ADAM GREENFIELD: Welcome to Lifepod, the podcast about taking care of ourselves in a world on fire. I’m your host, Adam Greenfield.

Today I want to talk about a little chunk of language that's changed how I think about the ways in which we develop and share knowledge, and how it might help us more effectively organize provisions for shelter and mutual care in our communities.

That chunk of language is the curious little word “tek,” T-E-K.

I first encountered this word in mycological circles, where you’ll very often come across mushroom-growing techniques that are offhandedly described as tek. You'll see references to “PF tek,“ or “monotub tek,” or “Uncle Ben tek.”

At first, I thought it might have something to do with the discourse around what’s now called “traditional ecological knowledge,” which is the other context I can think of in which you might see the word tek spelled that way — you might have come across it, for example, in the titles of books like Julia Watson's *Lo-TEK: Design by Radical Indigenism*.

It didn’t seem particularly likely, given that some of the tek I saw being discussed involved things that were in no way traditional, like plastic tubs. But it wasn’t that much of a stretch either: if there’s an aspect of ecology you can bet there’s a whole bunch of traditional knowledge about, it’s the cultivation of mushrooms. So it actually did take me a little digging before I was able to ascertain that tek in the mycological context was completely separate from the discussion around traditional ecological knowledge.

The term’s other immediate resonance for me was even odder still. I have to confess that the first time I saw something described as tek, I got a vaguely Scientological vibe from it: Scientologists refer to their grab-bag of high-pressure sales hustles and pseudotechnological carny tricks as “LRH tech,” because L. Ron Hubbard was a hack science-fiction writer...and he shrouded the cult he founded in hack science-fiction jargon. But blessedly, tek in the context we’re talking about has not a thing to do with Scientology.

But if we're not talking about a well-intentioned but problematic design discourse, or the weirdly cheesy jargon of a sinister mind-control cult, what *does* it mean to describe something as tek? So far as I've been able to determine, anyway, the term had already crystallized by the early 2000s, on early internet forums devoted to psychedelics, like Erowid, which was founded in 1995, or Shroomery, which has been around since 1997.

The culture of these sites was and is intensely participatory, oriented toward the sharing of knowledge in a way that feels to me like it's directly descended from exemplary hippie-modernist projects like the *Whole Earth Catalog*. Canonically, a lot of this sharing takes the form of “trip reports“: I took this amount of this substance, at such and such a body weight, it took this long for effects to appear and to subside thereafter, and those effects were as follows. In a field shrouded in so much unnecessary mystification, where the tenor of the experience depends so vitally on the calibration of set and setting, this kind of documentation is invaluable in helping people know what to expect and how they can prepare for what they are about to undergo.

But as we all know, there are a few powerfully psychoactive substances that can be grown rather than purchased. And so the sharing of information on these sites has always extended to the praxis of production as well as consumption. When, in their process of experimentation, forum users stumbled on procedures that worked for them consistently, they began writing them up and sharing them, very much as they'd shared trip reports. And for whatever reason, they called these repeatable methods “tek“: as we've seen, “PF Tek,” “bulk tek,” “monotub tek,” and so on. The terminology that evolved around this kind of knowledge production has come to suggest something distinct: that the methods being described are modular, transferable and even codified to a degree, without being subject to quite the same rigors as formal science.

Because what that rather goofy “k“ signals is that what's involved isn't what we might think of as High Road laboratory science, with its lab coats, carefully controlled environments and five-figure precision tools. Tek evolved under conditions of amateur production in domestic spaces, using household tools and easily accessible resources. And given that the psilocybin mushrooms that were, after all, what most tek enthusiasts were interested in growing remained illegal in most places, and still do, the necessity for a lot of that was in turn driven by a certain desire for clandestinity — a production method that doesn't shout about itself, or produce detectable signatures of its presence. We might think of tek as the fruit of a guerrilla science.

Calling something a “tek,” then, implies that on some level it’s a field-tested, reproducible procedure that others can follow and generate something like the same results, more or less consistently. It’s not academic protocol. It certainly isn’t a minutely-defined ISO standard. But it’s not quite artisanal tradition, either. Tek sits between these categories, in a way I find provocative and useful.

