How We Saved the World from Underground

The Mycelium Networks – A Short Story

In my last post I said there’ll be time and space for imagining better worlds. Well, that time is now.

Suzanne Taylor

created an essay contest in January which garnered a large response (around 175 submissions). My piece was not chosen as a finalist, but I’m publishing it here anyway for my readers.

The original prompt was to write a retrospective, explaining how, by 2050, we created a cooperative world. The only requirement was to start with something you yourself did.

This is not the kind of framing or register I would normally use, but I found the process of writing this piece more generative than I expected. I aim to turn this first attempt into a more thought-out series of posts carrying the same vision. I haven’t the foggiest when that will be, so for now please enjoy this prelude.

---

It’s 2050, and the world is right-side up again. We were living backwards and upside-down for centuries, forgetting that we’re part of nature, treating other humans like trash, plundering the planet we call home. I can hardly believe it, but all that has changed. Now we live in patchwork cooperative communities stretched across most of what used to be the United States.

What was the shift that moved us from opposition to cooperation? It was the realization that no one is coming to save us — that we have to take care of each other. The climate crisis was the main driver, a series of environmental disasters and economic collapse exacerbating a political crisis that reflected a loss of faith in governing structures. In response, a cultural shift combining several currents led to a rejuvenation of empathy. The mode of transformation? An expanse of networks, like mushroom mycelia, through which the new culture spread, took root, and blossomed.

The change happened over three phases: Phase 1 saw a shift from digital to analog, where the mycelium networks became something truly original. Phase 2 describes the move from networks to infrastructure, where we sowed the seeds of the counterculture. In Phase 3, we were powerful enough to affect system change and bring about a new cooperative world.

Some call it anarchy, some call it communism, some call it utopia — regardless, it’s ours and we made it, and we’ll do everything we can not to go back to how things were.

But how did it happen? What’s the secret to changing such deep-seated animosity? Well, in a word, people started doing things for themselves.

People start forming networks

My Substack publication acted as a catalyst and a node for the networks that would eventually turn our world inside-out. Anarchy Unfolds is about preparing the world to come, crafting viable alternatives here and now. As my audience grew into the thousands, we were able to do much more together. We traded ideas, shared news about projects and activities we were part of, and invited each other to participate. I did interviews and hosted virtual meet-ups where we talked strategy and gave ourselves space to dream. In my writing, I tried to seed healthy ideas into the world, inspiring people to think and act differently.

I was not alone — many others on Substack were on the same wavelength. We connected via the platform’s powerful networking tools, but we didn’t stop there. We began to use our writing in the digital space to amplify our analog lives.

Building on campaigns like Substackers Against Nazis in late 2023-early 2024, we used online organizing to drive participation in real-life marches, demonstrations, and protests, cultivating an active resistance to the systems of violence and their culture of greed. Like

SolarPunk Stories

we curated positive news from our collective memberships, little victories and small joys that had an outsized impact on nurturing a culture of hope and generosity. Like

Radical Reports

for the goodguys, we kept tabs on our growing movement, making sure everyone was in the know and no one was left behind.

That spirit of care translated into mutual aid groups, modeled after the response to the COVID-19 pandemic in the 2020s. People crowdsourced help for those in crisis: they organized food drives for the hungry and grocery runs for the busy, swapped childcare and eldercare, crowdfunded exorbitant medical bills, and gave prisoner support in the form of letters, visits, and bail funds. They helped keep the lights on and heat and water running, especially for those affected by natural disasters.

At that time, existing mutual aid networks and activist projects tended to be hyper-local or siloed within a particular community. The emerging mycelium networks on the other hand kept a pulse on everything at once. They didn’t need centralization to do this. Through overlapping systems of communication, all direct and interpersonal, they accomplished what so many organizations and institutions so far had failed to achieve: an autonomous, leaderless movement, a perfect blend of digital and analog.

This care work was inherently politicizing — people quickly ran into legal challenges while trying to share what they had, which illuminated the systems and their inequities in stark contrast. In the early 21st century, even feeding the homeless was illegal in some places. They also had cash bail, private insurance companies, and other evils we find hard to imagine. Even so, in the beginning stages political action merely spun off from the networks; it didn’t swell from the coordinated movement of them all at once. Such spontaneous order would come later, supported by a robust system of alternative, sustainable infrastructure.

People start growing their own food

The mycelium movement reached another phase of development when people began to meet their needs outside the state and capital. Urban agriculture got the spotlight, and sustainable techniques like hydroponics, aquaculture, and composting proliferated throughout the networks. People started raising micro-livestock, ripping up pavement to plant food forests, and of course cultivating mushroom logs. Almost overnight, it seemed as if everyone had their own vegetable garden.

