Metabolic Rift
1. METABOLIC RIFT
Metabolic rift is a concept from Marx that helps us locate where we are in the historical trajectory of Mycelium Teleology. Metabolic rift is what happens when humans disrupt the natural processes of earth systems to the point of no return. If we pan out and away from organic objects—be they trees, rivers, orangutans, clouds, ants or slime mold—we can conceptualize larger earth processes as opposed to isolated beings. These earth ecosystems form a metabolism—the transfer of energy through life. This metabolism has been engineering itself for more than a billion years; these are very old, very complicated systems that sustain life itself. Humans have torn a rift in these systems and, as-of-yet, we do not know how to repair them. The Anthropocene era, from a geo-historical context, is solely defined by this rift. Examples of metabolic rift can be found anywhere from plastic waste, to the depletion of water sources, to increasing forest fires, rising seas, rising temperatures, pandemics, species extinction, etc. We stand at a strange and vertiginous moment where we are only just beginning to realize the full extent of our clear and present doom. Our only hope is our sheer ignorance: that which we know is far surpassed by what we do not know.
2. TERMINAL PROFIT
Because Capitalism can make a profit from cataclysm, it has no real motive to prevent it. This makes metabolic rift a vicious problem. Capitalism is an unnatural metabolic process. It clones energy transfers and extracts from the natural metabolic processes of earth for the sole purpose of maximum profit. Profit is the force without which Capitalism does not exit. It is a force that cannot stop and will not compromise. A telling axiom taken from the technical analysis of markets makes this force self-evident: those who are winning will continue to win and those who are losing will only continue to lose all the more. This rule makes capitalism a zero-sum determinism that must produce a losing class. This losing class are the dispossessed of the earth. These dispossessed are both the impoverished multitudes unable to eat, and also, the planet itself. In other words: capitalism produces catastrophe. We can see evidence for this catastrophe anywhere from the slave trade, to the genocide of indigenous peoples, to the opioid crisis, to the advance of metabolic rift. The force of profit generates the fantasy of prosperity without consequence. Metabolic rift is the brutal fact that the consequences of profit have now become an existential threat to society itself; these consequences are as severe as we can imagine; The brutal fact that metabolic rift makes clear is that the rule of profit is terminal.
3. METABOLIC REPAIR
Mycelium Teleology accelerates the vertigo of this dire moment by continually revealing to us how much we do not know about life on planet earth. The common experience of those studying mushrooms has been described as a kind of ego dissolution. This is what I have referred to elsewhere as the 14,000 epiphanies. Each new “fact” that science learns about mushrooms undoes a thousand other old fictions that we have been living inside of. One such disorienting fact is that mycelium has the power to repair metabolic rift. We have found evidence of this metabolic genius in mushrooms that can eat plastic, clean up radiation, and break down petrol-chemicals into their benign parts. This power of mycelium to repair what humans have broken indicates two profound facts:
1. We are not alone.
2. Should humankind ruin the environment to the point of their own destruction, mushrooms will inherit the ruins*
Mycelium Teleology presents a counternarrative to the apocalyptic narratives of capitalism and its progenitor Christianity (more on this soon). Whereas both Capitalism and Christianity tend to desire the apocalypse, Mycelium Teleology proposes the radical thought that life on the planet will not end. It is possible that Capitalism may crash and burn in our lifetimes, but there is also the very real possibility that life, humankind and otherwise, will go on. The relevant question is how can we sustain life now. The answer to this question will not be found in capitalism, for profit is its only solution; but there are other much older forces at work on the planet that may have answers we cannot as-of-yet imagine.