Why would someone not just say “method” or “technique,” spelled conventionally? Because “tek” carries a particular subcultural tone: that what is being conveyed is empirical, DIY, peer-to-peer knowledge, based on iterative, improvised, communal refinement. It's to say “this works,“ but it's also to say, “And why not give it a try, and report back what you've found to be the case?“ We can maybe think of it as open source, without any of the toxic baggage that term has collected over the years.

Labeling something a “tek“ subtly frames the practice under discussion as something that's shareable, hackable and open-ended. In fact it feels to me like there’s a quiet epistemological commitment embedded in the word. Something that’s a “tek” is not guaranteed to work, in the same way something off-the-shelf, shrink-wrapped and mass-produced might be. What it *is* is operationally sufficient. It says, “Under these conditions, done this way, this sequence produces results.” You might think of it as a distributed procedure that allows different practitioners, in different places, to align their actions without requiring full theoretical agreement.

**§** OK, this is all fairly abstract. We can get a better sense of how this works concretely by considering one of the foundational teks in amateur mycology: PF Tek, developed in 1991 and named after its originator Robert McPherson, who posted on the forums under the screen name “Psilocybe Fanaticus.“ PF Tek is a simple, standardized method for growing mushrooms using small jars of nutrient substrate, designed to be accessible, low-cost, and relatively reliable.

I think that, by now, thanks to contributions like Merlin Sheldrake's wonderful book *Entangled Life*, it's pretty broadly understood that the mushroom isn't the fungal organism itself, right? The mushroom is just the fruiting body or reproductive structure of something diffuse that’s hard for us to perceive as a single entity. By far the better part of the organism consists of an expansive, thready, generally subterranean network called mycelium. And these things can grow to be enormous. In his 2005 book *Mycelium Running*, the great mycologist Paul Stamets offers an example from eastern Oregon he characterizes as quite possibly the largest single organism in the world — a contiguous mycelial mat 2,400 acres in area, or 9.7 square kilometers, that he estimated to be 2,200 years old.

Well, you’re clearly not going to grow that at home. But if what you want is to grow mushrooms, psychedelic or otherwise, you need to first provide a substrate for the right kind of mycelium to colonize. PF Tek is built around the production of a very specific substrate: a matrix of brown rice flour, for nutrition, and a mineral called vermiculite, which gives the mix structure and the ability to retain moisture. Combine those things in the right proportions, top it off with a little water, and what you wind up with is an ideal growth medium for mycelium. You pack this mixture into a small glass jar, sterilize it so it isn't contaminated, so the variety you're interested in growing isn't outcompeted by other organisms, and then you inoculate it with the spores of whatever strain you *are* looking to produce. With any luck, the mycelium will then colonize the substrate. And once that's happened, you can transfer the “cakes“ that result into a humid environment, where given the right conditions they'll reliably enough fruit into mushrooms. The key idea is that you've modularized the growing process so it happens in small, self-contained units that are easy to handle and store.

There are a few reasons why this is interesting. PF Tek became popular because you don't need to source expensive gear like a laminar-flow cabinet before you can get on with it. Its requirements are minimal, and what little equipment it does require is cheap, legal and easy to get ahold of, just about everywhere. It's relatively forgiving of error: you do need to take some care with sterility, but that mostly amounts to washing your hands and wearing a mask, the same things the pandemic tutored us all in how to do properly. You don't need any specialist knowledge or particularly rigorous control of the working environment. It can be done in ordinary domestic space. It produces consistent results at small scale — among other things, effectively liberating the would-be psychonaut from the nasty business of drug dealers and market conditions. And if for whatever reason you fail, you're not out much, in either time or financial outlay.

PF Tek, then, effectively lowered the barrier to entry so far as home cultivators were concerned. It's both the “hello world” of mushroom cultivation, in other words the first proof-of-concept project undertaken by newcomers to the domain, and a baseline from which more complex and elaborate methods evolve, once folks have gotten some experience under their belt and grown confident enough to experiment. More advanced approaches generally build on the same principles, but simply scale them up. If you master PF Tek, you can most likely get your head around those too.

