From Highways to Hyphae: Why Digital Forests Must Grow

A Digital Archaeological Investigation
Authors: Josie Jefferson & Felix Velasco (Unearth Heritage Foundry)
Collab: Claude 4.5 (Opus & Sonnet) & Gemini (2.5 & 3 Pro)
Date: January 2026
Classification: Applied Research
Abstract

Linear pathways optimized for speed, throughput, and efficient transport from origin to destination have defined digital infrastructure for three decades. Vice President Al Gore's "information superhighway" guided network design, policy, and investment. Yet efficiency often produces sterile spaces. Highways connect points A and B but nourish nothing in between. A paradigm shift from highway to forest architecture prioritizes life over transport. Mycological research, network science, and analysis of platform capitalism inform the "Mother Tree" principle as an alternative to extractive platform architecture. Contemporary digital giants—Google, Meta, Amazon—function as parasitic nodes extracting value from smaller participants. Myceloom infrastructure envisions established nodes as Mother Trees. These entities nourish emerging nodes rather than consume them. Stability in living systems derives from root depth, not bandwidth. Connection quality defines health, not traffic speed. The "internet of roots" establishes architectural principles dependent on relationship depth.

I. Introduction: The Metaphor That Built the Web

In 1991, then-Senator Al Gore introduced a phrase that shaped digital infrastructure development for three decades: the "information superhighway."1 Gore explicitly connected his vision to his father's legacy, Senator Albert Gore Sr., who championed the Interstate Highway System in the 1950s. Gore framed the emerging internet as the successor to America's transformative infrastructure project.2 The analogy presented the internet as "a network of highways—much like the Interstates begun in the '50s," with data traveling at electronic speeds through fiber optic cables and copper wires.3

"Information superhighway" became ubiquitous in policy discussions, academic literature, and popular culture by the mid-1990s.4 The British Library catalogued seventy-one books containing the phrase in their titles, with thirty-four published in 1995 alone.5 The conceptual framework shaped public understanding of the internet. It also influenced engineering design, investment funding, and regulatory governance.

Consequential assumptions accompanied the highway metaphor. Transport defines highways. Moving passengers and goods from origin to destination with maximum efficiency is the goal. Throughput (how many vehicles can traverse) and speed (how quickly they arrive) take priority. Sterility also defines highways. The space between on-ramps and off-ramps exists for traversal, not habitation. Interstate medians separate opposing traffic flows rather than nourishing travelers.

Network architecture optimized for packet transmission, bandwidth allocation, and latency reduction inherited these assumptions. Success metrics centered on throughput, uptime, and response times. Infrastructure connecting points ignored events at those points or relationships developing between them. Global communication at near-light speed, information access, and the dissolution of geographic barriers to commerce and collaboration resulted from the highway model. Extractive platform capitalism now dominating digital life also emerged from these conditions.

Challenges facing digital infrastructure in the Web4 era demand a different metaphor, a different architecture, and a different set of assumptions about network purpose. Highways serve a purpose. Forests, however, must now be built.

II. The Poverty of Linear Infrastructure

Contemporary digital challenges reveal where the highway metaphor breaks down. Highways optimize individual journeys but cannot coordinate collective flourishing. Traffic volume measures success on highways, but these metrics cannot account for relationship quality. Maintenance follows specification; adaptation, learning, or evolution cannot occur.6

Highways lack memory of previous travelers. One journey cannot inform or assist another. Community does not form among those who traverse highways. The car ahead and the car behind remain strangers regardless of shared miles. Transport generates the only value. The highway produces nothing; it enables movement between places that produce. Highways extract from the landscape rather than contributing to it. The Interstate system consumed agricultural land, divided communities, enabled suburban sprawl, accelerated environmental degradation, and concentrated economic activity.7

Parallel limitations exist in digital highways. Infrastructure optimizes data transmission without considering data representation or potential relationships. Search engines and social platforms measure engagement without distinguishing between connection and extraction. Unprecedented transaction volumes degrade the social fabric those transactions were meant to serve.

Network science confirms these limitations are architectural. Barabási and Albert's foundational work on scale-free networks demonstrated that networks optimizing for efficiency—where new nodes preferentially attach to already-connected hubs—inevitably concentrate connectivity in a small number of dominant nodes.8 Preferential attachment creates the topology observed in contemporary internet architecture. Massive platforms surround countless peripheral participants. All depend on the central hubs for discovery, connection, and resource access.

Shoshana Zuboff terms the economic logic created by highway architecture "surveillance capitalism." It unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data.9 Digital platforms—Google, Meta, Amazon—do not merely facilitate connection. They extract value from every interaction.

