The Wood Wide Web Is Not a Metaphor

The mycorrhizal network is the best picture we have of a resilient, decentralized system. It is also, in places, a lie we like too much.

Trees connected by fungal threads share nutrients, route warnings, and subsidize seedlings in the shade. Every popular retelling turns this into a cooperative internet, the wood wide web, and every retelling quietly drops the parasitism, the competition, the fungi playing favorites.

The honest version

Real mycorrhizal networks are marketplaces with cheating, not utopias with packets. That doesn't weaken the analogy for distributed systems. It strengthens it. Our networks also have freeloaders, sybils, and incentives that don't align.

The metaphor earns its keep precisely at the point most people abandon it: the ugly parts.