We can understand PF Tek, or *any* tek, as kind of a canonical procedural unit in a distributed knowledge ecology. PF Tek's particular advantages were that it was physically compact, low-overhead, repeatable and readily transmissible. And that's exactly what allowed the practice to propagate across early online communities.

**§** Ahh, but this isn't a podcast about growing mushrooms, you say. So why do I raise the subject? It's because organizing a Lifehouse so it's able to support the people it needs to is a challenge with technical aspects to it, the number and nature of which will vary slightly from place to place, and I think “tek“ is a great way of describing the ways in which Lifehouse communities might develop and share knowledge about these things with one another.

The problem that tek solves for mushroom growers is that they all want to do the same thing — successfully grow mushrooms! — but they all want to do so in slightly different circumstances, with different conditions of access to tools, equipment, resources and so on. And the same thing is true of Lifehouses.

Remember that a Lifehouse, as we discuss it in the book, is a place at the heart of each community that's designed to shelter people from both the first-order harms of climate system collapse — the obvious manifestations, like extreme weather, drought, flooding and so on — and to the greatest extent possible the cascading, nonlinear second- and third-order consequences of that collapse, from infrastructural breakdown to the pervasive sense of helplessness and futility and despair so many people experience. But a Lifehouse isn't quite the same thing as a “resilience hub,” which limits its aims to addressing those first-order effects. What makes a Lifehouse a Lifehouse is that it's autonomous and self-organized, managed democratically by the members of the community it serves, explicitly founded in a very distinct and particular set of values. It's a place where people learn how to develop their own power, and experience what that power feels like in use.

Any Lifehouse community that wishes to furnish shelter under pressure needs to do the same things. These might involve reliably generating off-grid electric power, maintaining an environment that's cool or warm enough for vulnerable people to be safe during extreme weather events, collecting and purifying enough water for people to drink safely. You might want to grow food. You probably want to stay in touch with your neighbors, or other Lifehouse communities. And what all of these things have in common with guerrilla mycology is that they involve some kind of challenge that it'd be best to address experimentally, iteratively, using the means on hand, with as little as possible in the way of resource dependencies.

And given the way the world is, and the kind of opposition people tend to face whenever they set out to furnish politicized care for others — whether that's from the state or other hostile parties — it'd probably be helpful, too, if the equipment involved were low-cost, robust, easily demountable, easily portable, should it come to that easily hideable, and easily replaceable if confiscated, sequestered or destroyed.

I think it's fairly obvious that coming up with something that fulfills all these desiderata at once would likely take quite a bit of trial and error. It occurs to me, then, that one of the most useful ways in which Lifehouse communities can coordinate with one another would be by sharing their tek. If you develop a way to do these things locally that ticks most or all of those boxes, share your recipe! If you want to get fancy, upload it as a PDF with the date and a version number prominently visible, so people know when that particular protocol has been superseded by a cheaper or an easier way of doing things. But either way, share your tek!

It doesn't mean you think you've solved the problem permanently and for all time, and it sure doesn't imply you expect anyone to follow your suggestions blindly. It just means you're letting people know that “under these conditions, done this way, this sequence produced the desired results.” And in suggesting that people give your method a try, you're also asking them to report back what they've found to be the case, so everyone can get a better sense of the parameters inside of which the method is effective, and what happens if and when the method fails. This is part of what transforms separate cohorts of people all working a similar set of problems in parallel, but in isolation from one another, into a distributed knowledge community, the members of whom are invested in one another's success.

§ Here’s another concrete example, this one a little closer to the work we’ve been discussing, that has nothing to do with mushrooms. It has to do with the desire to stay in touch with one another, when for one or another reason the power and cellular networks and internet have all gone down.

