The Forest Knows When Something Dies

I went down a rabbit hole this week that started with mushrooms and ended with me being angry at the internet. Which is not where I expected to land on a Thursday but here we are. I was supposed to be meal prepping and making arrangements for Mother's Day.

It started because someone shared a clip about Suzanne Simard's research. She's the forest ecologist who figured out that trees talk to each other underground. Not metaphorically. Literally. Actually. Through fungal networks that connect their roots. I have kind of always known about this, since being smitted by the movie strange magic in 2015. So while avoiding the scrollable internet for a few days in attempt to be the least uptight, highstrung, daughter this mothers day, I started re-reading. New things are happening in the world of fungi it seems.

They call it the Wood Wide Web, which is a pun I will be respecting forever. Fungi thread through the soil and link trees together. Hundreds of them. Different species even. Not event the same lineage. Plantae kingdom, and fungi kingdom. And through these connections they actually share things: Carbon. Nitrogen. Phosphorus. Water. Information - yeah, talking - speaking entirely different languages - Trees are literally networking better than I can on LinkedIn, and they don't even have wifi or a personality... honestly, maybe that last one is my Linkedin Problem.

Here's the part that broke my brain a little. When a tree is dying... the network knows. The dying tree dumps its remaining resources into the MUSHROOMS network, and the network redistributes them to OTHER trees that can still use them. The forest doesn't waste what the dying tree had. It recycles it. Mushrooms are literal uber drivers. Redistributing it. The nutrients go to seedlings. To neighbors. To whatever can still grow. The dying tree becomes a donor and the network is the mechanism that makes sure the donation lands somewhere useful. I cant reiterate enough.. that this isn't trees doing it for trees. The mushrooms are the custodians of the forest. WHAT?!

This has been happening for roughly 450 million years. I only just learnt about it yesterday. Four hundred and fifty million years of detecting when something stops and then doing something about it. Of recognizing when something stops contributing and redirecting what it had to where it's needed. Before dinosaurs. Before DIRT existed in the way we think of dirt. These networks were already running. Mushrooms figured it out FOR THE TREES. Does that mean the lorax is just the humanization of a mushroom? Oh man, new rabbit hole incoming.

Take that perspective and look at what I do, scroll the internet.

When a user dies online, nothing happens. The account stays. The data stays. If I dies tomorrow... my subscriptions stay active; they keep billing. The profile picture stays up. The email address keeps receiving. Nothing gets cleaned up. Nothing gets recycled. Nothing gets returned anywhere useful. It just sits there. A digital corpse in a digital hallway that nobody walks through anymore... still consuming resources, still holding space, still technically "alive" in every way the system can measure because - even without me in it - the system has no way to tell the thing actually changed. There is even tech coming out that I could set up, to have messages keep going out. You - dear reader - might not even know I am dead for a year! - Okay, that might be great - well for you. I might write about that next.

I wrote about my thermostat last week. How it was still sending data to an account I deleted eight months ago. Same problem at a different scale. The internet doesn't know when something stops. It doesn't detect absence. It doesn't redirect resources. It doesn't recycle what's been abandoned. It just accumulates. Layer on layer of dead accounts and orphaned data and unused subscriptions and forgotten profiles, all of it sitting in server farms burning electricity to maintain the digital equivalent of a body nobody buried. That's... not great, when you put it like that. That is without making the analogy of all that debris just sitting on the forest floor until it becomes fuel for a giant wild fire - like someone taking on my now vacant identity... Like what is happening with Ozzy Ozzbourne's Twitter account... that still posts to this day. iick. Okay, now that IS a new post.

The numbers are stupid. And I mean that literally. The average enterprise maintains 15,000 inactive user accounts that are still enabled. FIFTEEN THOUSAND. 88 percent of organizations carry ghost users in their environments. 51 percent of enterprise software licenses are dormant at any given time. That's billions of dollars a year in resources allocated to nobody. The internet is paying rent on empty apartments and has no mechanism to notice the tenant left. Sometimes that is even the POINT. have you read about everything happening with these "ghost philanthropy" companies and not for profits in california - that are getting paid.. but just don't exist? Should I talk about that too.. Oh man - the internet giveth of its bounty.

A forest would never do this. A forest can't afford to. Resources are finite in the woods. Sunlight is competitive. Water is seasonal. If a tree stopped photosynthesizing and the network kept sending it nutrients anyway, the whole system would degrade. So the network evolved to detect exactly this scenario. Not because trees are smart. I mean... they probably are. I don't even feel like I should be calling them out like that at this point. But systems that waste resources on absence don't survive for 450 million years. The ones that detect and respond to death do. That's not philosophy. That's just math with a couple hundred-million-year timeline.

The internet is maybe 50 years old depending on where you start counting. And it's already choking on its own waste. Data centers consume more energy than some countries. I've seen that stat before and scrolled past it (see: last blog post about scrolling past things). E-waste is the fastest growing waste stream on the planet. Digital storage grows exponentially while the data inside it becomes less and less relevant. We're building bigger landfills for information nobody will ever access again.

The forest composts. The internet hoards. Pretty Human, honestly.

I need that on a coffee mug- or a rainforest preservation poster.

And it's not just the waste... it's the failure to redistribute. When a tree dies in a forest and releases its carbon, nearby seedlings get a growth boost. The death feeds the living. When a user dies on the internet and their Spotify account keeps running, nobody gets those playlists. Nobody inherits the curation. Nobody benefits from the twenty years of preferences that algorithm learned. It just runs in the background, serving recommendations to a ghost, burning compute cycles on a listener who will never press play again. That hits me harder than I expected. My dad's Spotify is still active. I checked. It recommended him a playlist last Tuesday. Facebook still tells me to connect with family who didn't get past COVID.

I keep thinking about the "mycorrhizal" network like a design document. Not a metaphor. Not as a cute nature analogy for a tech blog. As an actual architecture that solves problems the internet hasn't figured out how to even think about yet. Detection of death, nothing, absence. Redistribution of resources from the dead to the living. Waste elimination through recycling instead of accumulation. Communication between nodes about the state of the network. Warning signals when something is under stress. All of it running without a central authority, without a server, without an update cycle, without a subscription, without a terms of service agreement. Just fungi and roots and 450 million years of figuring it out, if we just frikken asked.

We built the internet and called it a network. But a network implies connection and response. What we actually built is a filing cabinet that never throws anything away and charges you monthly for the privilege of not looking inside it. The forest is the network. The internet is the landfill. Not even a graveyard - no one gets to go see it, or remember. It is just a steaming pile of hot garbage.

I don't have a fix for this. I'm not an engineer. I just follow tech and yell into the void about it on Wednesdays. But I know what it looks like when a system works because I spent three hours this week reading about one that's been working since before dinosaurs had parasocial relationships and easy dopamine. And I know what it looks like when a system doesn't, because I'm sitting inside one right now, distracting myself from scrolling past 10 second clips of a boat with a new Hentavirus on it.

The forest knows when something dies. The internet doesn't. And until it learns, we're just going to keep building bigger landfills and calling them clouds until we just dump it all. All that energy, humanity, resource - gone.