The unseen, in between
Language, ideas and action towards a more connective future
What?
The interstitium is a body wide system virtually unknown to Western scientists until quite recently. It’s unified; connecting and wrapping around our organs, nerves, arteries, basically everything.
The structure of the interstitium is fractal; it exhibits the same pattern at various scales. It’s unified. While scientists had seen glimpses of this mesh-like network before, they had not realized that it connected the entire body — just underneath the skin, and wrapping around organs, arteries, capillaries, veins, head to toes. It’s juicy. It moves four times more fluid through the body than the vascular system does, serving as a dynamic transportation network, regulating and balancing nutrients and acting as a shock absorber. Unfortunately, it’s also a conduit for cancer spread.
In short: it’s very important. It shifts the conception of the body from being comprised of separate organs and tissues to being comprised of fluid and a unified system. There is an entire scientific revolution set to unfurl as more studies are peer-reviewed and more science books and classrooms integrate its existence into their cosmologies. We are at the beginning of it all.
Why this site?
Beyond setting the stage for a scientific revolution, the interstitium holds a conceptual revolution that needs integration in other spaces, too. After all, our society and culture have always co-evolved with breakthroughs in science and technology.
Many people have begun to recognize the interstitium in various forms, and have been working in society like the interstitium works in the body: they’ve been hyper-connectors - be it ideas, people, resources, anything. And they have mostly been invisible, helping to keep systems in check and evolving with little recognition or understanding of their value. There have been attempts to provide language and understand these kinds of people and the roles they play. They’ve been called: Glue Workers (or the Grease?), Octopus Roles, Civic Engineers. They have been building Relational Infrastructure in a Third Space, practicing Connectionism and creating unimaginable value, much like the Interstitium.
I count myself as one of them, and thanks to a call to action through an essay I wrote in Orion Magazine and a story I reported for Radiolab, I’m finding there are so many more of us.
This site seeks to begin collating resources and insights from those who have recognized this shift, in an effort to start cross-pollinating and securing resources to work more intentionally together.
The sooner we recognize our interdependence in all of its forms, the faster we can build the bridges to ensure a resilient future in the face of existential crises.