You might be familiar with the idea of mesh networks, where the nodes that constitute the network are typically low-powered radio devices that self-organize and self-configure dynamically, to send and receive data in a way that’s both cost-free and fairly difficult to shut down. And all of this makes such a network highly robust to infrastructure failure. The merits of this way of doing things are so clear, in fact, that mesh networks have been an obsession among both autonomy-oriented and prepper communities for quite some time. But while they’re not that difficult to set up, the various places online where people talk mesh networking tend to be unnecessarily shrouded in paranoid affect and tacticool aesthetics. For a lot of people who might really benefit from having access to this set of techniques, it’s offputting, even intimidating.

If you visit a site called Nodestar, though, you’ll see that someone named Zach Perlman has written this case up as what I’ve been calling a “tek.”

He starts by explaining why you might want a mesh network, very crisply characterizing the value proposition as a “neighborhood-scale communication network that runs without cell towers, ISPs or anyone's permission, that’s free to use and impossible to shut down.” And then he breaks down exactly how to go about setting one up. You’ll have to lay out a few bucks for the necessary kit — particularly a device called the Heltec LoRa32 V3 915MHz Meshtastic development board, which ought to set you back somewhere between 25 and 30 bucks in the US, and a comparable amount on this side of the pond. And once you have the necessary components in hand, he lays out how to assemble them so as to produce the desired result, for each one of a few different scenarios.

Perlman describes that 25 or 30 bucks, by the way, as “not a significant financial commitment.” I’m going to be just a little more careful, and suggest that for lots of folks who might be interested in a neighborhood-scale communication network, that actually is a significant amount of money to drop on something that at first blush might not appear life-critical. I myself think that thirty dollars and an afternoon spent setting the thing up is absolutely a worthwhile investment to make in the possibility of connection under difficult circumstances, but I’m not going to pretend it’s nothing, either.

The Nodestar tek isn’t perfect, not by a long shot. There’s too much that’s jargony in his initial explanation of why you might want to set up a mesh network — in particular, his framing of mesh as a natural progression from what was briefly called “Web3,” built on crypto and smart contracts. The tradeoff for appealing to people other than paranoid preppers was evidently couching the case for mesh in kind of douchey jargon about ownership. There is still an imagined audience, in other words, and that audience is broish

Otherwise, though, just about all that distinguishes it from some of the tek we’ve been talking about is that he hasn’t written it up in the first person. So instead of saying “under these conditions, done this way, this sequence produced the desired results,” he’s saying “Here’s what you do: you buy this, you download that, you link these things in this order.”

I think we can do better yet. I think we can come up with tek that’s neither tacticool nor aimed at people who still think crypto’s a good idea. We can liberate technical knowledge from the communities that currently control access to it, demystify the unnecessarily complex and share that information with folks who can put it to use immediately.

§ OK, it's easy enough to see this as applied to aims like setting up an off-grid communications network, or water purification, or physical things like that. Let me go a step further, though, by broadening our sense of what a technology might be.

In Deb Chachra's book *How Infrastructure Works*, she cites the economist W. Brian Arthur's definition of technology, which has three components. First, he argues that a technology by definition harnesses, manipulates or relies for its effect upon some *physical* phenomenon. Secondly, he argues that each discrete technology consists of an *assemblage* of other, precursor technologies — primitives that humanity has previously gotten a reasonably comprehensive grip on. And thirdly, he holds that technology is *recursive*, which is to say that technological intervention is fractal and descends all the way down the list of parts in a given technical apparatus, so that different technologies have been brought to bear on every aspect of your bicycle's manufacture and assembly, from the metallurgical and mechanical processes involved in producing the frame to the refinement of the lubricants that keep the chain moving smoothly through its gears.

Now, there are other aspects of Arthur's thought I find illuminating and helpful, and you should go look up his 2009 book *The Nature of Technology*. But I'm going to go ahead and disagree with this definition. I find it too restrictive, too dismissive of other domains of human technique. The primary aspect of Arthur's definition that I take issue with is its insistence that technologies are invariably physical: that what we’re necessarily talking about when we invoke the term is material tools that harness physical phenomena like combustion or electromagnetism to produce their effects. I think limiting the discussion of technology to physical assemblies and subassemblies is to do the idea a profound injustice.

