By skyforbes 
(The Rhizome Is Us)
You’re chatting with ChatGPT about your weekend plans while simultaneously doom-scrolling TikTok, and then AI’s suggestions start connecting to the memes you’re seeing, which trigger memories that influence what you ask the AI next, which shapes the playlist Spotify creates based on your “current vibe.” You’re experiencing what philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari would recognize as
pure rhizomatic culture in action.
Writing in the 1970s-80s, Deleuze and Guattari anticipated many features of our digital age: network thinking, viral spread of ideas, distributed intelligence, and the breakdown of traditional institutional boundaries.
What Actually IS a Rhizome? (D&G’s Underground Revolution)
According to Deleuze & Guattari — let’s call them ‘D&G’ — a rhizome is a non-hierarchical, decentralized network structure that
“connects any point to any other point, and its traits are not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature; it brings into play very different regimes of signs, and even nonsign states…It is composed not of units but of dimensions, or rather directions in motion.” (Deleuze & Guattari, p, 21)
They weren’t just talking about plant biology — they were staging a philosophical revolution against hierarchical thinking itself. The rhizome operates by different principles entirely.
Rhizomes spread horizontally, multiply in all directions, and create unexpected connections. They theorized this concept in A Thousand Plateaus (1980) — decades before social media, neural networks, or the internet as we know it — yet their vision of rhizomatic connection-making eerily predicts how we actually live and think in digital culture today.
D&G, like Dolce & Gabbana, can be fabulous but somewhat out of reach. The rhizome isn’t some abstract philosophical concept floating around in academic ether — it’s a way of describing the processual, space-based, connection-making reality we’re already living in digital culture.
D&G were essentially describing the logic of networks before networks became the dominant organizing principle of contemporary life.
But here’s what really connects D&G’s rhizome to both our digital culture and neural network intelligence: it’s all about process, or rather
the process is the product
No beginning, no middle, no end. Just space and synergy.
“It has neither beginning nor end, but always a middle (milieu) from which it grows and which it overspills.” (Deleuze & Guattari, p, 21).
This ‘in-between-ness’ is crucial. The rhizome connects, and the combined effect is greater than the sum of their separate effects.
Hyperbodies: You Are Your Own Data Swarm
Dutch architect and media theorist, Kas Oosterhuis builds on swarm intelligence, describing how each person functions as a hyperbody. Your body isn’t just your physical form: Each person is their own data swarm, or rhizome. The information flows from one body or data swarm to another body or data swarm through a combination of physical communication and/or the network/digital means, and the social transactions provide the necessary bridges for swarm architecture.
We are hyperbodies
“connected, superclustered, time-based vehicle[s] of swarming intelligent building elements reconfiguring its multiple shapes and content in real time.” (Oosterhuis, p. 67)
The hyperbody becomes an integral link of communication between physical and virtual space. Translation: You’re basically a shape-shifting, time-traveling communication entity that exists simultaneously across digital and physical space and time. Your morning coffee photo connects to your friend’s afternoon mood, which connects to a stranger’s evening playlist, which connects back to tomorrow’s recommendations.
Neural Networks: When Machines Learn to Swarm
Modern neural networks operate like data swarms. Each artificial neuron is an independent agent, processing and passing along information in real-time dialogue with its neighbors. Neural networks embrace distributed, parallel processing where intelligence emerges from collective interactions.
Take GPT — it’s essentially a massive data swarm made of mathematics. Millions of artificial neurons, each a tiny intelligent agent, all processing language simultaneously, creating connections no programmer designed. The network learns to write poetry not because someone taught it “poetry rules,” but because it learned poetic patterns from swarm intelligence.
“The rhizome connects any point to any other point,” write D&G. That’s how AI systems work — connecting linguistic patterns to emotional tones to cultural references in ways that often surprise their creators.
Smooth and Striated Space: The Dance of Digital Existence
D&G’s concept of smooth and striated space becomes crucial here. Smooth space is nomadic, nonlocal — about movement and becoming. Striated space is sedentary, organized — about being and control. As noted: “The two spaces exist only in mixture: smooth space is constantly being translated into striated space, and striated space is constantly being returned to smooth space.”
You experience this constantly. When you post a photo, you’re in smooth space — pure creative flow. But it immediately gets striated: tagged, algorithmically categorized, measured by engagement. Then someone comments, shares, remixes, and that striated data flows back into smooth space — becoming part of new creative processes.
Neural networks navigate the same dynamic. During training, they exist in smooth space — exploring, experimenting. When deployed, they get striated — constrained by tasks, measured by performance. Yet even then, they keep generating smooth moments: unexpected poetry and surprising creative connections.
The Rhizome and AI: Artificial Intelligence as Pure Process
Here’s where D&G’s vision becomes almost prophetic: AI systems, especially large language models, operate exactly like the rhizomatic assemblages they described.
Modern AI doesn’t work through hierarchical decision trees — it works through what D&G would recognize as pure rhizomatic process.
ChatGPT doesn’t have a database of “correct answers.” Instead, it navigates vast probability landscapes, making connections between patterns never explicitly programmed. It weaves together syntax, sentiment, and cultural knowledge in unexpected ways — exactly what D&G meant by
“A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles.” (Deleuze & Guattari, p .7)
AI systems embody D&G’s principle that “the rhizome operates by variation, expansion, conquest, capture, offshoots.” (Deleuze & Guattari, p .21)
Every interaction with an AI creates new connections, new possibilities, new pathways through the network. The system doesn’t ‘learn’ in a traditional sense — it becomes, it is l’espace quelconque — a space in a state of constant flux and transformation — pure potential that is constantly reconfiguring its connection patterns through use.
Most strikingly, AI demonstrates what D&G called “multiplicity” — intelligence that emerges from countless simple interactions without any central controlling mechanism. No single neuron “understands” language, but understanding emerges from the collective behavior of millions of connections.
Conclusion: The Rhizome Is Us
“A rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines,” write D&G about the resilient, creative nature of the network itself. (Deleuze & Guattari, p. 9)
We are the rhizome. We always have been — social beings creating connections, sharing resources, building culture through collective intelligence. Digital technologies haven’t created something new so much as amplified patterns that were already there.
Every time you share a meme, contribute to a collaborative playlist, or co-create with AI systems, you’re engaging in rhizomatic culture-building. You’re proving that intelligence is collective, creativity is collaborative, and that
the most interesting things happen in spaces between individual minds.
We are the in-between, the milieu where connections form, dissolve, and reform endlessly. Pure process, pure becoming, pure rhizome.