012 The Autonomous Sphere ...

The nekomemetic disease was the first stage of a two-stage autoimmune disease and affected humans by turning them into antibodies that attack healthy components of Gaia, causing septicemia.

Despite the severity of the situation, however, various levels of resistance remained that pushed back against the pandemic and the infection. Gaia's first natural defense against the sepsis consuming her was reducing – if not completely eliminating – the active agents of the infection. However, her defenses were unable to distinguish between the many infected humans and the rest of the living. In any case, even if it wasn't Gaia's intention, the human species was one that would suffer most, precisely because of their density and invasiveness. Many signs suggested that the worst was to come.

Then there were the different kinds of immunity and resistance whose origins were lost in distant times. Far beyond Francis' Canticles of Creatures or Buddha's Bodhi Tree, reverberations of eras of progressive estrangement from nature (Gaia's bosom, if you will) remained in many humans. I certainly wouldn't question the existence of common traits that characterize the essence of humanity, nor the psychological constants between contemporary and prehistoric humans, but the latter lived in a world quite different from ours, and not only objectively. A world dotted with places and moments where direct and unmediated intra-actions with the rest of Gaia took place. In fact, many of what we later called intra-actions were the stories each living thing told in Gaia that the nekomemetic disease caused us to lose track of. Stories that ran through Gaia and spoke of continual encounters with nonhumans; of finding a spring, a food source, a cozy cave, the cool shade of an afternoon tree or, again, of lightning flashing across the night sky and setting bushfire. And so on. Like other species, humans were part of a cycle of life and death that, until the appearance of metatechnics, hadn't produced biosphere pathologies. Things began to change when we moved from the prodigious unity of these reticulations to the development of technical and religious thought. Master Simondon had this insight, a shift which took place, not suddenly, but over a period undoubtedly much longer than human history handed down. Without a doubt it was too early to admit what later would have to be faced: these two opposite and symmetrical mediations were part of a dynamic and changing quantum entanglement. According to the Master's definition of it, the nascent relationship of technoscience and religion was not just that of two inextricably linked phases; they were not abstract entities, but intertwined, entangled material agents that were born and nurtured in a mutual relationship.

More prosaically, the consequences turned out to be important because when the stories that told the moments and places of primal intra-actions were replaced by the mechanics of metatechnics, we didn't need lightning to light the fire. But there would be a price to pay.

In retrospect, countless struggles and battles had been waged throughout History to counter the spread of the disease, fighting not the nekomemes (existence hitherto unknown) but the symptoms they produced, making humans destroyers of Gaia. These were episodes that belonged to that characteristic of the homo social animal who always brought all available resources into play – including metatechnics, of course –  when reacting to great catastrophes or scourges. Perhaps this ability not to succumb in the face of crises had helped reinforce the use of technology, as also appears in certain archetypal narratives including that of the Great Flood. In those remote times, the propagation of the nekomemetic disease was slow and subterranean so that the Flood probably arose from a "natural" catastrophe derived from abiotic causes, but the reflex to use metatechnics – the Ark – to survive was firmly implanted in the human mind.

This time, even those who denied the existence of the nekomemetic disease could not deny the biotic, and particularly human, origin of Gaia's toxic shock. We described it in various ways: from ecological deterioration to climate change. This was the case with the Ecofin AltaSphere, which, in doubt, prepared the Great Escape and attempted to colonize space.

But on Earth there was also another much older sphere that, unlike the first, was not any kind of governance (because it did not manage anything, often not even itself): the Autonomous Sphere; I've mentioned it before. Its birth was lost, like all myths, in the mists of time, but it had certainly existed in every human age even though it had many other names. I chose this one, the Autonomous Sphere,  because it that was what my boomer generation called it.

It was the sphere of all centrifugal tendencies that sought to evade and oppose power from below. It certainly was not a sphere comparable to the elites because you could almost always enter and leave freely. Nor was it really a sphere because there were no boundaries and input/output flows were continuous. At times, it could be truly autonomous, at least in the proper sense of the word, as a power subordinate to another higher power, but with the ability to dictate its own rules; or at any rate try to live by ones that are different from what is considered normal by a higher sovereign power.

But in certain cases there were tendencies within the Sphere that advocated the destruction of the higher power, or even of all power. The Autonomous Sphere was a complex set of dynamic processes that didn't pre-exist before its interactions with the surrounding world, but rather emerged through and as part of relational entanglements of all natures, including the conflictual ones, that continually reconfigured it within the affairs of the species. In certain circumstances of certain phases of capitalism, this ontology of the Autonomous Sphere seemed marked precisely by diametrical opposites, by an "in and against" the capital that bound it inextricably to the latter and thus seemed to (de)perish with it, as often happens in the story I'm telling you. It seems presumptuous to me, as a Boomernaut, to assume that the human Autonomous Sphere would be able to break out not only from the cage of Neolib capital realism but also from any other straitjacket that forced it to relate only within the species. Later I'll tell you how Gaia's severe pathology (and especially the discovery of the nekomemetic pandemic) forced her to attempt to rip through this coercion...