26
Network
Stimpunks Foundation · Zine No. 26

A Mycelium and
a Rhizome

how neurodivergent knowledge grows: no trunk, no center, many doors

L★S
Love You Down
To Your Star Stuff
· open edition ·
The rhizome

Not a
tree

The usual picture of knowledge is a tree. One trunk, a few big branches, everything ranked and traceable back to a single root. To learn it you climb; to belong you find your place on the chart. Miss a branch and you're lost.

Deleuze and Guattari offered another shape: the rhizome. Picture ginger root, or crabgrass, or fungal thread — no trunk, no first cause, no top. Any point can connect to any other. It is "a model perpetually in construction or collapsing," they wrote: a map you can enter from any edge, not a tree you must climb from the base.

Cut a rhizome and it doesn't die — it regrows from anywhere. There is no root to ask permission of, because there is no root.

A map you can enter from any edge — not a tree you must climb from the base.
tree one root · a top rhizome any point to any point

hierarchy vs network
no root, no top

A Mycelium and a Rhizome · Stimpunks 2
enter anywhere spiky mono-tropism deep attn a word that fit burnout a classroom problem

no prerequisite · no gatekeeper
every door opens onto the whole

Entry points

Many
doors

Because there's no beginning, there's no wrong place to start. Neurodivergent knowledge is a rhizome you enter wherever your life opens a door. Come in at Spiky Profiles and you might follow a thread to Monotropism, and on to Deep Attention — or arrive from the far side entirely, through burnout, or a word that finally fit, or a problem in a classroom.

No prerequisite. No gatekeeper checking you read the introduction first. No "you're not ready for this yet." The map has as many doors as there are people, and every door opens onto the whole.

This matters most for minds that were told they'd learned things in the wrong order, or hadn't earned the next rung. In a rhizome there are no rungs — only the next connection that makes sense to you.

No prerequisite. No gatekeeper. As many doors as there are people.
A Mycelium and a Rhizome · Stimpunks 3
The network flows

The mycelium
moves

A rhizome is the shape; a mycelium is the life in it. Underground, fungal threads lace whole forests together — the "wood wide web" (Simard) — shuttling sugar, water, and warning signals between trees that never touch, feeding a seedling in the shade from a parent in the sun.

And the network is not fixed. Where a path is useful, traffic thickens it; where it isn't, it quietly fades. A slime mold — one cell, no brain, no boss — grows across a map of scattered food and settles into almost exactly the rail network human engineers drew for Tokyo (Tero et al., 2010). Decentralised, and still smart.

That's how care and knowledge move through our communities too: not issued from a head office, but flowing along the threads to wherever they're needed, strengthening whatever works.

Not issued from a head office — flowing along the threads to wherever it's needed.
the network learns plenty fed in the shade strong paths thicken · weak paths fade

flow · redistribute · adapt
smart without a boss

A Mycelium and a Rhizome · Stimpunks 4
same shape, different scale cosmic web mycelium neuron not a pyramid — a web supercluster · mushroom · synapse

read the captions to tell them apart
the universe's favourite shape

Every scale

The same shape
everywhere

Zoom all the way out and the shape returns. The cosmic web — the largest structure there is — is galaxies strung like dew along vast filaments of dark matter, with great voids between and no center anywhere. Matter drifts down the strands to the bright knots where filaments cross.

Set a slice of the cosmic web beside a mycelial mat, beside a slime mold, beside a single neuron, and you have to read the captions to tell them apart. The universe keeps reaching for the same answer: not a pyramid, a web.

So when we build without a throne at the top, we aren't failing to organise. We're organising the way the universe does at every scale. Decentralisation isn't disorder — it's the oldest structure there is.

Not a pyramid. A web. The oldest structure there is.
A Mycelium and a Rhizome · Stimpunks 5
Neuro-anarchy

The Autistic
Rhizome

We are already building this. David Gray-Hammond and Katie Munday name it neuro-anarchy: "the decentralisation of hierarchy as it pertains to neurocultures." The Autistic Rhizome is "a network with no single point of origin. No part of the network depends upon the existence of another."

