214 TAMs and the worlds of spontaneous consciousnesses

Here, I really have to open a parenthesis on healing from the nekomemetic disease and how it was influenced by subjective or collective intentions/attitudes/state of mind. That's the only way to understand MATs as an antidote.

The greatest virus deniers, the Big Sick, were also fierce opponents of MATs as an instrument of multispecies intra-action. They denied such an intra-action so far removed from their individualist beliefs could even exist. The initial intention of the Man2Man project, before it was hacked open, was to extend levels of control over the living and maintain dominance. The Big Sick hoped that they could survive at the expense of others, hoping Gaia's toxic shock would only destroy other lifeforms. But it was a losing manoeuvre, and at a certain point they could no longer limit the damages to others.

For them, there was no hope of recovering from the nekomemetic disease. In fact, they were its first propagators, even if they didn't accept being considered as such. In any case, even those who, without confessing it, were intimately persuaded of the existence of the contagion, preferred to deny it. They thought denial was in their best interests, convinced they could maintain their privileges even in the most adverse circumstances. Needless to say, this cohort included the vast majority of the Ecofin AltaSphere, Gov Q and the elites in general; while formally denying the virus they pushed for the preparation of the Great Escape and all its technological implications, first and foremost the space elevators. They secretly thought that once they succeeded in terraforming Mars, just as they had terraformed entire continents on Earth, it would be centuries before they would have to face another biospheric septicaemia. Of course, many of them attributed this inevitability not to the existence of the nekomemetic virus, but rather to a distrust in humans (apparently removed or unconfessed because it was inspired by their own behavior) veined with contempt and arrogance that they called individualist pragmatism.

Even the most pacifistic activists who sought to oppose this view understood that direct and even coercive measures were necessary to neutralize the Big Sick. Given the reduced number of elites, this probably wouldn't have made a multispecies rebellion particularly violent if the SecurServ militias could be demobilized and if the widespread, varied and powerful instruments of self/control and repression deployed by the Gov. machines were at least weakened beforehand.

Far more numerous were those who publicly declared they were fighting the pandemic, but in fact continued to fuel it. Some argued that vertical forest skyscrapers, with exclusive apartments for soccer players and models, were not only aesthetically pleasing, but were also the solution to make megacities more environmentally friendly. Then there was the underbelly, those who didn't really know which way to turn but who, through force of circumstance or convenience, tried not to take sides, yet suffered continuous deterioration in living standards.

Even those who were beginning to gain an awareness of the degree of their contagion were under no illusions. Being aware and fighting back weren't enough to cure the memetic disease and, indeed, this was where the hardest part began. A hypothetical and improbable global revolt, along the lines of the one attempted by us boomers, which had shaken the world about a century and a half before this MAT breakout, wouldn't stop Gaia's septicemia. And even as the intuition of a multispecies rebellion grew deep inside, ideas were confused and doubts numerous.

Thanks to the prospects opened up by MATs, we then began to believe in building a commune of affect that included a large part of living and machinic intelligence. A commune at last capable of combating the nekomemetic disease; humans, including H+, -H, non-humans and emancipated generative bots were to take part. Obviously, the construction of this multispecies commune implied a different way of living in the biosphere, where global balances would've totally changed. Not only the balances between humans, nonhumans and machinic mediations, but a real upheaval of what had become human presence on Gaia.

Gaia's toxicity was about to cause an extinction comparable to the one that had caused the end of the dinosaurs and most of the webs of life. It's likely that the protozoa, bacteria and many microorganisms that can adapt and thrive in different extreme environments would've continued to exist and evolve.

Then we assumed that, barring unforeseen events, the Earth would survive at least until absorption by the Sun in half a dozen billion years. Gaia, on the other hand, could have died sooner for other reasons, including the possible collapse of oxygen or loss of atmosphere or other phenomena on a scale quite different from that of the nekomemetic pandemic.

In this context, thanks to MATs, a hypothetical alliance between humans and nonhumans was emerging as the last anchor of salvation even though the implication of the whole of nonhumans up to, and including, simple organisms wasn't yet clear. As highlighted by ontologies and epistemologies derived from quantum philosophy, viral outbreaks confirmed the role of intra-actions at any level in the scale of the living and even the abiotic substrate and autonomous bots.

Many species could interact directly through the devices of MATs, from those more or less close to humans to the even more distant ones like slime. Some considered MATs to be the synthesis of technological clairvoyance. Many nonhuman collective life forms like herds, swarms or schools, etc. were also involved in such exchanges. Although certain insects and other social nonhumans could communicate collectively, it was obvious that protozoa, metazoans, bacteria and other simple organisms believed to be the earliest forms of living matter and whose biomass was enormous, couldn't be directly involved in MATs. Taken individually, these organisms and those in the plant world often didn't have the feedback systems necessary for sensations and reflexive forms of consciousness but, like I said earlier, they did have capabilities for spontaneous consciousness of their surroundings. Even official science admitted that plants, beyond from the ravages of Gaia's toxic shock, were able to effectively solve problems by interacting and adapting to their environment through memory and learning, thereby demonstrating a form of intelligence.

