Under
ground
on mycelial networks, decomposition, and the quiet dark
where we do our realest work — the below to Bone Song's above
The oldest
anarchist in
the room
Beneath the forest floor runs a living web of fungal threads — mycelium — laced through the soil and trading nutrients with the roots it meets. That trade is well established; how far the shared networks reach, and how much moves tree to tree through them, is still argued over by the people who dig them up. It has no head office. It grows in every direction at once, feeds its neighbors, and asks no one's permission.
Its intelligence is distributed: problems get solved, paths get reinforced, weak connections fade — all with no commanding center telling each thread what to do.
We know this shape, because it is how we try to hold each other. A competency network — everyone knowing something, sharing it with whoever needs it. Mutual aid — resources moving to where the need is greatest, not up a hierarchy to be rationed back down.
Zero hierarchy is not a slogan we impose on the network. It is the shape the network takes when we stop forcing it into a chain of command. The mycelium never needed a manager. Neither, it turns out, do we — we need interdependence, which is a very different thing.
distributed network · no commanding center
hyphae · nodes · nutrient trade · reinforcing paths
carbon: forged above, metabolized below
star → soil → hyphae → uptake → and back
Nothing is wasted.
Only waiting to be
metabolized.
Decomposition has an image problem. We hear the word and think of rot and loss. But fungi reframe it: they break the toughest structures — rock, oil, a fallen tree — back down into materials life can use again. Rock becomes soil. A dead trunk becomes a nursery.
The star-forged carbon of Bone Song does not stop at the skeleton. It falls, becomes soil, is taken up by the network, and passed along — star stuff all the way down, and up again through the ground.
Then comes the leap from biology to politics: we can enlist those powers on the hard structures too. The pathology paradigm that files us as broken. The deficit framing. The systems built hostile toward the people who most need them. We do not argue with the rock. We grow into its cracks and, over time, turn it into ground.
Beneath the forest,
a network with no name
is doing the work.
No head office. No throne. No plan on file.
It grows in every direction at once,
feeds its neighbors,
and breaks the dead down into the living —
underground, unseen, asking no one's permission.
We know this shape.
It is how we try to hold each other:
no one at the center,
resources moving to wherever the need is,
everyone teaching, everyone learning,
growth in every direction at once.
Decomposition is not the end.
Rock becomes soil. A fallen tree becomes a nursery.
Nothing is wasted here —
only waiting to be metabolized
into whatever comes next.
The carbon in you was forged in a star.
It fell. It became soil.
The network took it up and passed it on,
and some of it became you.
Star stuff, all the way down,
and up again through the ground.
The realest work happens in the dark,
where no one is watching,
where the metrics never reach.
Do not mistake invisibility for absence.
The network is busiest
exactly where you cannot see it.
We are not admiring a clever organism.
We are kin, recognizing a relative.
We look for ourselves in the fungi
and we find us there:
mischief with a purpose,
refusing the world as given,
making new possibilities
while composting the old.
We love you down to your star stuff —
and up again through the soil.
To the thread. To the trade. To the dark.
To the network that occasionally surfaces
and is busiest when it does not.
L★S.
The work that
changes everything
is the work
no one is watching
In a world of influencers and incessant self-promotion, mycelial networks engineer whole ecosystems in the quiet and the dark. The most transformative work is often the most invisible.
There is deep resonance here for anyone told to be louder, more visible, more legibly productive to count. So much of what holds us together is quiet crip labor — unglamorous, unposted, done where the metrics never reach.
Unmasking is often a retreat from the stage lights into a truer, quieter mode. Monotropism — sinking all the way down into a single interest — needs exactly what the mycelium thrives in: undisturbed, unhurried, unsurveilled depth. This is what a cave is for. We do not mistake invisibility for absence.
Fungi gleefully defy well-established assumptions, making new possibilities while decomposing old ones. Mycologists call this punk science. Read the description back without the word fungi and it is a description of us: crossing boundaries, refusing the world as given, rooting the work in creativity.
To neuroqueer a space is a punk act. To imagine a livable, interdependent future built by and for the people this world discards is punk aimed at the horizon.
On decomposition — what hard structure in your life is waiting to be composted rather than fought head-on? What would it mean to grow into its cracks instead of arguing with the rock?
On the quiet and the dark — what work do you do where no one is watching, that the metrics never reach? What would you lose if you had to make it visible to count?
On kinship — where do you see yourself in the mycelium, and what changes if you live as a network that occasionally surfaces rather than a self that occasionally connects?
Underground is the fifth zine in the Stimpunks series — the below to Bone Song's above. It is offered freely, to be printed and folded and handed to someone who needs it.
It draws on two Stimpunks pieces, "A Mycelium and a Rhizome" and "The Mycelial Worldview Is Punk," and on the sources they build from: the MOTH collective's essay "Punk Law: Lessons from Fungi," Toby Kiers and SPUN on "punk science," and the documentary Allpa Ukundi, Ñukanchi Pura (Kichwa for "underground, around, and among us"), made with the Kichwa people of Sarayaku in the Ecuadorian Amazon together with the Fungi Foundation and SPUN. The rhizome comes from Deleuze & Guattari; the neurodiversity paradigm language from Nick Walker and the Autistic community of InLv; the cosmology from Carl Sagan. The Stimpunks synthesis is our own extension, not a claim made by those authors.
On the science: mycorrhizal symbiosis — fungi and roots trading nutrients — is well established. The popular "wood wide web" picture of forests wired together, with elder trees feeding seedlings through shared fungal networks, is contested; see Karst, Jones & Hoeksema, "Positive citation bias and overinterpreted results lead to misinformation on common mycorrhizal networks in forests" (Nature Ecology & Evolution 7, 2023). We keep the kinship and drop the overclaim. A rhyme, not a proof.
The underground has been among us all along. The mycelial worldview is punk, and punk is a Stimpunks worldview.