Dear friends,

Back in September, I wrote about “Growing Movements like A Tree,” and the patient work of building unions in South Korea and Indonesia. But as I’ve deepened my analysis of platform labor activism, I want to push the analogy further.

In many sectors of the gig economy, the soil is too dry and the algorithmic pruning too frequent for deep roots to take hold. If we judge these movements by the logic of the trees, they look like failures.

In this edition, turning to the work of botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer, I want to suggest a “moss logic” for making sense of labor organizing in the informal economy. My understanding is shifting, and I invite you to shift with me. This shift to a moss analogy has required me to unlearn my own biases about what power looks like.

This is a deepening of the emergent strategy I’ve been exploring, and an attempt to offer a new way of understanding labor struggles at these new frontiers.

Here is what the biology of moss teaches us about resilience and adaptation.

Asian Labor Futures is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

When Centers Do Not Hold

In my post on Organizing Strategy from the Margins, I argued that workers at the “margins” adopt different ways of organizing. Moss could offer deeper insights into this.

Ecologists call moss a “pioneer species.” It is the first life to colonize bare rock, disaster sites, and hidden places where nothing else can grow. Platform worker organizing similarly emerges precisely where traditional labor organizing cannot take root: where there is no shared workplace and no protection from legal frameworks.

Unlike trees, moss has no vascular system. Trees need complex plumbing to fight gravity and move water upward; without this rigid structure, moss cannot stand tall. Instead, it stays low to the ground, absorbing what it needs directly through its leaves.

We must be careful not to romanticize this. Just as soil can be stripped of its richness, platform companies have terraformed the economy to be hostile to workers. Organizing emerges here not by choice, but by necessity.

The infrastructures of care riders build mirror this anatomy. Without a centralized structure, mutual aid circulates directly from person to person. Because platforms refuse to provide safety nets, riders fund their own. Yet, while individual moss plants are fragile, a colony creates a humid microclimate that sustains the group.

The gathering places of the gig economy such as “base camps'“ or community centers are where workers collectively generate the atmosphere of solidarity that makes individual survival possible.

The Art of Waiting

One of the hardest questions I raised in How to Sustain Our Movements is that of sustainability. How do we keep going no matter what happens?

Moss has a superpower called poikilohydry. Unlike plants, which die if they dry out, moss can lose 95% of its water content and simply go dormant. It looks dead: crisp, brown, and fragile. But the moment moisture returns, it rehydrates and photosynthesizes immediately.

Rather than seeing this as weakness, moss logic reveals it as an adaptation. This period of dormancy is not idleness; it is the time to slowly build the base. It is the patient work of accumulating the numbers, the trust, and the density required to withstand blowback. We wait not because we are afraid, but because we are gathering the critical mass necessary to exert pressure that cannot be ignored.

We wait for the rain. We retreat and re-strategize.

This quality troubles our conventional ways of understanding sustainability of movements.

Finally, mosses learn to 'dwell in the boundary layer.' In nature, this is the zone just above the ground where wind velocity drops to zero. Riders and drivers have mastered this political boundary layer, inhabiting spaces where they maintain the critical work of learning and nurturing growth. Crucially, these are also the zones where they build allies with civil society organizations, strengthening the layer of their protection.

Necessity Is The Mother of Adaptation

In short, moss offers a masterclass in what adrienne maree brown calls emergent strategy: complex patterns arising from simplicity and the art of being small.

It is important to state clearly: moss demonstrates a biology of resilience and adaptation.

Moss is small because the environmental conditions allow for nothing larger. To praise the resilience of gig workers without seeing through the conditions that create the drought in the first place is a mistake.

This framework is not a prescription for how the world should be; it is a description of how life survives when the ecosystem is broken.

I find myself stepping away from the metaphor of the tree I used just five months ago.

We need to stop looking for a forest of trees. We need to learn to recognize the resilience even when, to the untrained eye, it looks like defeat.

Until next time,

Kriangsak (Kiang)

Get full access to Asian Labor Futures at asianlaborfutures.substack.com/subscribe

Get full access to Asian Labor Futures at asianlaborfutures.substack.com/subscribe