The Mushroom Model of Creativity
May. 4th, 2026 06:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingI'm finally getting started on my "Creativity at the Margins" zine, and I'm trying to think through my theoretical model. I'm still figuring things out, but this is where I'm coming from...
In 2015, the American anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing published a book called The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Tsing spent more than a decade talking with communities of people who organized themselves around matsutake mushrooms, from immigrants working as mushroom pickers in the forests of the Pacific Northwest to Japanese retirees who collectively buy land in the mountains surrounding Kyoto so they can go mushroom hunting together on the weekends.
What’s interesting about matsutake mushrooms is that they’re impossible to farm commercially. Despite the high prices they fetch on international markets, these mushrooms are a commodity that falls almost completely outside the purview of capitalist control. If they don’t grow naturally in the wild, they don’t grow at all.
Tsing is curious about what matsutake communities, which are just as organic as the mushrooms themselves, can tell us about global capitalism. Specifically, is it possible to operate outside of this economic system? And what’s the value of doing so?
Tsing opens her book by explaining what she means by the concept of “capitalist ruins.”
Capitalist enterprise demands forward progress: not just profit, but profit that increases every single year, if not every quarter. If a company can’t meet shareholder demands by making the line consistently go up, even profitable business ventures are discarded. What can’t be controlled must be abandoned. Insufficiently profitable projects thus become ruins.
What Tsing has observed is that such “ruins” can become thriving economic ecosystems in their own right, often providing a place for people who have no desire to operate within the confines of capitalism. Matsutake pickers don’t work for anyone, if in fact they consider themselves to be “working” at all. If they find mushrooms and make money, that’s great. And if they don’t... Well, it’s not like they can control the mushrooms, and at least they got to spend time in the woods.
At the end of her study, Tsing joins her voice with that of the speculative fiction writer Ursula Le Guin, who once wrote an essay called “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” about how stories don’t really need to have a tangible lesson or educational purpose. There are certain elements of human nature – and the natural world – that can never be governed by the demand for favorable metrics, no matter how hard we try. Instead of abandoning these ruins, why not be happy they exist? Why not enjoy your time there?
Given that this is a zine about creative production, I think you can probably see the parallel I’m trying to draw.
Some creative work is rewarded by capitalism, either in the sense that it makes money or in the sense that its popularity can be measured by numbers on social media, but most creative work returns very little tangible reward at all. Does that mean it doesn’t have value? Of course not! We just need to use a system outside of capitalist metrics to understand what that value is.
In 2015, the American anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing published a book called The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Tsing spent more than a decade talking with communities of people who organized themselves around matsutake mushrooms, from immigrants working as mushroom pickers in the forests of the Pacific Northwest to Japanese retirees who collectively buy land in the mountains surrounding Kyoto so they can go mushroom hunting together on the weekends.
What’s interesting about matsutake mushrooms is that they’re impossible to farm commercially. Despite the high prices they fetch on international markets, these mushrooms are a commodity that falls almost completely outside the purview of capitalist control. If they don’t grow naturally in the wild, they don’t grow at all.
Tsing is curious about what matsutake communities, which are just as organic as the mushrooms themselves, can tell us about global capitalism. Specifically, is it possible to operate outside of this economic system? And what’s the value of doing so?
Tsing opens her book by explaining what she means by the concept of “capitalist ruins.”
Capitalist enterprise demands forward progress: not just profit, but profit that increases every single year, if not every quarter. If a company can’t meet shareholder demands by making the line consistently go up, even profitable business ventures are discarded. What can’t be controlled must be abandoned. Insufficiently profitable projects thus become ruins.
What Tsing has observed is that such “ruins” can become thriving economic ecosystems in their own right, often providing a place for people who have no desire to operate within the confines of capitalism. Matsutake pickers don’t work for anyone, if in fact they consider themselves to be “working” at all. If they find mushrooms and make money, that’s great. And if they don’t... Well, it’s not like they can control the mushrooms, and at least they got to spend time in the woods.
At the end of her study, Tsing joins her voice with that of the speculative fiction writer Ursula Le Guin, who once wrote an essay called “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” about how stories don’t really need to have a tangible lesson or educational purpose. There are certain elements of human nature – and the natural world – that can never be governed by the demand for favorable metrics, no matter how hard we try. Instead of abandoning these ruins, why not be happy they exist? Why not enjoy your time there?
Given that this is a zine about creative production, I think you can probably see the parallel I’m trying to draw.
Some creative work is rewarded by capitalism, either in the sense that it makes money or in the sense that its popularity can be measured by numbers on social media, but most creative work returns very little tangible reward at all. Does that mean it doesn’t have value? Of course not! We just need to use a system outside of capitalist metrics to understand what that value is.
