205 Counterflow and utopia

Building or fostering the emergence and expansion of a memetic stream capable of slowing and interrupting the pandemic was quite different from past mass vaccinations, those to which humanity had become accustomed since the good Dr. Jenner had discovered that bovines infected with cowpox (vaccine) no longer developed the disease in a form as deadly as the human variant. The first vaccine scientifically demonstrated that while zoonoses existed, nonhumans could also provide protection. But in the face of an immaterial and selfishly human virus, our good Dr. Jenner would have been powerless. Just like the vaccines and other cures that came from genetic engineering and on which Big Pharma had made immense profits didn't work...

Instead, considerable was Soundbridge's insight and those of other semiotic hackerspaces, given that the very survival of humanity (or "civilization?) was at stake.

How could this immaterial vaccine or barrier against nekomemes capable of assuming infinite guises, leading to infinite devastating acts, work?

While the harmfulness of nekomemes was often evident, there were also particularly insidious categories of memes in which, under the seemingly innocuous guise of a phrase, verse or image, "the superiority of the human race" or "the afflicted verse of the divine" is surreptitiously conveyed. What I mean is any transcendence in which "Man", in order to rise, must break the bonds that bind him [sic] to Earth. Gaia is, or must become, a dead weight, from which we free ourselves to "ascend to heaven".

In nekomemeic taxonomy, there was also a large class of memes that induced intra-human devastation, humans objectively being part of Gaia – despite our attempt to deny this fact for millennia. There were wide categories of these intra-human nekomemes that were racist, sexist, homophobic, etc. Not to mention human-on-human exploitation, which was another obvious link between pandemic expansion and the entrenchment of capitalist rationality.

Could there be an algorithm that recognized nekomemes and stopped their spread? What technologies would have to directly penetrate humans' bodies and minds to prevent them from forming?

Semiohackers and the crypto-commons movement hoped to create new, anonymous collective ownership of decentralized computing architectures but, with the advent of quantum computation, their firepower was nil in the face of the techbros; besides, we're not talking about two armies facing each other as was once the case. There was, needless to deny it, a great osmosis and, following an old tradition, semiohackers were often seduced by the techbros's unfathomable wealth and power. Many sold out and became techno-tycoons themselves...

Moreover, nobody had forgotten about the battle over free software that their predecessors had lost to the proto-techno-tycoons. Software had remained, by and large, proprietary and unmodifiable. Born from the commons, Free Software promoted cooperation and open access to technology and knowledge. It seemed to herald a non-capitalist turn, especially since the results were often incomparably superior to proprietary or closed-source software. When the head honcho of free software, RmS, devised the ingenious semantic reversal of copyright to copyleft, important legal battles had also been won. But it was precisely this terrible semantic misunderstanding of "left" and "right" that sealed its fate. Only future techno-tycoons understood that the two terms had to be understood in both a legal and a political sense. Having failed to beat copyleft and the free software movement frontally on either legal or technical fronts (clearly demonstrated by the superiority of the C.Brownix operating system), techno-tycoons beat it out politically without a hitch. A decisive victory. Indeed, they successfully adopted the classic capitalist strategy: co-opting and harnessing this free production into their service. At the same time, they duped hacker developers and designers with attractive wages.

In Neolib times, techno-tycoon victory was in the air, but it was also conceded almost without a fight by the genius, but bearded and Asperger grump RmS, along with many other free software activists. They limited themselves to fighting the technical and legal aspects, renouncing all political pretensions, even to the point of washing their hands of the techno-tycoons' hoarding of the free work produced by the very movement they created.

The consequence? The great artifacts (also known as flagships) of free software became the key elements in the system they had claimed to abandon. This severe blow brought the entire Autonomous Sphere and the deluded people who had called it a concrete utopia to their knees.

The technical success that enshrined the superiority of free software as a mode of common production was thus coupled with a political failure to liberate this common production from the capitalist yoke. Once again, we returned to Che's old aphorism: free techbros in a free software henhouse.

In the light of the memetic pandemic, the coopting of free software into Neolib production caused a marked deterioration. Proprietary software in the hands of techno-tycoons and their predecessors had always been, by definition, the privileged vehicles of viral nekomemics. Now their potential was amplified by the efficiency and power of key software produced by the commons. The certainty that a memetic stream able to combat the immaterial pandemic wouldn't be a mere technical device and that it couldn't function without a profound change in those who were rebelling and insurgent arose. Only a collective, abstract, shared utopia had allowed for advances in civilization in the past but, after so many failures, where were we supposed to find it now?

Could such a powerful utopia capable of reversing the situation after so many generations subjugated to the imprinting of neolib "pragmatism" be found? Of course, capitalist imprinting wasn't only the result of classical discipline imposed through violence, but also by means of soft persuasion and voluntary adherence to forms of subjugation.

The free software affair, as well as FOSS, were further confirmation that technology alone could never spark a revolution, even though with every major technological paradigm shift the opposite is said and many delude themselves into thinking that it can.

Hadn't Neolib Gov exerted its discreet appeal for decades and partially fulfilled its seductive promises – especially in the wealthy northern quarters? Who hadn't been somewhat susceptible to the lure of buying in one click? Who had not noticed, for a time, the almost worldwide lengthening of the average life span of almost all classes? Hadn't this occurred through the combination of welfare, acquired through struggles, and the "advances" of technoscience? Hadn't the population had increased twenty-fold and life expectancy more than doubled in the last five centuries? As argued by Gov, wasn't all this thanks to the efficiency of privatized services in the face of those remaining public services made deficient by the gradual dismantling to which they had been forced by the capital-state machinery? Who would have imagined that, in less than half a century, the hacker utopia of the Whole Earth Catalog would be turned upside down by individualists, then globalized and made available to all through global platforms of consumerism, with Amazonas and Aladdin at the helms of two warring imperialists? What utopia would have been stronger than all this wealth brought by the Neolib for the classes that could afford it?

Was it not, if not the best of worlds, at least the most technologically efficient? Even though one had to turn a blind eye to the methods used... "it doesn't matter if a cat is black or white, if it catches mice it's a good cat".

Yes, of course there was a heavy price to pay in terms of precarization, abandonment of social gains, stress, and the quality of life in general. Plus some frustration with the inequalities that increased as one moved to the South, and then also in the new "South" within the North...

And there was also frustration in the North, over this model of long and comfortable living re-proposed by the Big Sick spewing nekomemetic virus from SUVs and private jets, while a growing part of the population was expelled from this comfort zone.

Everyone knows that frustration is easily ridirected towards scapegoats, generating hatred. But ever since Gov Q had succeeded Neolib, it was impossible not to see, even by closing one's eyes, that a global tsunami was slowly approaching.

Under such conditions, it was impossible to cling to a new utopia. The premonitory signs had come when science fiction and fiction in general became incapable of escaping reality: the imaginations of writers and scriptwriters could no longer come up with escapist utopias, they could only copy the real.

However, had it not been for the nekomemetic pandemic and the apocalyptic threats it implied, all these negatives would have been passed off by Governance as mere collateral damage to the system. And at the same time, like Grantham's shopkeeper, Governance continued, undaunted, compulsively insisting "no alternative is possible"!