The Fungal Network: Cyberfolk Practices in the Spaces Between

An essay on authentic culture, technological symbiosis, and the unmarketable spaces of resistance

I. The Waymo Swarms

In San Francisco, 2025, autonomous vehicles move through the streets like white blood cells through digital arteries. The Waymo swarms represent the spectacle made literal—transportation as pure consumption, where even movement becomes something you purchase rather than perform. Passengers sit in climate-controlled pods, experiencing the city through algorithmic mediation, their routes optimized by systems that exceed human comprehension.

This is what Guy Debord called the society of the spectacle: lived experience replaced by its representation, direct encounter dissolved into data streams. The Waymo passenger doesn't navigate the city; they consume a transportation service while the city flows past like content on a screen.

But in the cracks of this spectacular infrastructure, something else persists.

II. The Detour as Resistance

A visitor to the city, traveling from hotel to Haight-Ashbury, makes an unplanned stop. There's a wooden installation in the Presidio—tactile, organic, requiring physical presence to experience. The Waymo becomes a tool for wandering rather than optimization, its autonomous systems hijacked for psychogeographic drift.

This moment embodies what the Situationists called détournement: the hijacking of spectacular forms for subversive purposes. The same technology that normally enforces efficient consumption becomes a vehicle for authentic exploration. The wooden installation offers what no algorithm can deliver: the irreplaceable experience of encountering something that can't be digitized, optimized, or reproduced.

The visitor has stumbled into what we might call cyberfolk practice—ways of relating to technology that preserve human agency within systems designed to eliminate it. Not through rejection of the digital, but through insistence on direct encounter within mediated environments.

III. The Persistence of Scale

From the Presidio to Haight-Ashbury, the visitor witnesses layers of cultural production operating at different scales. Amoeba Records continues to thrive by selling physical media in an age of streaming. John Fluevog creates shoes too weird to mass-produce. Nooworks designs fashion that resists algorithmic replication. A coffee shop plays ska music while Waymos cruise silently past—rocksteady's precursor as sonic détournement of the smart city's ambient hum.

These businesses represent what Mark Fisher might have called "popular modernism"—cultural forms that are simultaneously accessible and uncompromising, refusing to simplify themselves for market appeal. They survive not by competing with algorithmic curation but by offering something fundamentally unmarketable: the experience of browsing, discovering, choosing based on aesthetic resonance rather than optimization.

The ska in the coffee shop becomes particularly significant. Ska's entire aesthetic celebrates movement, energy, collective joy—the antithesis of passive consumption. It broadcasts an alternative frequency while the surveillance capitalism infrastructure hums around it, creating what the Situationists would recognize as a "constructed situation"—a moment where authentic encounter interrupts the spectacular order.

IV. The Fungal Metaphor

These scattered observations point toward a larger pattern. Like mycorrhizal networks that connect forest ecosystems through underground fungal webs, cyberfolk practices create hidden networks of authentic relationship within spectacular infrastructure. They're neither purely oppositional nor fully incorporated—they exist in the spaces between, creating symbiotic relationships with technological systems while maintaining their own irreducible logic.

Fungi are the perfect metaphor for this kind of cultural practice. They can be nutritious, poisonous, or consciousness-expanding, depending on context and approach. They decompose dead matter while creating new life. They network and communicate in ways that exceed individual comprehension while remaining grounded in specific ecological relationships.

The visitor's experience in San Francisco reveals how this fungal network operates in practice. The wooden installation, the independent businesses, the musical détournement—these aren't islands of analog purity in a digital ocean. They're nodes in a living network that includes and transforms the technological infrastructure around them.

V. Scale as Political Question

What emerges from this analysis is a recognition that scale itself has become the key political question of our era. The crisis isn't simply about who controls technology, but about how human-scale meaning can persist within systems that exceed human comprehension. The Waymo swarms represent one answer: mediated experience that eliminates the unpredictability of direct encounter. The cyberfolk practices represent another: symbiotic relationships that preserve agency within technological environments.

