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.
no subject
Date: 2026-05-15 08:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-05-17 10:42 am (UTC)I've been doing a lot of creative work lately that's gotten almost no response. It's good work, I think, but the lack of support is disheartening. "Do what you love" is solid advice, but I hate that it always seems to come from people who are already popular. What I want to do is explain why "doing what you love" is important, even if it isn't rewarded. I think it's worthwhile to make this argument from the perspective of someone with no audience! In an age of enshittification and Gen-AI slop, being human is good.
The paradox is that, because I have no audience, I suspect that very few people will read the zine. 😅
So I'm thinking of making it a little more attention-grabbing by positioning it more explicitly as anti-AI. That's not really what I want to write about, because "the pain of not being heard" existed way before 2023, but perhaps it's okay to make a few concessions to current audience demands, right?
Anyway, this is all to say that I really appreciate your support. Even one person saying "hey man, that's really interesting" goes such a long way these days!
no subject
Date: 2026-05-29 08:09 pm (UTC)the AI theft-slop is so fucking frustrating to me, as a person who works a lot with funky data sets, because machine learning can be so powerful and cool and helpful and then techbros did that with it. There was an interview I just saw with the CEO of....is it Rockstar or Take Two? the people who make GTA - and he was talking about the fact that AI can extrapolate things based on data, but cannot innovate in the way a person can to make that surprising thing that makes a property really STICK, and his point was basically there are some workflows that it can streamline but all of the tools to make a derivative game were there before AI, it just took longer. Which I agree with, but I also find it really interesting, especially in conjunction with Uber's COO saying that the literal monetary cost of the company using AI has not translated into better profits. If there was ever a company that should be able to benefit from models that way, it's probably Uber.
Anyway, I am undoubtedly over-optimistic, but I see the pin approaching while the JAWS theme plays.
no subject
Date: 2026-05-29 08:17 pm (UTC)That's exactly it! I wish it didn't have to be this way.
And I hope you're right about the bubble bursting. It's not enough for this technology to vanish from the general population; I want wealthy people to suffer.