010 Gaia's autoimmunity

One thing that lent further credibility to the nekomemetic disease hypothesis was the imprint left by the memes in the media through which they propagated. The fact that such highly contaminating places were traceable and analyzable confirmed our hunch that the biosphere sepsis, generated by the ongoing nekomemetic pandemic, was an autoimmune disease.

There had long been an unstoppable growth of autoimmune diseases affecting individual humans, and many had speculated about this phenomenon. According to one scientific definition, an autoimmune disease is a breakdown of self-tolerance, a statement that might also have political significance.

The novelty lay in the fact that the immaterial nekomemetic virus was not an autoimmune disease with respect to an individual, in whom it produced only symptoms of a behavioral and relational order, but rather for the whole biosphere, humanity being only a small part. So a single component of the biosphere, humanity, once infected, became pathological for the entire system. Nevertheless, even within the human  component, resistance and even small victories happened: bodies rebelled against this seemingly unstoppable trend, like lava flowing from a volcano. In nekomemetic contamination, the reproduction and mutations of infectious memes were often produced by the very infected for the in/conscious purpose of maximum spread. It is as if the infected could intervene in the mutations of common viruses, like a flu virus, to make them even more contagious and engage in new forms of contamination.

During the spread of biosphere septicaemia, confusion abound regarding the respective roles of capitalist regulation and economic organization on one hand and nekomemetic contagion on the other. This became clearer when we saw that the action of capital anesthetized infected humans. It took any transindividuality away from them, making them unable to share all that they couldn't act on as isolated individuals. Consequently it prevented them from feeling the suffering caused by their transformation into life-destroying agents of the biosphere. Meanwhile, the nekomemetic contagion effected world autoimmunity.

Many other variables also intervened in human awareness of the nekomemetic pandemic, especially class affiliation. The poor – discriminated against, marginalized and essentially enslaved to the influence that neurocapitalism exerted – were less aware of the contagion and the fact that both they and their descendants would suffer the harshest and most direct consequences. At the other extreme, the Big Sick acted from a purely individual perspective heedless of everything, certain that they could get away with it at any ecological cost.

This contamination had something in common with that at the heart of the zombie tales and films that have entered popular culture in the 21st century and perhaps explained its success. In films like World War Z, terrible infections turn humans into aggressive zombies who in turn try to pass on the contagion by biting anyone who happens to be around. In our case everything happened in a much softer way,  but I wonder if, like the zombies, the contaminated lost all self-awareness and became contamination machines. Yes and no. Those infected with the nekomemetic disease definitely were zombies in terms of their destructive and polluting relationship with the biosphere, but they did not lose all consciousness. In fact, many were even consenting.

The issue of a kind of conscious acceptance of the nekomemetic disease was relevant in the decline of civilization, a common thread in my narrative. Unlike material viruses, the nekomemetic disease involved the cognitive sphere and consciousness itself, and the fact that, theoretically, there was a possibility of combating or controlling it at this level was a crucial aspect of countering criticism.

A part of the Autonomous Sphere, particularly Capitalocene advocates, raised the hypothesis that if humanity was becoming a destroyer of the biosphere due to a "common" disease, this would exempt the Big Sick and economic-political power from any responsibility, since getting sick was usually not a conscious choice.

The elites and governing bodies, on the contrary, might have accepted the fact that no class or community could be held more responsible than others in the global crisis, since it was caused by the virus. However, they preferred to deny its existence for fear that their conniving acceptance could be shown.

But back to our dilemma about autoimmunity: some researchers thought that we needed to extend the concept of world immunity. Come to think of it, it was pretty evident. It was enough to consider immunity globally, at least as far as the biosphere was concerned. Of course, we could have gone beyond that and even considered a univere immunity, but only at the risk of ending up only in philosophical or religious diatribes. For world immunity, we only had to refer to the biosphere as a living entity. As early as the 20th century there were those who, in the name of a goddess from Greek mythology, named the biosphere Gaia. She's the idea of the world as a living whole, where everything is held in a delicate and unstable balance that now seemed hopelessly compromised. And so, all the more reason to speak of a serious infection, and therefore toxic shock, of Gaia, since she was a living system it seemed plausible that she could become infected and sick. After clarifying quite a few of my doubts and overcoming the ideological prejudices of my youth, I adhered to this hypothesis, without giving up on denouncing the responsibilities of Governance. From here on, I'll just refer to her as Gaia in the rest of my story. However, some criticized this view of the biosphere as transcendental, and then blamed the old-world intellectuals for remaining etymologically Eurocentric, choosing the name of a deity of ancient Greece. In any case, it would have been difficult to give her names taken from other cosmogonies such as the Andean Pachamama (Mother Earth) that would have attributed roles or intentions to her that she didn't have. Even though she wasn't a generative or destructive deity, Gaia wasn't a passive backdrop to human power either. The nekomemetic pandemic, which exposed the connections and feedback loops Gaia's components were bound up in, toppled once and for all, for those who wanted to understand, the belief of a nature at the sole service of humans.

So, the nekomemetic disease could be defined as the first of a two-stage autoimmunity of the biosphere: spreading among humans it made them agents of Gaia's septicaemia which, while not fatal to her, was deadly to countless living networks.

To reiterate: it is Gaia herself, a systemic entity of the living, that was undergoing a breakdown of self-tolerance generated by one of the species that lived in her. The humans infected by the nekomemes are the antibodies that attack her, but then suffer a boomerang effect, dragging with them a part of Gaia's life, which, for the first time, was being attacked by an auto-immune disease. And this could have had consequences comparable to the famous fall of a giant meteorite...

The perniciousness of this strange new contagion seemed precisely to be generated by the interference of human action in the mutation of the nekomemetic pathogen.

Ultimately the biospheric infection wasgenerated by an immaterial virus made intelligent and dangerous by the species that carried it, but without being able to say whether this intelligence was unconscious or voluntary. A paradoxical situation in which there seemed to be no capacity for cure or vaccine.