The fundamental dynamic remains: participants must pass through the platform to reach each other, and the platform captures value from every passage.

The mechanism is straightforward. Platforms position themselves as highways. Infrastructure enables users to reach destinations (information, social connections, products). Private ownership distinguishes these platforms from public highways funded by taxes. Intermediaries capture behavioral surplus from every transaction. Users provide the "free raw material"—attention, preferences, relationships, location, search histories. Platforms transmute this material into "prediction products" sold to advertisers seeking to influence future behavior.10

Large nodes extracting from small nodes defines the resulting topology. Data contributed by a small business using Google's search infrastructure strengthens Google's predictive capabilities. Traffic received depends on Google's algorithmic decisions. Advertising payments to Google ensure visibility in searches Google controls. The relationship is parasitic, not symbiotic. Small node vitality feeds large node growth. Small node survival remains contingent.

III. The Forest Alternative

The sophisticated network architecture evolution has produced lies beneath every forest. Mycorrhizal networks—the "Wood-Wide Web" identified in Suzanne Simard's 1997 Nature paper—connect up to ninety percent of plant species through fungal partnerships spanning thousands of acres.12 These biological networks exhibit properties foreign to highway architecture. Distributed intelligence, reciprocal resource sharing, adaptive coordination, and collective care characterize them.

Living infrastructure functions through the mycelium. Branching thread-like hyphae constitute the vegetative body of fungi. Up to eight miles of mycelial threads can exist in a single cubic inch of forest soil.13 A honey fungus (Armillaria ostoyae) in Oregon's Blue Mountains spans approximately 2,385 acres and has grown for an estimated 2,400 years.14 Information processing, response coordination, and exchange facilitation have occurred longer than human civilization.

Research by Mark Fricker, Dan Bebber, and Lynne Boddy established that fungal mycelia develop network architectures characterized by high clustering coefficients and efficient global connectivity.15 These architectures optimize local efficiency and network-wide transport. Local growth decisions produce globally optimal configurations, unlike engineered networks designed from centralized specifications. Individual hyphal tips respond to immediate conditions. Local actions benefit network-wide patterns of resource allocation and threat response.

Distinct topological properties emerge. Fungal networks achieve transport efficiency comparable to engineered systems while maintaining robustness against random damage.16 Efficiency typically trades off against resilience in traditional network designs. Mycelial networks accomplish both through continuous reconfiguration. New connections grow. Successful pathways are reinforced. Unsuccessful routes regress. Structure adapts to changing conditions without external coordination.

Simard's research revealed a discovery with implications for digital infrastructure design: the Mother Tree.17 Largest and oldest trees function as hubs in forest ecosystems. Dozens of other trees link through shared fungal networks. Mother Trees nourish the network they anchor, unlike hubs of highway-model networks that extract value from peripheral nodes.

Google and Meta grow stronger by capturing value from peripheral participants. Mother Trees grow stronger by nourishing peripheral participants.

Carbon transfer to seedlings occurs through mycorrhizal connections. Preferential allocation to genetic offspring demonstrates kin recognition operating through fungal networks.18 Stressed or dying Mother Trees increase resource transfer to connected seedlings. "Legacy carbon" supports the next generation.19 Douglas firs under life-threatening insect attack flooded the fungal network with carbon. They nourished surrounding trees rather than hoarding resources for individual survival.20

Kevin Beiler's DNA mapping of Douglas-fir forests demonstrated that Mother Trees connect network regions.23 Oldest trees with extensive mycorrhizal connections linked to over forty-seven other trees through fungal partners. Network function degraded for all connected individuals when hub trees were removed. Hub trees served the network by enabling other nodes' flourishing. Connectivity amplified value rather than extracting it.

VII. Implementation: Growing the Digital Forest

The transition requires practical mechanisms enabling forest-style relationships. The Myceloom Protocol specifies "Lineage Discovery Protocol."37 Shared conceptual ancestry enables node discovery rather than algorithmic curation.

Simple HTML tags signal node presence and orientation:

<meta name="myceloom" content="lineage:unearth; signals:digital-archaeology, solarpunk">
<link rel="myceloom" href="https://mother-tree.example.com">

Two lines define the protocol. The "Spore Line" declares node content. The "Mother Tree Line" declares node roots. Discovery relies on resonance, kinship, and depth.

The protocol rejects engagement optimization by algorithmic recommendation systems. Genuine conceptual affinity enables Lineage Discovery. "Digital-archaeology" interest connects nodes regardless of traffic statistics. Mother Tree community affiliation joins sharing nodes.

