Dating the start of the anthropocene to “the advent of modern capitalism” (Tsing 2015: 19) serves as a thought-provoking framework for situating the livelihood of commercial mushroom picking. By positioning the matsutake as both a post-industrial luxury of high economic value and as a resilient and unpredictable being in the face of industrial production and human destruction, Tsing sets the foundation for using mushrooms as an analogy for the illusions of progress and anthropogenic impacts of capitalism. I’m curious to see how evidence in later chapters might support Tsing’s framework. Will this way of life that is “not a common characteristic of all humans” provide an alternative option to the illusions of progress that drives the global economy or serve as a niche case of human and non-human survival in an exploitative capitalist system? As an ethnographer, how might Tsing portray the narratives and agency of nonhuman beings in later chapters?