A new kind of infrastructure is spreading beneath the collapsing media landscape—one that Big Tech can't buy, politicians can't control, and communities are building for themselves
The morning the Washington Post killed its presidential endorsement, something shifted in the American information ecosystem. Not because editorial boards matter much anymore—they don't—but because it was such a perfectly choreographed illustration of information feudalism at work. A billionaire overlord, protecting his other business interests, muzzles his media property with the casual indifference of a medieval lord closing a gate. The serfs inside may grumble, but the castle belongs to him.
This is the media landscape we've inherited: Six corporations controlling 90% of what Americans see, hear, and believe. Algorithms designed by psychology PhDs to maximize engagement through outrage. Local newspapers stripped for parts by private equity vultures. Truth paywalled while lies flow freely. And now, the richest men in history collecting media properties like trading cards, transforming them into propaganda organs for their preferred versions of reality.
But here's what the oligarchs don't understand: You can't buy a mycelium.
Beneath the toxic topsoil of our information landscape, something extraordinary is happening. Communities are building their own knowledge infrastructure—decentralized, resilient, and impossible to capture. Like the mycorrhizal networks that connect forest root systems in webs of mutual aid, these new systems share resources, warn of threats, and ensure survival through connection rather than competition.
Call them Knowledge Architecture Commons. Call them narrative mesh networks. Call them the inevitable evolution of human meaning-making in response to existential threat. Whatever the label, they represent something the current media paradigm cannot comprehend: information as medicine rather than weapon, stories as community property rather than corporate asset, technology as ally rather than master.
I've spent the last six months embedded with the architects of this underground, watching them build what might be humanity's last, best hope for narrative sovereignty. What I found wasn't another crypto-utopian fantasy or Silicon Valley disruption play. It was something far more radical: communities taking back their fundamental right to tell their own stories.
To understand why this matters, you need to understand how completely fucked our current information system has become. We're not just talking about bias or corporatization—we're talking about the wholesale transformation of human meaning-making into an extractive industry.
Consider the mechanics: Every story you read, every video you watch, every thought you share online becomes data to be mined, refined, and weaponized. Not against foreign enemies, but against you. Your attention is the resource being extracted. Your polarization is the product being manufactured. Your addiction is the business model.
The platforms have become more sophisticated than any propaganda system in history because they're not pushing a single narrative—they're pushing whatever narrative will keep you scrolling. Liberal rage for liberals. Conservative rage for conservatives. And for everyone, a carefully calibrated drip of dopamine designed to override your prefrontal cortex and keep you hitting refresh.
This isn't a bug. It's the feature. An addicted, polarized, perpetually anxious population is a profitable population. You can sell them anything: products, politicians, or most lucratively, more content to manage the anxiety the previous content created.
But the real violence isn't in what these systems do—it's in what they prevent. By controlling the infrastructure of meaning-making, information feudalists don't just shape what we think. They shape what we can think.
When a handful of platforms control distribution, they control possibility. When algorithms determine visibility, they determine reality. When engagement metrics drive creation, they drive culture itself toward whatever generates the most powerful emotional response—which, neuroscience tells us, is always fear, anger, or disgust.
This is information feudalism: A system where the means of meaning production are owned by lords who extract value from digital serfs. Where communities' stories are stolen, packaged, and sold back to them. Where the fundamental human act of sharing wisdom becomes a resource to be mined.
The local newspaper that once helped your community make sense of itself? Bought by a hedge fund, stripped of reporters, turned into a clickbait farm. The social media platform where you connected with friends? Transformed into a skinner box designed to make you angry at those same friends. The search engine that once felt like magic? Now a shopping mall where truth is whatever pays for placement.
But here's where it gets interesting. While we were all doomscrolling through democracy's death spiral, something else was taking root. Technologists who'd helped build the surveillance economy started having dark nights of the soul. Journalists watched their industry devour itself and began experimenting with new models. Communities that had been fodder for content mills started saying: What if we just... didn't participate?
What emerged wasn't another platform. It was a protocol. A way of creating, preserving, and sharing knowledge that operates outside the extraction economy entirely.
Picture it like this: Instead of uploading your community's wisdom to some platform's servers, you build your own knowledge garden. Instead of hoping an algorithm shows your story to your neighbors, you create direct peer-to-peer connections. Instead of monetizing through ads, you operate on gift economy principles. Instead of scaling infinitely, you stay small and interconnected.
Each community becomes a node. Each node preserves its own stories, traditions, and wisdom. But—and here's the crucial part—the nodes connect. They share protocols and practices. They exchange insights and innovations. They warn each other of threats. They create resilience through diversity rather than efficiency through homogenization.
