All the while, large and small movements, protests, uprisings, and revolts were born. But only under special circumstances were these autonomous forces able to organize enough to trigger the great changes that humans call revolution.
In the 20th century, the movements armed with Marxist theory that had achieved the great proletarian revolution belonged to the Autonomous Sphere. Revolutions that would also mark the next century with the rise of great (imperialist!) powers. Later, the momentum would be renewed in The Long '68 which, though ignorant of the nekomemetic disease, put up a pretty good fight against the spread of the virus, just as it was entering its most intense phase. But at that stage, the movement focused on and prioritized its tug-of-war with capitalism: we still thought the "bright future" could only be built after defeating capitalism. The dream of subverting capitalism everywhere, especially in its Northern fiefdom, never happened. The forces standing in the way of a global revolution had long been too strong, too present, too entrenched, and capitalism overcame every crisis.
When the epic of The Long '68 ended, the era of Neolib counterrevolution began. The of the Autonomous Sphere's red tinge nearly became transparent and its political pulse faded so much that it was hardly perceptible. An American historian of Japanese ancestry even decreed the End of History. In reality, the Sphere was not only alive though battered, but, as the networks spread, it would be covered with a teeming mesh of activities and initiatives that simply no longer posed the problem of revolutionary political strategy. This unwillingness could have been one of the result of the pseudo-prophecy uttered by the biopolitical French snake-charmer's magic formula:
"Mais je crois qu'il n'y a pas de gouvernementalité socialiste autonome [...] il n'y a pas de rationalité gouvernementale du socialisme".
In the late 21st century, the distant echo of this prophecy no longer resounded in the Winter Palace, but it could still be heard in some of the recesses of the Great Wall, on the plateaus of Tibet, and even in certain ruins of Shenzhen manufactories on full moon nights.
Spells aside, this apparent powerlessness was a weakness but also a strength. A weakness because whenever an atom of the Autonomous Sphere came into head-on conflict with real instances of power it was instantly charred by emitting a dim red light. Strength was the tireless engine that kept the Sphere moving in its dogged and stubborn quest for autonomy from the dominant's forms of command, for an escape from the exploitation passed off as "freedom and progress". In its complexity and extension, this engine emitted gigantic flows that did in fact loosen the grip of control in the more and more deteriorating context of the biosphere.
This was probably the reason why, decades later, ephemeral movements concerned about the condition of Gaia periodically arose. Through arduous struggle, they managed to extinguish a handful of outbreaks even though they were still unaware of the disease, but without ever totally stopping the contagion. Mostly these were MegaProjects, which were consubstantial to Gov Neolib, not because they were indispensable or even functionally important, but because they helped control financial flows. MegaProjects were also necessary because they politically prepared the Great Escape. This would become the only real MegaProject now vital to Governance and the elites. A plan that would allow them to continue the production-destruction cycle to the limit of the possible and then abandon everything via the Space Elevators when chaos became uncontrollable and life impossible. At that time, many were convinced of the validity of the Capitalocene Hypothesis in the Autonomous Sphere. But by then, few activists, persuaded of the imminent downfall of the system, were looking for strategic, global and energetic solutions that would disprove the prophecies of the French snake-charmer. The other forces, rather than following the traditional revolutionary patterns of previous centuries, seemed interested in founding horizontal reticular contaminations as the basis for restarting on the ruins of capitalism. The One-hundred Flowers of these attempts, projects, and ecological processes multiplied and were in fact a cure for the nekomemetic virus. They had no nostalgia for an archaic world and tried to use metatechnics appropriately, in accordance with a non-hierarchical, "horizontal" vision. It was also an attempt to disprove the ineluctability of the existing link between metatechnics and the nekomemetic virus. Where these autonomous forces installed themselves and succeeded in their microprojects, the infection of Gaia usually receded. It was a long-term strategy, we hoped it would become the last resort when Gaia's septicemia would leave no escape for life in whole swaths of the planet. Or perhaps we dreamed that the limitless reproduction of these attempts would eventually empty the instances of Governance almost without ever throwing a punch. A little bit like what happened in Russia during the sudden collapse of the Soviet regime through aging and attrition. A hypothetical possibility of septic recession? Would it be enough? Would it come before it was too late?
Like kitsuné, the mythological Japanese fox capable of changing its appearance and taking on human form, it was not in Captial's nature (nor in that of of the nekomemetic virus) to relinquish control of metatechnics and simply cease to exist as a vulgar political regime.
On the other hand, ignorance of the disease was probably why the revolutionaries of the 20th century and the great antagonistic theorists before them – including our own beloved bearded patriarch – weren't able to grasp the danger in sharing the myth of production and progress with Capital, and thus conceding space to it before attempting to defeat it. It's also true that Capital, in the upheaval of the first global wars it generated and then exploited for a paradigm leap, left no choice to the countries where the so-called proletarian revolution had won: produce according to capitalist ways or succumb, no one realizing that this was the production of death.
And it was from that forced but consensual choice, and the accompanying misunderstanding that remained in the minds of so many revolutionaries the conviction of the inevitability of the "in-against" the system of capital. A choice that would open the doors of class division to nekomemetic contamination.