The elites, and unfortunately also a substantial part of humanity at that time, didn't seem to possess any real capacity or interest in understanding this.While cohabiting with other species, they couldn't recognize the types of intelligence of other life forms (anymore), and this paradoxically also affected the machinic forms of intelligence. They were, however, a long way from being able to establish the same affective revolution with these species that MATs now seemed to allow.

Then even though the species belonging to the plant kingdom and those in between had not been directly integrated into MATs at that stage, there was a belief among pro-MAT humans that they could act indirectly in a concatenation that starting from the least differentiated levels would then be able to spread and be available to everyone in the bio-network.

It wasn't a question of importance because, in any case, no hierarchy could be defined in Gaia's composite, constantly moving configuration.

In the growing MAT community, humans aspired to the integration of the plant kingdom in the same way that nonhumans or machinic entities did. They were aware of the complexity of the plant world in its phylogenetic relationships, its material extent, and especially its essential role in the very survival of Gaia. Indeed, the bio-network came to have non-invasive contact with so many environments and plant entities and especially with what remained of the largest original rainforest, the Amazon.

Like nonhuman animals, plants suffered from Gaia's toxic shock with the same destructive dynamic and with even more lethal consequences, given their apparently limited and slow mobility compared to the rest of the living. A dynamic that depended on the advance in the human world of the nekomemetic disease with the accelerations to which I have already alluded. On the other hand, many of the sensors and related devices of the bio-network also worked for plants, not to mention the specific ones that had accumulated on the territory also as a function of the intensive production established in earlier eras. In the development of the bio-network, great semio-technical difficulties had been encountered in the development of interfaces with plants that would enable them to reach the level of existing intra-actions with animal domains. Most critics argued that the possible contribution of plants in affective exchanges had been underestimated in the Autonomous Sphere, despite awareness of their adaptive intelligence.

Perhaps it was considered a hopeless endeavor, given the distances and differences in pace that separated human behaviors conditioned by the disease from those of the plant kingdom under the onslaught of Gaia's septicemia.

But significant steps had been taken in understanding the way plants and especially trees communicate, with regard to the Wood Wide Web, the so-called mycorrhizal network, a result of the intra-actions between the complexity of roots and the mycelia of fungi underlying the growth and development of forests and much of plant life.

But again, pro-MAT humans basically hoped that such limited exchanges with the plant would indirectly become part of the bio-network of multispecies affections and change many of its tones; they also counted on animals acting as mediators, or perhaps representatives, using their intact capacity to intra-act with plant species.

Finally, a large part of Gaia was composed of inanimate matter, without which the living could never have existed. A necessary condition, but not a sufficient one, because they found substrate, but not life, in neighboring planets, despite Gov Q's claims of off-planet life after mutilating Gaia. Even the inanimate terrestrial substrate, being part of Gaia's internal balances, suffered the consequences of septicaemia even more passively, at least in appearance, than the other nonhuman living components.

Abiotic matter had been measured, cataloged, monitored, controlled and exploited by humans since the birth of metatechnics. Think, for example, to the first thermometers, dating back to the earliest human civilizations. But if even to pro-MAT humans it seemed arduous to be able to affectively interface with the plant world let alone if, apart from collecting the usual scientific surveying data, they thought it sensible to do so with rocks, sands, air or groundwater.

Yet this skepticism seemed to be contradicted by many experiences: if there was no possible perception of certain phenomena typical of the inorganic components of the Earth, and particularly of the lithosphere, how could certain nonhumans perceive the arrival of a volcano eruption or an earthquake in advance?

Here, again, for lack of anything better, all that was left was hoping that the nonhumans connected to the bio-network could become interpreters/mediators/representatives of the rest of Gaia.

An interminable diatribe broke out in the case concerning matter, especially in the Autonomous Sphere. Just know that the great osmosis that characterized this Sphere gave rise to many infiltrations and tendencies, even reactionary ones such as those who believed that technologies were an absolute evil, like I mentioned earlier. It wan't clear whether this anathema was limited to "modern" and contemporary technologies born in the centuries of capitalism, or concerned metatechnology itself. Be that as it may, it was in this niche, convinced of the seriousness of Gaia's septicemia but opposed to MATs and the bio-network, that the doubts were seeded. The reasoning wasn't without a certain logic: indeed, they wondered why it was necessary to use technology to delegate to certain nonhuman species the right to represent the plant and hybrid worlds and then even the inorganic ones. Some of them, criticizing the energy costs of the bio-network (meager because they were strictly based on renewable energy), began to wonder whether it wouldn't be better to forgo any technology, including the bio-network and MATs, and expand the principle of the now zombified Western electoral democracy by electing humans capable of representing the various living and inanimate nonhuman worlds. This proposal remained an unsuccessful minority. First, because it wasn't clear how and who should be elected, and then who would decide which representations should be constituted: the peoples of the sea? those of the sky? And then what?

But the topic that closed the discussion was precisely that of human capacity. Who, other than Gov Q, would dare to represent other species when our own, ailing one, had blatantly demonstrated that we couldn't even do so it for ourselves?