What mushrooms, ghosts, NASA, and a 19th century economist can show us about hidden labour

While I have been preparing for my Hidden Labour research project I've been looking at some interesting related ideas from other sectors and areas of thinking that might help to make sense of the issue.

Here are four I've come across that felt worth sharing.

Mycelial networks

I came across this idea in the book Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake. Mycelial networks are the underground fungal networks that connect trees and plants, moving nutrients, water, and information between them. These networks are critical to the health of forests, but they are mostly invisible from above ground.

What looks like an individual tree surviving on its own is, in reality, supported by a dense, shared system that's doing constant background work.

I think that this is a useful metaphor for digital labour in the cultural sector because digital work often functions as connective tissue. Digital roles link systems, teams, data, suppliers, and decisions. Because their work usually sits across traditional departmental boundaries they need to be able to translate language and ideas, smooth friction, and spot issues early in order to keep things flowing. None of this is very visible, and much of it is not even formally recognised as work that needs to be done.

Like mycelial networks, this labour is relational and preventative. Its value lies in what does not go wrong, but when it is stretched, overloaded or damaged, the whole system can become very fragile very quickly.

Cultural organisations often focus on visible outputs and individual roles or teams, while overlooking the shared, connective work that sustains them and makes those outputs possible. Thinking about digital labour as a mycelial network could help explain why cutting or ignoring it weakens the entire organisation, even if everything looks fine 'above ground'.

NASA's Task Load Index (NASA-TLX)

The NASA Task Load Index (NASA-TLX) is a simple but useful way of measuring how demanding work feels to the person doing it.

It asks people to rate a task across six dimensions:

• Mental demand (how much thinking it requires)
• Physical demand (how much physical effort is needed)
• Time pressure (how rushed it feels)
• Effort (how hard you have to work to get it done)
• Performance (how successful you feel you were)
• Frustration (how stressful or irritating it felt)

It was developed for high-risk environments like aviation and spaceflight, where hidden overload can lead to mistakes, burnout, or system failure with very serious consequences.

I'm not suggesting that digital work in the cultural sector has any equivalence in terms of stakes but I think there is a useful insight here that 'workload' is not only about hours worked. To truly understand the 'load' that any particular work involves you also have to consider multiple factors, like cognitive load, pressure, uncertainty, and emotional strain.

Much digital work is often described or thought about as light, quick, or incidental, but in practice it often scores highly on factors like mental demand, time pressure, and effort. People are having to be reactive, deal with fragile or limited systems, translating between teams, and having to assume responsibility without formal authority or recognition.

The NASA-TLX feels like a useful idea because it makes invisible strain measurable. It shows how work that looks small or straightforward on paper can still feel heavy when it comes to someone's actual lived experience. I suspect there may be a similar, and similarly useful, simple rubric you could use to assess the 'load' of common digital work, especially cumulatively. For example working on a lot of simultaneous tasks that are low on technical complexity but higher on emotional or relational demands could, cumulatively, carry a really significant load that isn't otherwise visible.

Ghost Acreage

Ghost Acreage is a term from agriculture and economics. It describes the unseen land, water, energy, and labour required to produce what we consume, even though those resources may sit outside the ways we usually measure things.

For example, a country may appear efficient or low impact because it has outsourced resource-intensive production elsewhere. The real 'footprint' of the required resources still exists, but it is hidden from view.

The idea translates quite neatly to digital work in the cultural sector.

Many organisations appear to run lean and reasonably effective digital operations, but much of the effort required to sustain this sits 'off the books' in extra hours, workarounds, and individuals doing the necessary translation between systems and teams.

This is digital ghost acreage, it's capacity that exists (and is essential), but is not formally owned, funded, understood, or acknowledged.

And like environmental ghost acreage, it creates a false sense of sustainability. Things will look stable until that hidden resource is exhausted and then people burn out, systems fail, or progress stalls.

This idea helps explain how organisations can appear functional while unknowingly over-extracting from their digital teams. Making this ghost acreage visible is an important step toward more honest, sustainable and effective planning, resourcing, and care.

The Jevons Paradox

And lastly, back to the 19th century.

The Jevons paradox was an idea first articulated by 19th century economist William Stanley Jevons (he was looking at coal usage, so Victorian) - when something becomes more efficient, cheaper, and/or easier to use, people tend to use more of it, so total demand goes up rather than down.

Energy is the classic example of this in action, as machines and technology become more efficient, energy costs fall, which makes it more economical to do more things that use energy, so overall energy consumption actually increases.

While Jevons was observing this effect in relation to industrial coal consumption, the underlying dynamic appears in our work as well. Digital tools are often introduced to save time and effort (for staff or audiences), but reducing friction and increasing the speed at which work can happen often raises expectations. Teams are then asked to do more, respond more quickly, run more channels, and produce more reporting. What was meant to reduce workload often instead ends up increasing or expanding it.

The key point here is that efficiency does not automatically create spare capacity, reduce pressure, or make things feel like they've 'eased up'. Without deliberate decisions about what will stop or be protected, efficiency usually converts pretty directly into more work. I've seen a lot of this happening around the adoption of AI tools, people talk about '10x-ing' their productivity, but that doesn't seem to mean they've freed up 90% of their time, rather they've taken on 10 times more work.

There's a good long read in the New Yorker about this 'efficiency dilemma'.

The reason that I've shared these ideas is that I think it may be useful to try to find some new lenses through which to look at and understand digital work.

If you've come across other relevant ideas, wherever they may come from, I'd love to hear about them - leave a comment below or drop me an email ([email protected]).

I’m now in the research phase of the Hidden Labour project and inviting anyone involved in digital work in or with cultural organisations to take part. Alongside a short anonymous survey (which is now accepting responses), there will be 1-to-1 interviews and a two-week diary study in April and May, both designed to be light-touch and fit around everyday work, you can register your interest here.