204 BSM movements

In the exponential multiplication of conflicts, a buzzword suddenly took hold within the Autonomous Sphere, a term that would later give rise to a whole new set of horizontal social movements that complemented many that already existed: Breath&Smell Matter, or BSM for short.

In the face of Gaia's unprecedented infection, no literally taking the breath away from those who could't afford decent air, the slogan "I can't breathe" came back. A desperate cry from the dominated classes for themselves and for Gaia from deep within the endless megacities they were forced to live in. Beginning in Mexico and South America, where hundreds of millions were now living in the torrid death fog of exterminated slums, the slogan spread first to the rest of the South, in Asia and Africa, and then finally to the North and the West. Thermal catastrophes becaming frequent. Mass deaths occurred during extreme heat waves, especially in areas where wet-bulb temperatures exceeded levels bearable for the human body.

This was the wake-up call, somewhat louder than the others, that marked a leap in the biospheric septicemia.

In its proverbial flexibility, Ecofin sought to integrate the answer to this extended malaise into the market. Inspired by their old greenwashing practices, they invented curewashing. For example, ever since the distant Covid 19 era, a new chain of private cures emerged known as Lost Senses Clinics.

But back to the BSM. A rapid intersectional and geographic expansion converged many components onto this unifying buzzword. Feminists, precarious, black and racialized, migrants, semio-hackers from the cryptocommons movement, ecowarriors, Pink LGBTQ+ activists, former schizo-tempestuous Chinese, post-antispecialists, and other splinters elements left over from long gone movements – including Greta's great-grandchildren – participated. Not limited to activists, broad sections of populations united by the same vital issues came into the fold. The precarious cognitive workers from the North, the vast poor populations of the South, and alternative networks spread out just about everywhere, all found themselves within BSM.

The BSM wave, in addition to denouncing Gov Q's policies, repeatedly tried to block important arteries of the megacities like, as I said earlier, cutting the pipelines that carried the black blood of Gaia's infection. They surprisingly achieved several favorable results here and there, but on the ground and in the squares they were often up against an unfavorable balance of power. Not to mention the organizational shortcomings and unresolved contradictions in such a large and complex geopolitical arena.

Things began to change when Gov Q's three-stage device was installed and began functioning algorithmically, but it too was suffering the devastating effects of Gaia's decimated state. In their discontinuity, the loose anti-Neolib movements had been traversed by intersectional vectors that lost the strict sense with which this term had originated. Now, intersectionality meant the interdependence of the severe forms of oppression such as racism, sexism, and homophobia, but iwithout yet finding adequate forms of struggle that could redirect these multiple drives into a revolutionary force able to worry Ecofin's centers of power.

But a strength emerged. From the throes of geeks within BSM, a small army of semio-hackers, scattered around the world, who used and maintained the most important anonymous browsing protocols and virtual private networks, rose up. This was no small feat, because it enabled digital forms of resistance to Gov Q's quantum domination. Semio-hackers began working in multiple directions, undertaking empirical experimentation. Many of them were part of the cryptocommons movement that had sought to create conditions for replicable, bottom-up managed computation. Their technological knowledge gave them the hunch of the quantum turn of Governance and the danger of the advent of a centralized megablack-box that it would represent. They attempted to shape and defend the techno-political evolution of information technology platforms outside the logic of ownership. An evolution that, at least theoretically, would have been possible using blockchain algorithms.

To combat this autonomous offensive more effectively, Gov endowed WorldForce with an Executive Board which, in addition to representatives of the armament oligarchy, had as many as 5 VPs of GAFAM- and BATX-class mega-platforms. These people (mostly men...) who controlled key sectors and departments: information (and especially intelligence), communication, education, research... Obviously, given the considerable rise in temperatures due to global warming, a portion of the GAFAM-class data farms had gone up in smoke, had been abandoned due to lack of cooling capacity or other geopolitical causes, such as simple abandonment. Platform flows were thus weaker compared to their heyday, but a new technological reorganization based on energy-efficient molecular memories gave techno-tycoons hope to return to previous levels. In the Ecofin AltaSphere, there was no shortage of challenges, alliances and struggles for influence among bankers, money funds and recycled statesmen. BATX-class platforms, accused of competing with state power, had been restricted by the CCP since the era when it was still all-powerful and fully functioning. Only China's Aladdin had been allowed to place its managers directly in Ecofin AltaSphere where, among the leaders, were the heirs of Zebos, the mythical founder of Amazonas, a site that alone handled much of the world's trade, while those of M/Elon were given up for lost after a failed landing attempt on Mars.

Despite the successes that techno-tycoons achieved in quantum and nanoparticle technologies in space elevators, black clouds were gathering on the horizon. Although they tried to hide it, large platforms, long used for individual biopolitical control of humans, were now somewhat exhausted horses, and molecular memories were certainly not going to give them any new breath of life. They embodied the neurocapitalist extension of Neolib Gov, based on individual neuronal influence, their goal to condition subjectivities in such a way as to generate voluntary subjugation. They had succeeded to some extent, but their megamachines were losing steam and only the inexorable decline of their once-powerful biopolitical control capabilities was in sight.

In letting the techno-tycoons loose in the Neolib phase and later in the first part of the quantum phase, Governance had only worsened the nekomemetic pandemic and Gaia's consequent suffering. In the 4 elements warszones where people were dying of heat or could no longer breathe, eat, quench their thirst or live with any dignity, the seduction of voluntary digital servitude had vanished.

Although collapses were still relatively episodic, and huge disparities between territories and/or between population strata within the same region persisted, the trend was set. So much so that many even said that there was a new South even within the North. But what had begun with the first migrant crises in the previous century were now generalized, massive and often irrepressible.

On the other hand, it really seemed that the repercussion of BSM buzzwords failed to produce empathetic, revolutionary and a global organizational tissue. Despite this, movements continued to express themselves even violently in innumerable forms, ranging from resistance struggles to insurrections and armed activities, but they lacked a globality that would have been a sine qua conditio for developing further. Moreover, Gov Q inherited the genes of full compatibility with nationalist, populist and fascist movements from Neolib Gov. This allowed it to exercise divide et impera among subaltern categories and, if necessary, to stir up forms of civil war (proletarians vs. migrants, etc.).

Despite everything, a proverbial chink opened where it was least expected. Like other passages in history, when the time is ripe, the same insight becomes ubiquitous by manifesting simultaneously in distant places. Such was the case with the one destined to definitively oppose the nekomemetic pandemic. On the North American continent, it was in the semiotic hackerspace Soundbridge, which had survived San Francisco's BIG ONE, that the idea emerged. In India, Russia, China, Lithuania, Japan and elsewhere, the same happened while, in Europe, it was precisely at a conference organized by ESC that it was discussed. What was needed, they said, was a free memetic counter-flow that could depotentiate the virus with both a curative and immunitive function.