Flocking
Related data travels together. A question gets answered by whatever already knows the answer nearby, before anything is sent to a model.
Local first, cloud last
MycoStack · mycelial intelligence for the commons
Mycelial intelligence (mi) is the yin to AI's yang.
Large models think from the top down: one enormous brain, far away, re-reading the world every time you ask it something. Mycelium thinks from the bottom up: countless small threads, each aware of what is right beside it. MycoStack grows the second kind of intelligence into the data layer, so the first kind has far less to do.
substrate: alive
carriers: mesh radio · LoRa · Reticulum · internet, when convenient
status: just works
Mycelial intelligence
Data that knows where it is
In today's stack, data is inert. It sits in rows until something fetches it, ships it to a datacenter, turns it into tokens and forgets it again by morning.
In MycoStack, every piece of data carries its context: whose it is, what it means, who may use it, and what it sits next to. Data that knows its neighbourhood can act on it.
| Yang · AI | Yin · MycoStack |
|---|---|
| Thinks from the top down | Thinks from the bottom up |
| One huge model, far away | Many small threads, close by |
| Re-reads everything, every time | Remembers what is nearby |
| Scales by burning more power | Scales by growing more threads |
| Knows a lot about everything | Knows a lot about here |
| Answers the question | Works out which questions need asking |
What the substrate does
Flocking, instead of fetching
Local awareness lets the network behave like a flock of starlings: no leader, no central plan, thousands of small decisions that add up to something that looks very much like it knows what it's doing.
Reinforcement
Paths that get used grow stronger and unused ones fade. The network rewires itself around real demand, the way slime mould finds the shortest route between oat flakes.
No central router. No routing table. No meeting.
Membranes
Every community decides what crosses its edge. Context is shared on purpose and never scraped by default.
Capabilities, not permissions
For example: a question that once shipped forty thousand tokens of background to a datacenter can ship a few hundred, because the threads around it already hold the background. Do that across a whole community and the compute bill shrinks many times over.
Cosmolocal data ontologies
Light knowledge travels. Heavy data stays home.
Cosmo-localism, from the P2P Foundation's work, says: share designs globally, make things locally. MycoStack applies the same rule to meaning.
Cosmo · travels light
Shared ontologies
- What a commons, a watershed, a grant, a favour or a promise is
- Proofs that something is true
- Patterns, protocols and code
Local · stays home
Living records
- People, places, harvests and ledgers
- Conversations and decisions
- Context only the community has
A seed library in Oaxaca and a tool library in Leeds can read each other's records without either one handing them over. Each extends the shared vocabulary in its own dialect, and nothing breaks.
Beyond the internet
Off the internet, still on the network
The internet assumes an always-on connection, a few giant routers and someone in the middle you have to trust. MycoStack assumes none of that. Messages ride whatever carrier is around: mesh radio across a valley, LoRa on a solar panel, a satellite pass, a USB stick in a backpack. Protocols like Reticulum make the carrier interchangeable while the message stays sealed end to end.
Add zero-knowledge proofs and secure hardware, and a device can prove something about its data without revealing the data.
The internet had a good run, but it's legacy infrastructure now. We're migrating to the outernet: fully distributed, runs on whatever is lying around, and nobody has worked out how to put ads on it yet.
What becomes possible
- A river sensor proves the water is clean without revealing whose land it sits on.
- A member proves they belong, and votes, without saying who they are.
- A village keeps trading through an internet outage over radio, and settles up when the link returns.
- A computation proves it ran correctly on hardware you will never see.
Timing, size and traffic patterns are disguised too, by machinery whose real names we are too embarrassed to print.
What grows from it
Mycelial economics, governance and computation
Economics
Value moves to where it's needed
Fungi move sugar to the tree that is struggling. Mutual credit, commons funding and contribution accounting run on the same substrate as the data, so a community can see its own flows and feed what feeds it.
Trickle-down, but it actually trickles.
Governance
Decide where it's felt
Decisions happen at the level they affect and roll up only when they must. Holons nest inside holons, and each sets its own rules for what crosses its membrane.
Fewer meetings are not promised, only strongly implied.
Computation
Think near the data
Work runs on whatever is close to the data it needs: a phone, a home server, a solar node. Results travel and raw data doesn't. A thousand small machines that know their neighbourhood can beat one big machine that knows nothing in particular.
Your toaster will not be asked to vote. Probably.
The mushroom is the part you see. The network does the thinking.
Tap the soil to send a signal through the network. Press ` or Peek underneath to watch it flock.