If Phase 1 was simple sharing through mutual aid and food drives, and Phase 2 was the revival of urban agriculture, Phase 3 saw massive agricultural reform in rural areas. The huge monopolies were broken up, government subsidies dried out or shifted focus, and monoculture was slowly but surely replaced with permaculture. There was the narrative that these country bumpkins were slow on the uptake, clinging to conventional methods when the cities had evolved to sustainable practices. In reality, the city slickers got all their ideas from their rural counterparts — the hippie culture and pioneering ecologists, who themselves got it from indigenous people.

These moves were timely too, as global supply chains were rocked by increasingly intense and frequent natural disasters, as well as military conflict. Food security was a matter of survival. Eventually, as government capability crumbled and corporations dissolved, the previous global supply chains collapsed — food production became localized out of necessity.

Slowly, through the mycelium networks, a new way of exchange allowed folks from different regions to share surpluses freely with one another. Some used a gift economy and refused to keep count, others figured out direct exchanges at price. In any case, no one involved in the networks would dream of exploiting someone over food. Even when times were tough, the idea was that we had enough to go around if we agreed to share.

People start collecting and treating their own water

It’s remarkable that capital managed to commodify something as fundamental as water, but they’d done it. In response, people in the growing mycelium networks began to take it back. Phase 1 saw the dissemination of wisdom about how to collect, purify, and store water, giving individuals and households some measure of autonomy in the face of frequent droughts and unstable urban reservoirs.

Phase 2 saw alternative plumbing and waste management systems sprout up to counter municipal utilities. People stored water for their whole neighborhoods in silos and water towers, rigged up to their own tanks, greenhouses, and gardens. In concert with the movement for food independence, bioremediation became the new trend: graywater recycling, composting toilets, floating trash islands, and careful cultivation of microbial life meant less pollution, cleaner water, and greater water retention in the soil.

In Phase 3, legal battles over local water independence ballooned into regional and national fights over access to rivers and lakes — and eventually the ocean itself. Big cities were no longer permitted to drain bodies of water dry. Urban sustainability became a must, as people empowered by the networks brought water back into the commons. Bottling companies had their rights stripped, and were only allowed an administrative role, alongside former government utilities, as distributors of a free resource according to the demands of the mycelium. Big Fish also had to go — most of the plastic waste in the ocean was fishing nets, and most industrial waste ended up dumped in the ocean. At the height of their power, the networks were strong enough to coordinate rapid and wide-ranging restoration efforts, especially across coastlines. In a matter of years, our beaches were healthy and our taps trustworthy again.

People start making their own electricity

As mentioned, the mutual aid groups in Phase 1 helped folks keep the lights on, especially those impacted by natural disasters. In Phase 2, solar tech reached its zenith, with ever cheaper and more accessible installations, devices, and materials. Local power grids sprang up alongside water systems, and legal battles ensued over disconnecting from the grid.

Phase 3 meant taking on the power companies. They were dismantled and replaced by localized decision-making and maintenance, which was increasingly easy to do as they kept declaring bankruptcy after causing disasters like the PG&E California fire in 2019. The hard part was convincing the government to let people build and operate their own systems.

The biggest win here was taking down Big Oil. A tipping point was when the airline industry decided to get rid of overhead and became the first worker-owned and operated industry. This set off a domino effect, and soon other industries followed, especially truckers and shippers — postal and delivery services were suddenly not-for-profit, and the planet thanked us for the dramatic decrease of waste. This buildup of sustainable practices and values meant that the auto industry also failed, leaving cities and communities free to rebuild themselves without cars at the center.

People start creating their own information systems

When the mycelium networks were first getting started, people shared info on privacy, security, and platforms as we learned how to balance the digital-analog space and act together. In Phase 2, DIY culture became cool again: repair cafes started popping up, which quickly led to right-to-repair laws. People were making, sharing, and fixing their own devices, and connecting them via distributed mesh networks such as those pioneered by

HydroponicTrash

. Decentralized social media platforms, like the fediverse, saw a surge in popularity and were widely improved upon. Open-source technology flourished, spurring on an anti-copyright movement that eventually challenged intellectual property rights.

By Phase 3, the knowledge commons was making a comeback. Largely in response to the demise of journalism and the dark age of traditional social media, public projects like Wikipedia, The P2P Foundation, GitHub, and Z-Library took over the scene. Planned obsolescence fell out of style, and streaming services atrophied because they couldn’t keep up with the free alternatives. Eventually Big Tech lost their legal monopolies over the information system.

