210 A new dimension opens up

MATs came into play smack dab in the middle of this extreme confusion. Gov Q's disorganized attempt to escape the impending global collapse with the Great Escape in a tailspin from the crisis it had accelerated.

A growing number of humans were trying to reestablish, sometimes unconsciously, sometimes individually and always confusedly an organic connection with Gaia to replace the one lost in time immemorial. In this belated effort, they began to chase the slightest clue pointing in any direction. There were promising leads, from mycelium to invertebrates, and it would go on and on given enough time.

Since the days of Grandma Haraway and Aunt Barad, many had begun to set out on new paths to avoid the worst, but in the face of Gov Q's determination and scientific violence, these alternative and peaceful ways seemed powerless.

When MAT devices began to be forged in the Autonomous Sphere's hacker spaces and under the impetus of BSM movements, they took on new forms that diverged from Gov Q's stereotypical neuromarketing. Although still in an experimental stage, the appearance of the new universe generated by MATs at first caused great astonishment, but soon the potential of this new dimension was truly glimpsed: MATs could contribute to the rise of a new utopia where the old division between species would come to an end.

I'll try to explain how these interspecies exchanges actually happened. Perhaps you may ironically assume that someone put an emotional collar on her cat or dog to find out what they thought of the kibble in the latest holographic advertisement. But domesticated animals had already been capable of such communications with their "masters" for millennia. Indeed, some scholars even thought that the dog/wolf had enabled the self-styled Sapiens Sapiens to prevail over their Neanderthal competitors because they were affectively involved in an alliance and mutual domestication and cooperation resulting in, among other things, new hunting techniques. But precisely because of this multi-thousand-year proximity, the door of unmediated perceptions and insights had also narrowed for the dog/wolf and domesticated animals, so they had little to reveal compared to the rest of the nonhuman beings.

In industrially raised nonhumans, suffering, fear and terror often dominated their meaningless life and death. MATs amplified and propagated these frightening feelings by dealing a near-death blow to the meat industry, which had taken on galactic proportions. At the same time, this industry was one of the main vectors of the nekomemetic disease because of the endless gas emissions produced by industrially raised animals and the induced effects of industrial GMO soy or corn crops and deforestation. The capitalist production of meat, symbolically represented by McDonald Trump, had again fanned the fire of the pandemic. But hadn't the endless pornfood memes of nonhuman flesh and blood posted on social media been just as significant, if not more so? And didn't this once again prove that the end of capitalism would not be enough to stop the pandemic?

Added to this was a feeling of fear, indeed distrust, that sometimes emanated from certain wild species that came into frequent contact with humans. It was like a background noise, akin to an affective tinnitus, that was now rampant in the collective imagination of humans; an emotional oppression that also functioned as a warning as humans were being hit by various global zoonoses. Perhaps not everyone knew that this aspect of Gaia's sepsis was yet another tangible sign of the deteriorating situation.

The downfall of the meat business was a positive consequence of MATs, which intimately conveyed the suffering inflicted on nonhumans and created a deep, yet beneficial, discomfort.

There were also other positive and engaging aspects that arose. Certain wildlife, which in the general crisis were somewhat increasing their margins of freedom, and transgenic -h were among the first to come into the picture without being invited or forced.

This happened because the bionetwork, able to capture and transmit affections, covered vast territories and reached many nonhuman species that were wild or had regained their freedom. The internet of things (IoT) was now limitless and blurred with the internet of animals (IoA). Nonhuman living things intimately interacted with the devices in their territory. The innumerable nodes of the bio-affective sensor web that covered the biosphere consisted of "technological clairvoyance devices" (or perhaps blinding as some argued) that were not passive, but vivified with intense carnality by the animals whose territories they had invaded; they were played with, sniffed, licked, mimicked, attacked, courted, fucked, urinated on, destroyed, even mourned.

Let's be clear: MATs didn't work like a simultaneous interpreter used in a Disney production to anthropologize crickets or squirrels. Even Gov Q had great ambitions and wanted to make MATs a kind of covert persuasion machine, before it lost control of it. Rather, it was an articulate system capable of processing the complexities of all the signals we have mentioned and putting them on a two-way street.

For humans who were already dependent on devices, whether worn or integrated, it was, after all, an extension of the existing. Still, it was an extraordinary functionality because it gave us access to a dimension open to previously unthinkable perspectives. Somewhat like when, upon the arrival of the Internet, the pioneers of the Web were astonished to discover the potential of the tool that was about to invest humanity.

In their frenzy to see and hear everything, locate everything, measure everything, control everything, the three Gov Q corps spurred the production of trivialized and dwarfed technologies to be spread the world over. Besides using them in the networks they controlled, they had also encouraged indiscriminate use. There were nanochips even in the most mundane food like bread, and this created new multiverses of BigData. It was almost impossible to find a recondite corner that didn't contain a myriad of connected objects; in such an environment nonhumans capable of escaping the reach of MATs were truly rare.

Once MATs became the domain of the commons, their development accelerated and, thanks to the contributions of extensive collective production, affective knowledge deepened. Humans discovered that many species reacted to MATs in often unpredictable and surprising ways. Some invented their own way of using them: interacting or shielding or fleeing depending on whether the emotions and affects they perceived attracted, disturbed or frightened them. Others remained indifferent to the stimuli, and still others were able to convey, along with pure emotion, hints as to the feeling's original cause. Of course, given prior history, fear generated by the mere presence of humans was often present.