Mycelium & Dialogue Project

Mycelium: underground network that ensures flourishing of the collective.

These times are urgent; let us slow down. -Bayo Akomolafe

From February 2nd, where I lost control of the Tesla I was driving on a highway during the rain, spun 1080 degrees and collided with the median at sixty miles an hour, and bounced back into the center lane of a 5 lane highway¹, I’ve been engaged viscerally in an epistemological question about how to be with the moment we find ourselves in collectively, which is contoured with collapse and authoritarian entrenchement augmented by the collectively dissociating power of social media and the destruction of the factual, courtesy of AI and Newspeak, and at the behest of billionaires who benefit from betting on an apocalypse they are intent on hastening.

I find myself, like many of us, in a world that seems to be hellbent on accelerating away from nearly everything I feel in my bones to be goodness, run by people dissociated either on ketamine, their own narcissism, lust for power, or a potent combination of all three. Like Roman emperors poisoned by the lead in their goblets, brains wormy with neurotoxins, these madmen are destroying, as rapidly as they can, functional foundations of literacy and cultural history, institutional safety nets, and stability. Not to mention nominally democratic institutions. Not to mention environmental safeguards. It feels like a tidal rush into the abyss led by white men with no sensitivities to the nuance of relating. As I’ve argued before, in Sam Altman went to My Highschool - on 2 AI, what we are hard-coding into silicon, and are calling appropriately Artificial Intelligence, are half-brains. AI is essentially hard-coded leftbrains: exactly half of what it means to be human with regards to the cranial brain.

Part of what is being undermined, most sinisterly in my humble opinion, is meaning-making. When people cloak stripping away rights in the language of restoring freedom, when what they mean is the opposite of what they say, when there is no kotodama to their words, the fog around us thickens, not least linguistically.

I have been tracking discourse markers on Substack with displeasure, watching as this platform continues to degrade into the kind of coarseness that caused me to abandon the Zuckerbergian dumpster fires after Mark showed up at the inauguration to take a knee.

What I am finding fortifying, in these moments, and these times, beyond spending time in deep nature, which does not lie to your face, speak word salad, say the opposite of what it means, deny the things it said moments before– is dialogue. I want to sense-make with articulate others, sit down beside the proverbial hearth and ask: What are you seeing here? How are these times landing in your body? What does your heart say? What does your belly say? What do your bones say about all this? Is it familiar to you? Do you have visceral memory of days like these? What does it all mean? How shall we respond? What do we need to build within? What do we need to build in our communities? How shall we prepare for what is coming? How shall we safeguard the Sacred?

I also find that I want to do this somewhat quietly, outside of the realm of spectacle. Outside of the realm of hoarding, soundbyte-grabbing, meme-making internet culture that has spawned so much of this trivialization of what it means to be human in the first place; accelerated the potency of the power-grab by directly disseminating garbage thoughtforms straight into people’s pockets, ears, and eyeballs; no intermediary required.

I bring your attention gently therefor to a meta-label that we are co-creating with articulate and sensible others, entitled Mycelium.

1. Although I cannot soberly recommend it, it turned out to be a very good way to get rid of a Tesla!