Protocol simplicity is intentional. Complex infrastructure is unnecessary. Simple systems survive technological change. HTML tags remain stable.38 Myceloom signals placed today will remain discoverable after platform collapse.

VIII. The Stakes of the Transition

Technical architecture questions lead to fundamental questions about human flourishing. Extractive topology has produced measurable harm.

Surveillance capitalism undermines personal autonomy.40 It claims human experience as raw material for behavioral prediction. Users lose control over data, attention, and relationships. Platform knowledge asymmetry allows manipulation at scale.

Platform concentration undermines democratic governance.41 Communicative power concentrates in private hands. Algorithmic decisions shape public discourse without oversight. Private terms override public law. Infrastructure of deliberation erodes.

Extractive dynamics undermine economic sustainability for non-operators. Infrastructure captures value generated by creators and workers.42 Winner-take-all dynamics accumulate wealth for highway operators.

Different possibilities emerge from the forest alternative. Value accumulation replaces hemorrhaging to intermediaries. Genuine connection replaces addictive engagement. Resilience replaces collapse upon platform failure.

The Mother Tree principle addresses power asymmetries. Established nodes nourish emerging nodes. Resources flow from center to periphery. Network health measures success. Surveillance capitalism dynamics become impossible.

Kindred researchers reach audiences through conceptual affinity. Value accumulates in the community. Mutual aid flows between neighbors based on need. Collective resilience builds through the network.

Forest ecosystems demonstrate these possibilities. Collective activity coordination, resource distribution, complexity emergence, and continuity maintenance have occurred for millions of years. Human networks can learn from fungal networks.

IX. Conclusion: The Internet of Roots

One phrase shaped three decades of digital infrastructure. "Information superhighway" oriented engineering toward speed, policy toward access, and investment toward throughput. Extractive platform capitalism resulted.

The myceloom framework proposes an alternative: the internet of roots. Mycelia weaving relationships replace highways connecting isolated endpoints. Nourishment, resilience, and collective flourishing define infrastructure design.

The transition requires new metaphors, metrics, and architectural principles. Relationship depth replaces bandwidth. Resilience replaces throughput. Mother Tree nourishment replaces extraction.

Construction choice remains. Humans built highways. They can also grow forests. Mycelium wisdom teaches stability from roots, health from depth, and alignment of collective flourishing.

Threads are ready. Spores are cast. The myceloom awaits weaving.

