MOTW

Mushrooms at the End of the World tells a story of diversity in our damaged landscape, following one of the strangest commodity chains of our time and exploring unexpected corners of capitalism. In all its contradictions, the author asks the question: what is there to survive in the ruins we have made? ?inspiring by it, I have also had to rethink liberal radicalization, commercialization, and marginalization in a digital culture to better understand the hope of cohabitation in an age of mass destruction.

“Mushroom foragers work for themselves,” writes Tsing. “No companies hire them. There are no wages and no benefits; pickers merely sell the mushrooms they find. Some years there are no mushrooms, and pickers are left with their expenses. Commercial wild-mushroom picking is an exemplification of precarious livelihood, without security.” After a harvest in Oregon, say, the mushrooms are bought by pop-up wholesalers who ship them promptly to sorters, who classify them and export them to Japan, where a large and ready market of high-end customers eagerly buy them, usually to give as gifts.

Tsing rejects rejects the standard narratives about “progress” that tend to be the axis for understanding the future, in both capitalist and Marxist accounts Instead, in an analysis appropriate for our time, Tsing presents to us a capitalism of “disturbance-based ecologies in which many species sometimes live together without either harmony or conquest.”