthy mutualism and solidarity among their members. In that space we create for ourselves, we may just have the chance to remember that we can once again rely on the interstitial fascia between all living things, a networked mesh of mutual economic support, and breathe a sigh of relief. Together, our opportunity lies in overgrowing extant state-fiat monocultures with a diverse and polycentric mix of permaculture currencies, mitigating the crises caused by today’s cancerous economic model through a profusion of emergent, networked, and adaptive local ecologies that allow people to provide for their needs on their own terms. Perhaps there is no more natural path to collective empowerment, than one grounded in the simple wisdom of nature’s oldest evolutionary algorithm: the ubiquitous mushroom.
After all, the revolution is — and has always been — mycelial.
Special thanks to Joel Mason, Matthew Slater, Macks Wolfard, Michael Zargham, and Jessica Zartler for edits and suggestions on the chapter proposal. Mush love also to Doug Rushkoff, Amber Case, Christina Bowen, Naomi Joy Smith, TreeDjinn, and all the other #mycopunks emerging from and contributing to the rich compost heap that we inhabit together.🍄💖
Bibliography:
- Sheldrake, Merlin. Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures. First edition, Random House, 2020.
- Stamets, Paul. Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World. Ten Speed Press, 2005.
- Simard, S. Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest. First edition, Alfred A. Knopf, 2021.
- Graeber, David, and D. Wengrow. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. First American edition, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021.
- Graeber, David. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Melville House, 2012.
- Interview for Woman’s Own (‘No Such Thing [as Society]’) | Margaret Thatcher Foundation. https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/106689. Accessed 8 Oct. 2023.
- Margulis, L., 1998 The Symbiotic Planet — A New Look at Evolution, Weidenfield & Nicholson.
- Noë, Ronald, and E. Toby Kiers. ‘Mycorrhizal Markets, Firms, and Co-Ops’. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, vol. 33, no. 10, Oct. 2018, pp. 777–89. ScienceDirect, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2018.07.007.
- Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing The Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge: University Press.
- Ostrom, E., Burger, J., Field, C. B., Norgaard, R. B., and Policansky, D. (1999). Revisiting the commons: local lessons, global challenges. Science 284, 278–282. doi: 10.1126/science.284.5412.278
- Fritsch, Felix, et al. ‘Challenges and Approaches to Scaling the Global Commons’. Frontiers in Blockchain, vol. 4, 2021. Frontiers, https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fbloc.2021.578721.
- Emmett, Jeff. ‘Conviction Voting: A Novel Continuous Decision Making Alternative to Governance’. Commons Stack, 18 Nov. 2019, https://medium.com/commonsstack/conviction-voting-a-novel-continuous-decision-making-alternative-to-governance-62e215ad2b3d.
- ‘Introducing Neural Quorum Governance’. BlockScience Blog, 9 Nov. 2023, https://blog.block.science/introducing-neural-quorum-governance/.
Author Bio
A self-professed #mycopunk, Jeff is a mycelial explorer of alternative economic potentialities, formally trained as an engineer studying signal-processing systems. He believes that many of our myriad societal problems stem from our hopelessly anti-democratic economic system, and he sees potential in the intersection of nature’s indigenous knowledge and nascent public ledger technologies that could help us progress toward an ancient future where collective resource allocation is as seamless and polycentric as the overlapping mycelial mats inextricably tied into thriving ecosystems.
Jeff is interested in how we can empower edge-based wisdom to proliferate through scale-free credit issuance in grassroots communities, such that everyday people can reclaim sovereignty over the production of value in whatever way they deem adequate for their lifestyles. He is eager to experiment with new mycelial economic models that can help to address collective action problems and foster the production of cosmo-local public and common goods.
