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The forum is more active than you’ve ever seen it. Every week there are new faces, new posts, more questions: What’s easiest to forage? and How do you find the best spots near you? People keep on bickering about mushrooms.
Sometimes you and Daniella text each other to complain. Can’t people Google their questions first? But publicly she’s always gracious, always patient, and you try to be too.
You find yourself typing, Pretty sure that’s a non-native plant for your area, as if you’ve always known this information, always understood the outside world with such fluidity. That’s not a chanterelle; look at the gills and how round it is. Also, search the forums next time.
Discussions move faster, but it’s starting to feel shallow.
Sometimes Daniella will write up a long forum thread, a tutorial on foraging that weaves in small details about the particular ecology of your area, its history, its decline. The first time she does so, she is inundated with positive reactions. This is so cool!, someone writes. This is the kind of information I’m here for. But the more effort she devotes to these posts, the longer they get, and you can see attention drift away. Most people, whatever they say, are here for the mushroom photos.
Celine Nguyen is a designer, design historian, and writer. She is an MA student in History of Design at the V&A Museum/Royal College of Art, where her research considers contemporary web aesthetics and their relationship to our ecological world. Right now, she wants to know: what does degrowth look like for the web?