It isn't simply hardware that helps human societies thrive and propagate themselves, in other words, it's software. It's ideas that travel in language, whether that language is transmitted orally or in written form. Ideas that are encoded in social structures, or even states of the body. Ideas that do *not* necessarily involve physical phenomena.

Double-entry bookkeeping is absolutely a technology, as is yoga, as is peer review, as are Robert's Rules of Order (or for that matter Rusty's, which is the variant we used in the IWW branch I belonged to). There is no reason why a technology cannot be independent of its physical instantiation. And many of the situations a Lifehouse community is foreseeably going to be confronted with are both immaterial, and in some way generic. We can think of dispute resolution, say, or triaging access to limited resources, or figuring out how to help the most centrally-involved community members negotiate burnout, or the management of tensions arising at the physical boundary with neighbors — it's largely going to be technologies of this latter sort we need to develop if we're interested in responding to them. If that's the case, then maybe it would be helpful to think of these things, too, as tek — as lightweight, low-cost methods that reliably produce a given desirable effect, that are “good enough for now, and safe enough to try,“ as they say in Sociocracy, and that are written down in a way that lets other people experiment with them in their own, locally situated set of conditions.

I think this is how we proceed: iteratively, experimentally, with a certain amount of epistemic humility, and in a way that both preserves the knowledge we've developed and makes it available for others to tinker with. I think how we proceed is by devising and sharing methods we consciously think of as tek.

**§** I have a further inkling as to a way in which tek might be helpful.

In anarchist thought, there’s an idea called “projectuality,” which I assume sounded somewhat more felicitous in the original Italian.

This is one of those terms that carries a whole lifeworld folded up inside it, and I think it’s fair to say that this lifeworld, like any, can never be translated completely. But we can take a stab at doing the idea justice. As it emerged from Italian anarchist currents of the 1970s, especially those around the late insurrectionist Alfredo Bonanno, “projectuality” referred to our capacity to formulate and pursue our own acts of political intervention, without waiting for mass organizations to authorize them, or the ostensibly necessary historical conditions to align. The emphasis was on immediacy, autonomy and initiative. As I understand it, this was in part a response to a recurring impasse in that sphere, a problem which is only a problem for certain currents on the left, and that’s how to act meaningfully toward human liberation without becoming the kind of hierarchical organization one is bound to oppose on those very grounds.

Only some of this survived translation into the North American anarchist context in which I first encountered the term. By the time I came across the word “projectuality,” I understood it merely to denote a mode of organizing and acting that privileges self-directed, time-delimited, intentional initiatives over membership in formal, enduring organizations.

But if at its simplest, projectuality merely means acting through projects rather than institutions, that significantly undersells the idea. What’s at stake is nothing less than a different relationship to time, commitment and power. In practice, projectuality describes an approach where small groups or individuals initiate specific interventions that are finite or situational, and not meant to persist indefinitely. Participation in these interventions is voluntary and fluid — it’s something that happens through affinity and shared intention, not formal membership.

This sits alongside related ideas, like the small, trust-based affinity groups pioneered in Iberian anarchism, a concept which Murray Bookchin appears to have been the first to translate into English, and which went on to inform so much activity on the American left of the ‘60s and ‘70s. And maybe all of this aligns pretty closely to that particularly fructifying term and idea I’ve nicked from Ursula Le Guin, the “syndicate of initiative.” In both cases, we informally organize ourselves as networks rather than standing structures. We act immediately, now, neither arrogantly thinking of ourselves as a vanguard nor deferring to some future revolution. And we emphasize that accountability for our acts is ours and ours alone. That much is clear, I hope.

But what constitutes a “project,” in this sense? A project might be a mutual-aid effort, a temporary occupation, a publishing initiative, the build-out of some infrastructure. Especially in the insurrectionist tradition, it might be something far more kinetic than that. What matters is that the formation undertaking it is self-constituted, purposeful and dissolvable.

