Books
The Mushroom at the End of the World
The Mushroom at the End of the World
Curator’s Note
An ethnography of the matsutake mushroom that is secretly about everything — capitalism, ecology, resilience, and what grows in the ruins of destroyed systems. If the internet is a dumpster fire, this book is about the mushrooms growing in the ashes.
Anna Tsing follows the matsutake mushroom from the forests of Oregon to the markets of Tokyo, and along the way builds a theory of how life persists in the ruins of capitalism. The matsutake only grows in disturbed forests — forests that have been logged, burned, or abandoned. It is a creature of the ruins, thriving in the wreckage of what came before.
The parallel to the internet is impossible to ignore. The best things on the web today grow in the margins, in the spaces that the platforms have abandoned.
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