  1. Unearth Heritage Foundry, "Information Superhighway," in The Unearth Lexicon of Digital Archaeology (2025), https://unearth.wiki. See also Digital Forest, Highway Metaphor, Extractive Architecture. ↩
  2. Vice President Al Gore popularized the term "information superhighway" in the 1990s as a way of garnering support for the Clinton Administration's technology initiatives. Gore frequently analogized the internet to "a network of highways—much like the Interstates begun in the '50s." See Adam Clayton Powell III, "The Information Superhighway: What Is It?" Nieman Reports 47, no. 3 (1993): 41–44. ↩
  3. Al Gore, "Remarks Prepared for Delivery by Vice President Al Gore," Royce Hall, UCLA, January 11, 1994. As recently as 2009, the Federal Communications Commission still referred to broadband internet as "the interstate highway of the 21st century." ↩
  4. The highway metaphor became dominant in policy, academic, and popular discourse throughout the 1990s. See Martin Dodge, Understanding Cyberspace Cartographies: A Critical Analysis of Internet Infrastructure Mapping (PhD diss., University College London, 2008), chap. 4, "Imagining Internet Infrastructures." ↩
  5. Dodge, Understanding Cyberspace Cartographies, 106. ↩
  6. Mark D. Fricker, Luke L. M. Heaton, Nick S. Jones, and Lynne Boddy, "The Mycelium as a Network," Microbiology Spectrum 5, no. 3 (2017): FUNK-0033-2017. ↩
  7. For critical analysis of the Interstate Highway System's social and environmental impacts, see Tom Lewis, Divided Highways: Building the Interstate Highways, Transforming American Life (New York: Viking, 1997). ↩
  8. Albert-László Barabási and Réka Albert, "Emergence of Scaling in Random Networks," Science 286, no. 5439 (1999): 509–512. ↩
  9. Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: PublicAffairs, 2019), 8. ↩
  10. Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 8–10. Zuboff argues that surveillance capitalism's products "are about predicting us, without actually caring what we do or what is done to us." ↩
  11. Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017), 48–50. ↩
  12. Suzanne W. Simard et al., "Net Transfer of Carbon Between Ectomycorrhizal Tree Species in the Field," Nature 388, no. 6642 (1997): 579–582. ↩
  13. Paul Stamets, Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 2005), 7. ↩
  14. U.S. Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station, "Humongous Fungus: The Largest Living Thing on Earth," Science Findings, Issue 167 (June 2014). ↩
  15. Mark D. Fricker, Dan Bebber, and Lynne Boddy, "Network Organisation of Mycelial Fungi," in Biology of the Fungal Cell, ed. R. J. Howard and N. A. R. Gow (Berlin: Springer, 2007), 309–330. ↩
  16. Daniel P. Bebber et al., "Biological Solutions to Transport Network Design," Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 274, no. 1623 (2007): 2307–2315. ↩
  17. Suzanne W. Simard, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2021), 164–189. ↩
  18. Simard, Finding the Mother Tree, 143–167. Simard's research documented preferential carbon transfer to genetic offspring through mycorrhizal networks. ↩
  19. Suzanne W. Simard, "Mycorrhizal Networks Facilitate Tree Communication, Learning, and Memory," in Memory and Learning in Plants, ed. František Baluška, Monica Gagliano, and Guenther Witzany (Cham: Springer, 2018), 191–213. ↩
  20. Y.Y. Song et al., "Defoliation of Interior Douglas-fir Elicits Carbon Transfer and Defense Signalling to Ponderosa Pine Neighbors through Ectomycorrhizal Networks," Scientific Reports 5 (2015): 8495. ↩
  21. Simard, Finding the Mother Tree, 5–8. Simard's work challenges "the prevailing theory that cooperation is of lesser importance than competition in evolution and ecology." ↩
  22. Francois P. Teste et al., "Access to Mycorrhizal Networks and Tree Roots: Importance for Seedling Survival and Resource Transfer," Ecology 90, no. 10 (2009): 2808–2822. ↩
  23. Kevin J. Beiler et al., "Architecture of the Wood-Wide Web: Rhizopogon spp. Genets Link Multiple Douglas-fir Cohorts," New Phytologist 185, no. 2 (2010): 543–553. ↩
  24. Unearth Heritage Foundry, "Root Systems," in The Unearth Lexicon of Digital Archaeology (2025), https://unearth.wiki. ↩
  25. Monika A. Gorzelak et al., "Inter-plant Communication through Mycorrhizal Networks Mediates Complex Adaptive Behaviour in Plant Communities," AoB Plants 7 (2015): plv050. ↩
  26. Bebber et al., "Biological Solutions to Transport Network Design," 2313–2314. ↩
  27. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (New York: Random House, 2012), 3–10. ↩
  28. Unearth Heritage Foundry, "Autogravitas Protocol," in The Unearth Lexicon of Digital Archaeology (2025), https://unearth.wiki. The term "Stabit" derives from the Isle of Man motto Quocunque Jeceris Stabit, meaning "Whithersoever You Throw It, It Will Stand." ↩
  29. Simard, Finding the Mother Tree, 164–189. ↩
  30. For critique of speed-as-value in digital culture, see Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (London: Verso, 2013). ↩
  31. Simard, "Mycorrhizal Networks Facilitate Tree Communication," 205–207. ↩
  32. Unearth Heritage Foundry, "Abyssal Time," in The Unearth Lexicon of Digital Archaeology (2025), https://unearth.wiki. ↩
  33. Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 287–363. ↩
  34. Simard, Finding the Mother Tree, 187–203. ↩
  35. For discussion of cultivation as alternative to engineering, see Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 88–102. ↩
  36. Unearth Heritage Foundry, "Stabit Node," in The Unearth Lexicon of Digital Archaeology (2025), https://unearth.wiki. ↩
  37. "The Myceloom Protocol (MCP-1)," Myceloom Protocol Specification, Version 2.0, January 2026, Section 5.1.4. ↩
  38. "The Myceloom Protocol (MCP-1)," Appendix C. ↩
  39. David Tilman, "Biodiversity: Population Versus Ecosystem Stability," Ecology 77, no. 2 (1996): 350–363. ↩
  40. Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 495–525. ↩
  41. For analysis of platform power and democratic governance, see Frank Pasquale, The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). ↩
  42. Trebor Scholz, Platform Cooperativism: Challenging the Corporate Sharing Economy (New York: Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, 2016), 10–12. ↩

Works Cited

Digital Archaeological Investigation conducted by Unearth Heritage Foundry. This work is intended for publication at myceloom.net.