Mycelial Design Patterns for Web3

* Book: Exploring MycoFi: Mycelial Design Patterns for Web3 and Beyond. By n by Jeff Emmett & Jessica Zartler. A MYC OPUNK PUBLICATION FROM THE GREENPILL NETWORK, 2024.

URL = https://greenpill.network/pdf/mycofi.pdf

"MycoFi is a movement to consciously apply lessons from the mycelial world to cryptoeconomics."

Contextual Quote

"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. 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. 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."

- Jeff Emmett [1]

Description

"Exploring MycoFi: Mycelial Design Patterns for Web3 and Beyond guides readers on an underground exploration into the world wise web of mycelial networks, the most prolific producers of public goods on Earth. This book examines how the evolutionary adaptability of fungi could help us imagine biomimetic alternatives to status-quo economic systems that demand infinite growth on a finite planet. If there is any hope for a transition away from extraction, domination, and planetary overshoot, towards regeneration, equity, and planetary healing, our economies must be realigned with nature’s ecologies - and for that, we can’t a! ord to ignore what mushrooms have to teach us. If we aim to design regenerative economies, what better place to start than with the thriving evolutionary patterns of nature?

MycoFi translates six design patterns of mycelial ecologies to Web3 economies:

• Network Infrastructure

• Fractal Nature

• Emergent Coordination

• Dynamic Flow

• Mutual Reciprocity

• Polycentric Pluralism "

Excerpts

Excerpt from the introduction:

1.

"This book is a creative excursion into the nexus between mushrooms, economics, and technology. It explores six mycelial design patterns and their potential applications to address modern challenges in political economics, using Web3 tools as emancipatory technologies.

Many of the ideas expressed in this book were inspired by countless authors, researchers, and developers, drawing from extensive bodies of research on the fascinating capabilities of mycelium and distributed ledger technologies. This book presents a fungal remix of some of those concepts, oriented toward a Web3 audience. For those interested in further reading, you can fi nd a series of links and references in the appendix.

While we take an optimistic outlook in these pages, we aim to avoid the appeal to naturalistic fallacy ≠ the oversimplified perspective that everything natural is good for us. Instead, we seek to identify and unpack useful, pro≠ social patterns that could be applied in contexts where they increase collective flourishing.

MycoFi is fundamentally a pluralistic and emergent meme, requiring many voices to interweave a polyphonic chorus ≠ including those who came before, as well as those yet to come. If you feel the call to contribute to the growing folklore of mycelial solutions, we have included information on connecting with communities of change≠ makers in the last chapter. We o! er this book as one step to an ecology of mind nurtured in the world of mycelial intelligence and all it has to teach us. There is so much more to be written, experienced, and embodied, and we warmly invite you to join in the exploration."

2.

Designing from Fungal Foundations

"In our search for regenerative economic design patterns, the answers we seek may be hidden right beneath our feet. Over billions of years of evolution, mushrooms - and the underground mycelial networks to which they belong - have been iterating design patterns for distributed, autonomous infrastructures used for intelligent resource distribution and collective signaling between countless living organisms worldwide. Decades of study into the interaction patterns of mycelial networks in natural ecologies have offered us a glimpse into a cooperative underground world where resources flow dynamically between flora, fauna, and funga to generate thriving ecosystems.

If Web3 technology holds the potential to craft new economic paradigms, mycelial design patterns may just show us the way back to a more ecological future.

Mycelium as Nature’s Public Goods Infrastructure

As one of the oldest and largest organisms alive, mycelium is a grand architect of nature. Fungi were among the planet’s earliest multicellular lifeforms, and along with their algae symbiotes, they terraformed planet Earth from a ball of cooled magma into the green paradise we know today.

Mycelia form underground in a structure of networked tubes, which provide the “pipes” for a large proportion of nutrient distribution within and between most plants worldwide. From the earliest days of life on Earth, fungi have been breaking rock and networking through the soil, building a vast and interconnected mesh across the face of the planet. Like most well-operating public goods infrastructure, they remain underground and almost entirely invisible, even as they serve as a keystone network of species sustaining life on Earth.

Mushrooms Leak So Much Alpha

Adaptively evolving to shifting climates, food sources, and ecological epochs, mushrooms not only provide essential services for all life on Earth through their distributed infrastructure, but they have demonstrated an evolutionarily honed capability for collective coherence and intelligent resource allocation in genetically diverse collectives. They transact resources using market-like exchange mechanisms with trading partners, address free rider problems in permissionless networks, and take advantage of arbitrage opportunities in the remediation of damaged ecosystems. They display strategies of mutual reciprocity with their trading partners, even keeping stumps and other non-producing members of the forest alive in what is essentially an underground economic support network. If nature has any alpha to guide us toward a flourishing future, perhaps the mushrooms will let us in on the drop.

MycoFi is Economic Biomimicry

With their pivotal role in the fl ow of nutrients in natural ecosystems, mycelial networks are the physical medium on which nature’s economies run. These organisms o! er us a conceptual bridge between economies and ecologies - two realms that we must reconnect to have any chance of surviving on this planet for the long term.

MycoFi is a movement to consciously apply lessons from the mycelial world to cryptoeconomics, and encourage Web3 builders to “think like a mushroom” about the systems they are designing. Incorporating nature’s evolutionary design patterns into our economies could alleviate much of the disharmony we see between human economies and nature’s ecologies, gesturing towards a future of economic permaculture.3 This is also the basic premise of ecological economics4 - that we must move away from singular notions of value and orient our economies to refl ect the interdependent coevolution of multiple forms of value fl ows, just as we see in nature. In that sense, this book can be considered a beginner’s guide to ecological economics, seen through the eyes of fungi."

More information

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.

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.