This is supposed to counterract the tendency we so often see in long-standing collectives to develop internal inertia, or latent and undocumented diagrams of power of the kind we may recognize from “The Tyranny of Structurelessness.” I think it’s true what the educator and writer Clay Shirky once said, that on some level “every organization exists to conserve the problem it was formed to address,” and organizations of the left are no different. Projectuality resists what many anarchists see as the inherent tendency among such institutions to reproduce hierarchy, capture our life energy, and persist beyond their usefulness.

OK, so far, so good. But here we run headfirst into a problem. I think it’s fair to say that projectuality long ago became the habitual default mode of organizing on the autonomous left, and that once this happened we largely surrendered whatever tools we had that might help us manage situations that persist over longer timeframes than those a projectual approach is best suited to. We got good at immediacy, in other words, and sacrificed continuity.

And this runs straight into the temporality of care. The need for care, of course, persists. It never goes away. The critique of projectuality from within anarchist thought is that this way of doing things can drift toward ephemerality. That it can struggle to maintain infrastructures over time. And all too often, that it fragments our efforts into disconnected gestures that lack cumulative force.

It’s true that municipalism did crop up during the 2010s, proposing to carry out reasonably persistent projects of autonomous self-governance at city scale, and maybe those formations would have proven themselves equal to the challenge of care over time. But in 2026, I feel comfortable saying that current seems to have receded.

So where does that leave us? In the terms I’ve been trying to develop, where power and care are seen as the exterior surface and interior volume of the same object of thought, we might say that projectuality excels at generating power-as-surface (intervention, disruption), but sometimes underdevelops care-as-volume, with its requirement for ongoing maintenance and reproduction. And this brings us back to tek.

I’d like to propose that we consider shared tek as the middle layer that sutures together formally autonomous projects, and forges from them something like a common intention and a common capacity. That we get good at documenting and sharing the methods and practices we’ve developed, such that people don’t constantly have to reinvent the wheel from scratch. Again, a few concrete examples might be helpful. Nodestar offers us a tek for mesh networking. Cassie Thornton’s Hologram, which we discussed with her a few episodes back, is a tek for distributed and collective self-care. The folks at resiliencetoolkit.org, in Vermont, have developed a tek for nothing less than helping an entire community protect itself against disaster — it’s ambitious, very nearly a one-stop Lifehouse tek. Appropedia is nothing but an archive collecting different kinds of tek, from solar dehydrators to off-grid “apocalypse computers.”

So: consciously thinking of the things we do as tek. Writing them up like lab notes, in such a way as to let our experiments be reproduced. And sharing our findings freely and widely. This, I think, is part of how we can preserve the orientation toward autonomy and immediacy we inherit from projectuality, while allowing ourselves to reproduce the capacity for care so that it sustains us into the indefinite future. To me, that feels both good enough for now, and safe enough to try.

**§** Before we wrap things up for this episode, I just want to say that I'm thrilled to hear how the podcast has been landing with you so far. We've been live just short of two months now, and I've been blown away by the intensity of your interest and the generosity of your response. I hope we can continue to host conversations you find as meaningful and generative.

I'd be grateful if you'd consider supporting Lifepod by becoming a member at Patreon — you'll find a link walking you through the process of doing so in show notes. Believe me, every penny goes to defray our production costs, and every last penny of it is hugely appreciated.

Finally, you are always welcome to get in touch with me, at hellolifepod@protonmail.com — you know I'm always interested in hearing your comments, your suggestions for future topics and guests, and accounts of your tek. I'll see you next time.

If you’re interested in the sorts of things we’ve been talking about today, you might just enjoy my book, Lifehouse: Taking Care Of Ourselves in A World On Fire, available directly from the good folks at Verso, at versobooks.com. Lifepod is made with love in Newington Green, London. Like anything of value, it's the outcome of a collective effort. Editing, audio engineering and production for Lifepod are by Laurence Green. The typography and graphic design are by Chris Lee. Thanks so much to Agriculture for permission to use excerpts from their song “Living is Easy” as our theme music. I'm Adam Greenfield.

Until next time, take care of yourself. Take care of the ones who need you. And let them take care of you. Remember, we are the ones we've been waiting for.