The architecture is deceptively simple. Take the podcast—that most democratic of media forms, still resistant to complete platform capture. Add collaborative AI that amplifies rather than replaces human wisdom. Create structured knowledge gardens where insights can grow and evolve. Build community spaces for integration and practice. Make it all open source so anyone can replicate the model.
But the real innovation isn't technical. It's philosophical. These systems operate on post-extractive principles:
Stories flow in circles, not up pyramids
Value accumulates to communities, not shareholders
Wisdom is preserved, not paywalled
Technology serves, not surveils
Small is the goal, not the enemy
Here’s an example: a local node starts with seven people tired of their local newspaper's collapse. They began recording conversations with elders, using AI to help structure the wisdom into searchable archives, creating their own hyperlocal knowledge commons. Within six months, they had preserved more community history than the newspaper had in its final decade. More importantly, the history belonged to the community—no platform could delete it, no algorithm could bury it, no acquisition could steal it.
This is what terrifies the feudal lords: You can't buy a protocol. You can't acquire a practice. You can't monopolize a method that gives itself away.
They can buy platforms—they've proven that. They can buy companies, newspapers, social networks. But they can't buy the connections between nodes. They can't buy the trust built through actual relationship. They can't buy the wisdom held in bodies and communities. They can't buy what was never for sale.
The mycelial nature of these networks makes them antifragile. Cut one node, and the others grow stronger. Attack the network, and it learns and adapts. Try to co-opt it, and it forks into something uncapturable.
We've seen this pattern before. When printing presses threatened church power, they tried to control the presses. When radio threatened government monopoly on information, they tried to control the airwaves. Each time, the technology eventually routes around the control. But this time is different in one crucial way: The routing isn't creating new centers of power. It's creating networks that resist centralization entirely.
What we're witnessing isn't disruption—it's return. Return to the original functions of media: binding communities, preserving wisdom, making meaning from chaos. Return to technologies that serve rather than extract. Return to the radical idea that communities should own their own stories.
The knowledge commons rising from information feudalism's ashes don't look like traditional media. They look like gardens. Like ecosystems. Like mycorrhizal networks sharing nutrients in patterns too complex for any algorithm to optimize or any billionaire to buy.
Each node small enough to be democratic. Each network large enough to be resilient. Each story preserved not for profit but for the same reason humans have always preserved stories: because they carry the medicine forward.
If surveillance capitalism is the disease, these networks are the immune system learning to recognize and resist extraction patterns. They're teaching communities to spot manipulation, to question algorithmic amplification, to choose connection over engagement.
But more than defense, they're demonstrating offense through example. Every functional knowledge commons proves the lie of platform necessity. Every thriving gift economy undermines the myth of monetization. Every preserved community wisdom that would have been lost to paywall or acquisition builds the case: Another media is possible.
The transition won't be smooth. The feudal lords have power, capital, and every incentive to maintain their estates. They'll try to co-opt the language while missing the substance. They'll create platform versions that miss the point entirely. They'll fund think pieces about why information democracy is actually bad for democracy.
But the mycelium is already growing. In makerspaces and community centers, in discord servers and mutual aid networks, in Indigenous communities and post-industrial cities, the spores are taking root. Each one small. Each one local. Each one connected to something larger than any platform could contain.
The choice facing us isn't between corporate media and chaos. It's between extraction and cultivation. Between feudalism and commons. Between platforms that profit from our polarization and protocols that support our coherence.
The knowledge architecture being built in communities worldwide isn't just alternative media infrastructure. It's the informational substrate for whatever comes after this extractive age. It's the memory system for a species learning to survive its own success. It's the story-sharing technology for a world where the only wealth is connection and the only security is resilience.
The oligarchs can keep their platforms. Their algorithms. Their castle walls. Down here in the underground, we're growing something they can't buy or control or even fully comprehend: Communities returning to their birthright as authors of their own meaning.
The spores are spreading. The nodes are connecting. The network is learning. And when the castles finally crumble—and they always do—the forest will already be growing in their ruins.
Welcome to the mycelium. We've been expecting you.
This essay was co-created with Opus4 and hours of strategic prompting, real world experimentation and days of brainstorming in collaboration with my cohost, years of experimentation with my JournoDAO colleagues and decades of work as a photojournalist.
I watched the media industry collapse from the inside and The Human Layer and our approach to building Knowledge Architecture Systems is one solution of many to help counter-balance the destruction of our communities and our democracy by oligarchs seizing power through asymmetrical information warfare and weaponized algorithmic networks.
Learn more about what we’re building here.
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