The fungal revolution

Rebuilding meaning from decay

We often forget that ‘revolution’ first meant rotation, the slow movement of a planet turning around its axis. Today, the world feels mid-turn: the surface still spinning, but the core quietly rotting.

We sense it everywhere, in work, in politics, in culture. ‘Professional cuddlers’ earn £100k a year while Amazon replaces half a million workers with AI. Fast Company, once the temple of techno-optimism, now publishes a newsletter called Between Jobs to help readers “propel themselves from unemployment.” The engine of progress has stalled.

As cultural foresighter Jasmin Bina writes in The Age of Potency, we’re facing a systemic breakdown. Think of crypto, Ozempic, or TikTok, wildly different technologies, same signal: effort no longer equals reward. You can become rich from a lucky bet, thin without exercise, or famous on a misunderstanding. The result is disorientation, a collapse not just of work, but of meaning itself. What once held our sense of purpose together is decomposing.

When systems rot, we can usually react in two ways: fight the decay or use it. Fungi have mastered the second path. Their intelligence lies into metabolising death. They turn waste into networks, rot into renewal. That’s an idea that fits our moment. The innovation studio Sporesight, specialising in fungal intelligence calls it the Rot + Regeneration Method: you let certain structures die, compost them, and from that decay, new forms emerge.

This text follows both paths: first, how systems rot (simulacra), then how we fight back (noise), how we rediscover agency (desire), and how that agency spreads (rhizomes). At the end, closing this loop, it’s a revolution.

When systems rot, the simulacra era

The first symptom of decay is simulation. When systems can no longer renew themselves, they start performing coherence instead of embodying it. For example, in China, unemployed people now rent fake offices to perform the fiction of working life. Built from real data (their photos, routines, and geolocations) this fiction sustains a sense of belonging in a collapsing order. It’s an updated version of what Jean Baudrillard called the simulacra: copies that no longer point to an original, only to other copies. Like Disneyland performing the fantasy of America. Today though, the copies generate the very behaviours, economies, and emotions that keep it alive.

Take Tibo InShape, the French fitness influencer who purposely gave his image to his fans so they could use it on the generative video platform Sora. Once released, his image flooded the web in racist deepfake videos. The copy escaped the original, multiplying endlessly. As the goal seems to be visibility, the more shocking the content, the more effectively it spreads.

Another recent example is The Friend campaign, launched by an AI companionship startup. Their ads appeared across the New York subway with messages like “I’ll binge the entire series with you”. It looked like a lonely-hearts campaign, until you realised the “friend” was AI. The New Yorkers scribbled their rage onto the ads. But it turned out, as the founder explained, the outrage was part of the communication strategy. The campaign was designed to provoke backlash, to feed the algorithmic churn of attention.

It’s the perfect simulacra of late-capitalism: critique and consumption fused into the same gesture. The scandal becomes the spectacle; resistance becomes reach. The system no longer fears contradiction; it runs on it.

But when every signal reinforces the loop, when critique feeds the very system it is denouncing, distortion becomes the only way out. The only way to fight is adding interference to the signal: noise.

When we fight back with noise

Over a decade ago, my design thesis explored this logic. It was a wearable bracelet that used real sensor data (motion, altitude and temperature) to generate fake tweets. Every input was true, but the output twisted reality. During a hot yoga session (high temperature and high humidity), it might tweet that you were in the Amazon rainforest. The goal was privacy through saturation: truth hidden in a cloud of noise. It’s like designing a stealth drone, hidden in plain sight.

Today, artists extend this gesture through circuit bending, deliberately breaking game consoles or audio gear to create unexpected connections. Noise becomes a strategy to resist the demand for total transparency, creating ambiguity inside systems that crave clarity.

But resistance alone isn’t the best way out. Noise protects what’s left, it doesn’t invent what’s next. To go from rot to regeneration, like fungi, something else must enter the loop, a force that gives us agency: desire.

When desire reclaims agency

It’s worth going back to a specific definition of desire, the one defined by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. In Anti-Oedipus, they reject the psychoanalytic view of desire as a void to be filled and introduce instead the idea that desire is a collective dynamic that goes beyond the individual. Desire, in their view, is a machinic force that connects, transforms, and produces agency.

A contemporary example is The Call, by artists Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst at London’s Serpentine Galleries. Their project turned data-training, usually an extractive process, into a redistribution of power. The artists recorded fifteen community choirs across the UK to train an AI “choral” model capable of singing in response to human voices. The recordings, gathered through a songbook and a shared protocol, became part of a Data Trust, a legal and cultural framework ensuring that contributors retain collective rights over their data.

What emerges here is the deleuzian desire as a machinic force, turning the AI extractive logic upside down and reinventing the system, redistributing agency. It’s also very fungal: a non competing network of reciprocity where power circulates instead of accumulating, an intelligence that reorganises the digital soil it inhabits.

When agency scales through rhizomes

To describe how desire (and the meaning it generates) scales, Deleuze and Guattari introduced the rhizome, a structure that grows without hierarchy or a single centre. Unlike a tree, which organises meaning from roots to branches, a rhizome expands through contamination, connection and unexpected linkage like fungi. [NB: This idea has long been dear to me. It shaped both my Instagram account name @rys_om and this newsletter’s subtitle, Field notes from rhizomatic paths.]

In digital culture, the rhizome reappears as a model for distributed sense-making. Projects like Metalabel’s DFOS (Dark Forest Operating System) explore how small, interconnected groups can build private “micro-internets” to escape the current top-town logic of the web where bots now outnumber humans. These enclaves trade virality for reciprocity, reclaiming networks from systems designed to exploit attention. Agency, now lateral, builds infrastructure through connection. Like fungal mycelium, these distributed communities grow across the cracks of the dominant system, forming quiet, resilient networks that share resources and meaning beneath the surface.

Closing the loop, a fungal revolution?

The ultimate rhizomatic structure, of course, is fungal. And it’s within this field that some of the most intriguing innovations emerge. From mushroom-powered computers to self-repairing fungal architectures. But the real revolution isn’t technological; it’s in the mindset. A shift from fighting decay to collaborating with it.

Across these stages: the simulacra that imitate coherence, the noise that shields it, the desire that creates agency, the rhizomes that spread it; we can see the loop of transformation at work. The system breaks down, but the loop continues. ‘Meaning’, in this sense, is a metabolic process, decay feeding renewal, collapse becoming continuity.

That’s the quiet rhythm of the fungal revolution, already unfolding beneath our feet.

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