I don’t want to scale
My business isn’t meant to grow like a cancer; it’s meant to grow like a mushroom.
When I was in an MLM, one of their main tenets was “life is expensive, so build a big enough money pile for yourself that none of those problems ever affect you.” And this is a predominant school of thought amongst folks surviving late-stage capitalism; why wouldn’t it be? You live in a world that shows you money is the most important thing and you’ll either die or be punished for not having it, so of course one natural response would be to comply—chase capital, and make sure you never have too little of it. But none of the folks on those motivational stages ever asked why life is so expensive, and for whom it is most particularly expensive. They never talked about using their wealth to make life less expensive for anyone else.
They talked about teaching men to fish. They talked about philanthropy and charity but never mutual aid or reparations. They never acknowledged the fact that every single person can’t have a giant pile of money, and they definitely did not acknowledge that their very own piles were being built on the backs of the audience. They needed us to believe that our own pile was coming—and for some it did arrive, but never alongside any acknowledgment of the systemic factors which contributed to certain folks’ successes within that model.
This was a mere microcosm for the bigger lie of capitalism that allows it to function: if people believe they’re destined for material wealth and their temporary poverty is nothing more than a fluke or a generational curse to be lifted, they’ll continue the endless pursuit of capital without ever realizing the tax bracket they intend to ascend to is built on extraction from below. Capitalism is the original pyramid scheme, and it’s evident in the shape & movement of things: a broader, less resourced, more numerous class of people is always being extracted from in order to siphon resources upwards, toward progressively smaller and more exclusive groups of people.
Once I understood that my success—both in the MLM and in capitalism at large—would always require extracting from those with less, I knew I was bound to “fail” spectacularly. Maybe that’s also why I could never fully commit. It wasn’t mycelial thinking at all.
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In the mysterious networks of mycelium, trees, and microbial creatures of the hidden world, we learn about interdependence. They remind us of our obligations, rights and responsibilities to one another. - Annie Faye Cheng