How We Grew the Internet Wrong: What Mycelium Networks Teach Us About Digital Infrastructure
- the Institute
- Nov 14
- 5 min read
Dig into any forest floor and you'll find them: thin white threads branching through soil, wrapping around roots, connecting tree to tree in a web so dense that a single handful of earth contains miles of filament. This is mycelium—the hidden network that moves nutrients, water, and chemical signals between plants. When a Douglas fir gets attacked by insects, it broadcasts chemical warnings through mycelial threads to neighboring trees, which respond by producing defensive compounds. The forest communicates through its underground internet.
Here's what makes mycelium remarkable: there's no central router, no master node, no control point. Information flows through the network based purely on local connections—each filament interacting with its immediate neighbors, patterns emerging from millions of simple exchanges. When one pathway gets blocked, signals route around the damage. When resources concentrate in one area, the network redistributes them. The system self-organizes without hierarchy.
The internet we built does the opposite.
From Mycelium to Monopoly
In 1969, ARPANET connected four university computers in a distributed mesh. Like mycelial threads finding each other in soil, these nodes formed peer-to-peer connections with no center, no control point. Information could flow through any available path. When one connection failed, packets routed around it. The early internet resembled mycelium: decentralized, resilient, self-healing. Then came commercialization.
By the mid-1990s, telecom companies and venture capitalists looked at this distributed network and saw inefficiency. Why let data meander through peer connections when you could route everything through centralized data centers? They built Internet Exchange Points—massive routing facilities where internet traffic concentrates. They constructed data centers in Virginia, Oregon, Iowa—warehouses full of servers that became the internet's new core.
Today, when you post to social media, your message doesn't hop device-to-device like a chemical signal through mycelium. It travels through fiber optic cables to a data center, gets duplicated across redundant storage, then makes the reverse journey to your friend's phone. The entire planetary network activates for a single hello—but the path runs through corporate infrastructure, not through the social network itself.
We built data centers where mycelium would have built meshes. We created monopolies where nature creates commons.
What Mycelium Gets Right
Watch a mycelial network respond to change and you'll see elegant network theory in action:
Local decision-making, global intelligence: Each hyphal tip—the growing end of a mycelial thread—makes autonomous decisions based on local chemical gradients. No thread waits for central approval to branch, connect, or reroute. Yet these millions of local choices create network-wide optimization. Resources flow where needed. Connections form between distant nodes. The system displays collective intelligence without requiring hierarchical control.
The internet could work this way. Mesh networking protocols like those used in the Red Hook WiFi network let devices make local routing decisions. Your phone connects to nearby phones, each forwarding packets based on immediate network conditions. No central router required. When Hurricane Sandy knocked out Verizon's towers in 2012, Red Hook's mesh kept running—neighbors' devices finding each other, forming pathways, routing around failure. Mycelial architecture in digital form.
Redundant pathways prevent cascading failure: Mycelium doesn't route all traffic through critical nodes. Cut one thread and signals flow through adjacent pathways. Destroy an entire section and the network grows around the damage. There are no single points of failure because there are no privileged nodes.
Compare this to modern internet infrastructure. In 2021, a Fastly CDN outage took down Amazon, Reddit, the New York Times, and thousands of other sites for hours. One company's technical problem cascaded into global internet disruption because we've architected centralization—funneling traffic through concentrated infrastructure instead of distributing it across meshes.
Resource sharing without markets: Mycelium doesn't extract rent for providing connectivity. A tree doesn't pay for network access. Resources flow based on need and reciprocity—what biologists call symbiotic exchange. Fungi provide trees with phosphorus and nitrogen; trees provide fungi with carbon. Both organisms thrive through cooperation, not competition.
The internet began with similar principles. Early internet pioneers built cooperative networks where universities and research institutions shared bandwidth freely. Internet Service Providers emerged as member-owned cooperatives in many regions. But market consolidation replaced cooperation with extraction. Today, Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T control residential internet access in most of America, charging whatever local monopolies allow while fighting municipal broadband attempts.
The Architecture Determines the Future
Here's the uncomfortable truth: mycelial networks aren't better than centralized networks by accident. The architecture creates the outcome.
Mycelium's distributed structure makes cooperation optimal. With no central control point to capture, there's no incentive to monopolize. With redundant pathways, there's no leverage to extract rent. With local decision-making, there's no single entity to corrupt. The physical topology determines the social relations.
The same applies to internet architecture. When we build centralized infrastructure—data centers, Internet Exchange Points, CDNs—we create natural monopolies. Network effects ensure that the largest platforms win. Capital requirements mean only well-funded corporations can compete. The architecture guarantees consolidation.
But when we build mesh networks, community-owned fiber, and federated platforms, we create different incentives. Cooperative ownership becomes efficient. Local control becomes practical. Distributed architecture enables distributed governance.
This isn't utopian wishful thinking. It's network theory applied to social infrastructure—the same network theory that explains why mycelium self-organizes into resilient webs instead of brittle hierarchies.
Growing New Networks
In soil, mycelium extends from established networks to new territory through exploration. Hyphal tips branch and probe, searching for roots to colonize. When they make contact, nutrient exchange begins. The network expands incrementally—connection by connection, node by node.
The cooperative internet grows the same way. In Chattanooga, municipal fiber provides gigabit speeds to every resident—cheaper and faster than private ISPs because the city owns the infrastructure. In Spain, Guifi.net connects 37,000 nodes through community-owned wireless mesh. In Detroit, the Equitable Internet Initiative builds neighborhood networks where residents govern their own connectivity.
These aren't isolated experiments. They're mycelia spreading—demonstrating that cooperative internet infrastructure works, that communities can own their digital commons, that network architecture shapes power relations.
NTARI's work extends these networks into new territory. The .ntari top-level domain will function like mycelium for digital identity—distributed registration, cooperative governance, transparent protocols. Agrinet creates farmer-owned data networks where market information flows peer-to-peer, no corporate intermediary extracting value. Municipal mesh networks we're helping develop let cities grow their own internet infrastructure—locally controlled, democratically governed, architecturally resilient.
The question isn't whether mycelial internet architecture can work. Nature proved that 600 million years ago. The question is whether we'll build it—connection by connection, community by community, until the mesh becomes the network and the cooperative model becomes the standard.
Learn More
Mycelial Networks and Forest Ecology:
Mesh Networks and Decentralized Infrastructure:
Network Theory and Architecture:
The mycelial web under your feet demonstrates what distributed networks accomplish: resilience through redundancy, intelligence through local decision-making, cooperation through architectural design. The internet we built chose centralization instead. But the internet we're building—community by community, protocol by protocol—returns to mycelial principles.
The technical challenges aren't trivial. The political resistance from incumbent monopolies is real. But the architecture determines the outcome. Build networks like mycelium—distributed, cooperative, locally controlled—and you create internet infrastructure that serves communities instead of extracting from them.
Join the developers, researchers, and organizers building mycelial internet architecture in NTARI's Slack workspace: https://join.slack.com/t/ntari/shared_invite/zt-39injdzvr-a7jY2FVU00fYPopG7gyP4w. The network grows connection by connection. Add yours.
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