This insight becomes particularly relevant when extended to the Pacific Northwest, where climate change has made technological infrastructure both more necessary and more alienating. Imagine atmospheric river management systems that process weather data faster than any human mind could follow, bioengineered forests that grow into architectural forms while storing carbon and processing information, transit networks that adapt to climate refugees while maintaining community connection.

In such a context, cyberfolk practices might evolve into something like "watershed folklore"—ways of relating to technological systems that honor both efficiency and intimacy, both collective survival and individual agency. The Infrastructure Mystic who tends servers with ritual care, the Salmon Keeper who guides both data packets and fish runs through river systems, the Rain Keeper who reads emotional weather in atmospheric patterns—these figures represent not escapist fantasy but speculative extrapolation of practices already visible in the spaces between Waymos and wooden installations.

VI. The Collaborative Process

Perhaps most significantly, this entire analysis emerged through a form of human-AI collaboration that itself embodies the cyberfolk ethos. Rather than using artificial intelligence to replace human creativity or to optimize predetermined outcomes, the process became genuinely symbiotic—AI as "helper daemon" offering fragments that get filtered through human judgment, aesthetic sensibility, and lived experience.

The AI contributed pattern recognition, conceptual connections, and linguistic facility. The human contributed experiential knowledge, aesthetic judgment, and the capacity for meaning-making. Neither could have produced the analysis alone, but together they created something that feels both technologically augmented and irreducibly human.

This collaborative method suggests a model for technological relationship that's neither utopian nor dystopian but pragmatically symbiotic. Like mycorrhizal networks that benefit both fungi and forest, human-AI collaboration can create conditions where both forms of intelligence flourish without either dominating or being subsumed.

VII. Unmarketable Futures

The cyberfolk practices observed in San Francisco and extrapolated into speculative Pacific Northwest scenarios share a crucial characteristic: they resist commodification not through opposition but through their very form. You can't mass-produce the experience of browsing Amoeba Records, algorithmically generate the aesthetic judgment required for Fluevog shoes, or scale up the ritual care of server maintenance.

These practices remain "unmarketable by default"—not because they lack value, but because their value emerges from direct participation rather than consumption. They create what economists might call "experience goods" whose utility can't be separated from the process of encountering them.

This unmarketability represents a form of cultural resistance that's particularly suited to an era of ubiquitous surveillance and algorithmic mediation. While explicit political opposition gets rapidly recuperated into content for consumption, practices that simply can't be commodified maintain their subversive potential by existing outside the logic of the spectacle entirely.

VIII. Living Systems Design

What the visitor experienced in San Francisco—and what gets extrapolated into the cyberfolk game setting—suggests an approach to technological culture that we might call "living systems design." Rather than treating technology as neutral tool or autonomous force, this approach recognizes technological systems as ecological relationships that can be shaped through practice, ritual, and intentional cultivation of symbiotic rather than extractive interactions.

The wooden installation in the Presidio, the ska music in the coffee shop, the ritual maintenance of servers in a speculative future—these represent moments where technological infrastructure becomes a medium for authentic encounter rather than spectacular consumption. They don't solve the problems of scale and alienation, but they create spaces where those problems can be lived with rather than simply endured.

In the end, the fungal network of cyberfolk practices offers neither escapist fantasy nor technological solution, but something more modest and more radical: proof that authentic relationship remains possible within systems designed to prevent it. The network grows in the spaces between optimization and resistance, creating conditions where human agency and technological capability can coexist without either dominating or being subsumed.

The visitor leaves San Francisco with more than tourist memories. They carry the recognition that the future is already present in the margins, growing like moss on server cooling systems, spreading through underground networks of care and attention that no algorithm can fully map or market. The revolution, as Gil Scott-Heron predicted, will not be televised—but it might be practiced, one small détournement at a time, in the spaces where fungi grow best: the dark, damp places between certainties.