Another tipping point in the battle for free knowledge was the closing of the schools. Public schools were already under attack from several angles, and unfortunately that never let up. Private schools puttered on in gated communities, buoyed by rich donors and reclusive elites, but for the majority of people education became an organic and integrated part of everyday life — not a separate world where young people are siphoned off and confined to classrooms while the rest of us work. Libraries became an epicenter of the new counterculture, fiercely defended as the physical institutions necessary for maintaining this new way of life. The knowledge commons was immaterial, but people viscerally understood the need to have physical spaces, a real-life commons too, to keep this thing from falling apart.

People start managing their own land

In the 2020s, no one could afford rent anywhere in the United States on a single minimum wage income. So from the start, people in the mycelium networks understood how crucial housing and land ownership was. We helped each other move, pay rent, and avoid getting evicted, sharing furniture, babysitting, and household chores. Many folks also moved in together, making the queer polycule fantasy a regular urban reality. Co-housing was different than having random roommates, because it was through the networks that people met each other and developed trust.

Phase 2 brought in co-housing on another level: community land trusts (CLTs), like those pioneered in the mid-1900s, became an effective model for collective land ownership. People experimented with tiny-homes, mobile homes, becoming digital nomads, and living off-grid. Urban planning, finally free from the auto industry, created more green space, mixed-use buildings, and walkable cities. Public rest installations, inspired by The Nap Ministry, became a staple of the new culture.

Of course we had to take on the landowners, construction companies, and developers, and in Phase 3 we did. People asserted their right to determine the kinds of buildings and physical spaces they live in. CLTs grew large enough to drive out developers, and tenant unions imposed rent caps and demanded affordable housing.

A huge turning point was housing the homeless. By the 2020s, there were about 650,000 homeless people in the US, and over 15 million unused properties. Well that was a quick fix! But good gracious was it a painful slog to get there: the process involved occupying public and private facilities until the authorities ceded, like in Sunvault. It meant protecting squatter settlements, like in southern Spain. Thankfully, by this point the mycelium networks were so established that we were able to mobilize large numbers of people almost anywhere in the country, and especially in urban centers. All unused properties were seized and redistributed, not by the government but by private citizens ourselves, working in concert with each other for the greater good.

In fact, the entire world began to understand just how serious we were about autonomy and independence when one city got nominated to host the Olympics and flat out refused. What’s more, Big Brother couldn’t do anything about it.

People start defending themselves and solving their own conflicts

We found ourselves on the wrong side of the law almost from the beginning. It’s not that we were contrarians just looking for a reason to buck the system — it’s that so many of life’s basic necessities were bound up in red tape. So we began coordinating legal aid for each other through the burgeoning mycelium networks, as problems arose in every other sphere. We also did prisoner support, reciprocal exchanges where folks would send in encouragement and supplies, and our friends behind bars would send letters and updates back. When the authorities caught on this quickly became illegal, which simply escalated the tension and increased the volume of communications sent to and from the prisons.

At the same time, as we moved into Phase 2, we developed alternatives outside the legal system to solve conflicts. Abolitionists led the way, with centuries of experience in fostering peace instead of violence. People realized they could help victims get to safety or confront a perpetrator the same way we organized everything else. We called the police less often, and dealt with domestic violence directly. Sharing childcare and eldercare meant that parents got more support, and the co-living experiments meant that people had a broader community around them to help avoid or recover from abuse and neglect.

Letting go of the appeal to authority led to a general rewriting of relationships, where the sharp lines between friend and family blended — where folks established a more collectivist culture to counteract individualism, one based on free association and mutual interest, not blood relations or religion. It’s all chosen family. And just like with agricultural reform, straight white guys got a lot of credit for popularizing what feminists, queer folks, and indigenous peoples had been at for a long time. But we don’t hold it against them — better that we all get enlightened, no matter how, who, or when.

The stakes were high: legal action from someone inside a network against another person in that network caused problems for the whole network, if not put the whole community at risk, so it’s better to do it yourself. Also some elements were clandestine, and people generally understood that they’ve got a good thing going on and didn’t want to ruin it for themselves or others.

This was the heart of the cultural shift: we really can rely on each other, especially because no one else is coming to save us. We are all we need.

The networks grew fast — outpacing the courts, who couldn’t keep up with the complexity. In Phase 3, this of course led to the biggest confrontation with both the state and capital. We took on the whole carceral system and its monopoly on violence. As the government realized what it was up against, they started arresting more and more of our leaders and public figures — which was a huge mistake. We had already ceased to rely on them to solve our problems. Now they were tearing apart our families. Especially as more white folks found themselves behind bars, racial solidarity against mass incarceration grew exponentially.

