Tropical Fungus: Digital Futures & Brown Blindness

Plant blindness is glancing at a patch of green and collapsing it into a single, undifferentiated backdrop, instead of a dense community of species, functions, and stories. This bias doesn’t just flatten landscapes; it distorts how we value plant-based assets, from fung shui ficus woodlands to mangroves in Mai Po, and feeds systematic underinvestment in conservation—and in beauty itself. If we can overlook towering trees bathed in sunlight, the hidden fungal networks beneath them disappear even more easily. Drawing on Anna Tsing’s “patchy capitalism,” Sophie Strand’s Dionysian mycorrhizae, and CIELAB color modelling, this essay proposes “brown blindness” as a way to name our failure to see tropical fungi in their full chromatic and ecological complexity. It is an experiment in world-building: using quantifiable color values as a quiet ritual of digital garden‑tending toward more attentive futures.