No advocates ranked above followers, no advancing by how much you know — we meet as equals, held together by a do-no-harm ethic instead of a chain of command. Helen Edgar maps the same ground: watering holes and Discords alive at 2am, belonging you don't have to earn.

Lose any one node and the network lives on, because nothing depends on a center. That isn't fragility waiting for a leader. It's resilience by design — a community shaped like the minds it's made of.

Nota tree — no trunk, and no root to ask permission of.
Nota ladder — no one advances by rank or "knowledge level"; we meet as equals.
Notwaiting for a leader — decentralisation is the design, not a defect.
Notchaos — a rhizome has structure; it just isn't a pyramid.
Notbuilt for us by others — by and for; we grow our own soil.
no center to lose one lost the network holds · equals, not ranks

autonomous · interconnected
resilience by design

A Mycelium and a Rhizome · Stimpunks 6
where the map touches soil soil patterns become environments Cavendish Space

ideas → experiments → rooms
grow the soil

Cavendish Space

Where it meets
the ground

A map is only worth something where it touches soil. Cavendish Space is where the rhizome and the mycelium meet reality: where ideas become experiments, patterns become environments, and a concept like Regulation First becomes an actual room someone can breathe in.

We've been below before — Underground (No. 5) followed the mycelium into the dark, and No One Is the Leader (No. 22) watched the flock turn without a captain. This is the map that ties them: a knowledge and a culture with no trunk, fed by threads that carry what we know to whoever needs it next.

So don't look for the person in charge. Find the nearest thread, and pull. Add a door. Thicken a path. Feed a seedling in the shade. Love you down to your star stuff — every node of it.

Don't look for the person in charge. Find the nearest thread, and pull.
A Mycelium and a Rhizome · Stimpunks 7
L★S A tree has one trunk and a chain of command. Neurodivergent knowledge and community grow the other way — a rhizome with no root to ask permission of, fed by a mycelium that carries what we know to whoever needs it next. No center to lose. Structure without a throne.
No. 5 Underground — the mycelial worldview, decomposition & the quiet dark
No. 18 The Garden and the Stars — knowledge gardens & the commons
No. 21 Not a Line — the spectrum as constellation, not a ladder
No. 22 No One Is the Leader — emergence & the murmuration
No. 25 Shared Signal — signal, distance & the Autistic Rhizome online
No. 26 A Mycelium and a Rhizome — how neurodivergent knowledge grows: no trunk, no center ← you are here
Reflection

Which door did you come in through — and who held it open?

Where have you seen care flow along the threads to whoever needed it, with no one in charge?

What path could you thicken, or what new door could you add, this week?

A Mycelium and a Rhizome is the twenty-sixth zine in the Stimpunks series. It maps how neurodivergent knowledge and community grow — a rhizome (structure) fed by a mycelium (flow) — and grounds them where they meet reality, in Cavendish Space. It's the map that ties Underground (No. 5) to No One Is the Leader (No. 22).

The philosophy: Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (1980) — the rhizome as a map, not a tracing, "perpetually in construction or collapsing." The culture: David Gray-Hammond and Katie Munday on neuro-anarchy and the Autistic Rhizome ("a network with no single point of origin"), and Helen Edgar's Autistic Rhizome and online watering holes. The framing draws on Stimpunks' own A Mycelium and a Rhizome and Cavendish Space, with its pattern language — Spiky Profiles, Monotropism, Deep Attention, Regulation First, Environment Fit. The science: mycorrhizal networks and the "wood wide web" (Suzanne Simard); the decentralised problem-solving of the slime mold Physarum polycephalum, which reproduced the Tokyo rail network (Tero et al., 2010); and the cosmic web of dark-matter filaments — the universe's largest structure, and a rhizome at the grandest scale.

The star stuff is Carl Sagan's, and the SN 1006 remnant on every Stimpunks page. The reading — that decentralisation is not disorder but the oldest structure there is — is ours. You were ★stuff, strung on the web with everything else, all along.

Stimpunks Foundation · Zine No. 26 · Open Edition
Print freely · Share freely · CC BY-SA 4.0 · L★S
stimpunks.org · starstuff.earth
A Mycelium and a Rhizome · Stimpunks 8