By far the biggest moment was when a whole prison got torn down. We formed a combined internal-external force that overwhelmed the prison guards, the families of the guards, and every politician and corporation invested in the prison. The symbolism was staggering, the slave labor stopped immediately, and the networks proved that chaos doesn’t erupt when law and order break down, because we were more than willing to welcome the former prisoners home — they’d been connected to us for so long already.

At that point, to stop a total revolution, the state had to make a choice: either bring in the tanks, or make major concessions to keep existing. But they knew that if they did try to put down this rebellion by force, they faced mutiny from the military. Recruiters had been decreasingly successful, seeing as fewer people needed the military for basic needs, and as the nationalist brainwashing had been cut down to size in the information revolution. Also, who was helping veterans and their families? We were.

So the bloodshed never happened. The state backed down — and it was clear they wouldn’t stand up again.

People start doing what they want when they want

The story of how we killed the economy — no more work, no more money — deserves a whole volume in itself, so I’ll just lay out the contours of what happened.

In Phase 1, while the mycelium networks were just getting started, the first layer of resistance was in sharing goods and services free of charge, and distributing the monetary burden of large bills to the collective. It was also about the division of labor, especially domestic and household labor, the key linchpin of sexism and ageism towards women and children. Women especially benefited from the growing networks, and children enjoyed a much larger and more welcoming social world.

Then Phase 2 was about directly interrupting the supply-demand-production chains with moneyless alternatives, and using money as a tool for collective wellbeing. This looked like buying property, moving resources, building infrastructure. Phase 3 increased direct confrontation with work and capital, in that people started refusing to participate in the economy — especially as workers, but also in other ways, as propagandists or managers, and it began to die by attrition.

The ultimate win in this sphere came about when the work system collapsed: corporations become co-ops, and their assets were redistributed — not as a top-down imposition, but in response to the groundswell of popular resistance.

People finally demanded free healthcare, and refused to pay insurance bills. The stock market collapsed, which dealt a death-blow to the wealthy, who could no longer speculate on credit or debt. Banks dissolved, or transformed into credit unions and mutualist funds. International financial institutions were broken up, relocalized, and made largely irrelevant in areas where currency lost its value. The end of work meant that people controlled their own schedules; no more rush hour, no more traffic, no more pollution.

People start making their own decisions, together

Let’s go back to the beginning: we started with the nitty gritty of coordinating analog and digital connections — sowing the seeds of the counterculture. The key here is that there was no organization or institution, no centralized place, where all the decisions happened. A culture of reciprocity and care emerged, as people began to imagine and appreciate the scale of what was happening.

It quickly became clear that no one person could call the shots. Instead, there was a sort of absolute autonomy of the nodes. Whoever was there in the flesh got to make the call. This also quickly distilled the need for fast and honest communication, spurring on the Phase 2 innovations. Instead of a massive centralized database, we had a vast array of relationships. Not one single place for everything, but a thousand places with a thousand things moving in concert.

What kept the networks from splintering or being co-opted is that we were already splintered — we were already a distributed, decentralized network of autonomous cells held together by powerful relationships of care and trust. You can’t shut us down; we have our own power. You can’t turn the internet off; we have our own internet. You can’t arrest and kill our leaders; we make our own decisions independently, and everything we say and do is saved in a thousand digital spaces ready to be re-disseminated.

When it came time for a prison break, very few objected. There was a sense that this new society was making decisions as a whole, without having to say it. After the first prison fell, the rest felt like it happened almost without trying, such was the release of all the built-up tension.

Sure, some detractors left and complained to their international friends about how their country was descending into anarchy, oh the horror, but anyone part of the mycelium networks knew what was up. At this point we were internationally linked, so the militaries of the world couldn’t intervene without risking revolution at home. Hence the social contagion spread around the globe. Others picked up what we started and took off running with it.

Conclusion

And that’s the story of how we threw off the shackles of capital, smashed the remnants of the state, and entered a period of joyful celebration — unleashing a festival spirit that the world had scarcely seen.

And not a moment too soon: our energies are now 100% on ecological restoration. Mother Earth is running a high fever, and things are going to get harder before they get easier. But since we literally just birthed a new world, I think we’ll manage. Won’t you join us?

Thank you for reading Anarchy Unfolds. This publication is entirely supported by my readers. Each free subscription helps grow the networks we need to weather the storms as a new world emerges. If you value this work, consider becoming a paid subscriber. I’m always grateful for your time and attention.