It came, among certain epigones of the great bearded philosopher, to the somewhat masochistic extravagance of worshipping The Golden Calf of Accelerationism. They preached the forced intake of heavy doses of techno-tycoon technology, hoping to turn the tide by overdosing the patient. But the revolt against the Long Spring, first, and the time machine's revelations about the nekomemetic disease put an end to any such vague ambition. This was the paradox of the search for group immunity for an autoimmune disease.
Meanwhile, the virus obviously circulated more intensely in all spheres of Gov Neolib, where the Big Sick who had the highest viral load swarmed. Like the chicken and egg paradox, it was impossible to decide whether Governance and its spheres were producing the Big Sick or vice versa. Probably theycomplemented each other, and this boosted the spread of the virus, given the low resistance encountered.
I have already explained to you that workers of the subjugated classes were involuntarily exposed to nekomemetic charges in both cognitive and industrial activities. This exposure was even more insidious and invasive, making brain workers pathogenic agents of Gaia sepsis.
From the ranks of the working class and subordinate workers had come generations of activists, trade unionists and politicians, including those who had made the great revolutions of the 20th. Their epigones of the Neolib era, perhaps because of their great intimacy with the Big Sick, such as Ecofin managers and Gov politicians, were heavily tainted. Often their viral charge exceeded all limits: they wanted to call themselves democratic reformists and "progressives" (the latter term became synonymous with strong nekomemetic positivity). The unionists were so infected that, under the pretext of protecting jobs, they were ready to defend any kind of activity tooth and nail, including those that would most fuel Gaia's septicemia: extractive and chemical industries or atomic power plants. Everything was fine with them.
It was public knowledge they had become mere cogs in the system. In particular the Gov Neolib, in both its components, but especially the Ecofin AltaSphere, had long adopted and co-opted them because of their ability to interface with and manipulate the masses and subordinate classes from which they came. Then, despite the promise to associate them with the Great Escape, when they were no longer needed for production, they were unceremoniously cast aside.
Just like the science fiction movies of that era with malicious aliens donning anthropic guises to more easily exterminate humanity, so "progressives" of all kinds stealthily transformed themselves into Big Sick, super-spreaders of the nekomemetic disease to covertly introduce it to the masses they claimed to represent and defend.
We naturally started to wonder whether the disease, in addition to making humans zombies of the environment, could also erode the sense of belonging and solidarity in the subaltern classes that had characterized much of the 20th century. That may have been the case, but as a revolutionary boomer I am more inclined to believe that the imprinting of individualism, to which so many generations had been subjected, was the preponderant cause. These two simultaneous effects could not have been accidental. In the past, wasn't it precisely the sense of belonging that changed the course of 20th-century history? Why was nothing or nearly nothing happening now that the situation was far more serious?
The spread of the disease to all sectors of the populations (thanks in part to sick aliens disguised as trade unionists or "progressive" politicians) caused an increase in mutations of infected nekomemes that became more contagious and worsened the severity of the consequences on the biosphere.
To the detriment of the progressives, when the reality of the nekomemetic disease was finally recognized by the Autonomous Sphere, the early proponents of the hypothesis, squeezed between the extremes of "genetic everything" (anthropocene) and "political everything" (capitalocene), started to pursue a new strategy of fighting against the catastrophe of Gaia's septicaemia and admitted their mistake:
We didn't realize that the human nekomemetic virus, the origin of Gaia's septicaemia, had existed from the very beginning of time. In human history and even more so in Gaia's history, capitalism is only a brief and fierce parenthesis that aggravated the situation to the point of criticality. Understanding our error of reversal of cause and effect, we realized that the old strategy of "bringing down" capitalism in an unlikely final confrontation was in vain. Rather, we needed to find the antidote, not only to end capitalism, but more importantly to avoid chaotic, self-destructive and ultimately suicidal ways out.
After the failure of post-'68, apart from sporadic and ephemeral waves, for more than half a century only loosely linked movements and activities arose from the Autonomous Sphere. They acted on a "thousand productive planes" that were often tangential to those managed by power. Many of these activities were intended to prefigure new ways of escaping the political and economic spacetime determined by power. Producing honey, making raku in your backyard, or foraging for matsutaké mushrooms while standing on the edge of the forest. Legally allowed activities used to test approaches that perhaps might be usable in the collapses to come. At the time, ithis didn't bother the Ecofin AltaSphere or the PoS/tate much. They may not have even noticed it at all, like the elephant that doesn't notice the fly except when the insect buzzes around its ear. Indeed, sometimes communal labor in the Autonomous Sphere, even when it was not immediately subservient to the logic of capitalist accumulation, was well regarded by the powers-that-be and particularly by the techno-tycoons. It was seen as a beneficial humus for doing multicolored washing, recycling, recovering initiatives, research and activities in the market cauldron from where the Ecofin AltaSphere could continue to suck the substantial marrow. Had this not been precisely the case with the famous Linux operating system that became indispensable to the functioning of the network technology infrastructure that innervated the bioipermedia? Initially conceived and implemented in the Autonomous Sphere, it later retrieved gratis et amore dei from the techno-tycoons when the time was right.