007 Vectorial memes

Unanimous agreement in Gov Neolib spheres to support the absolutist anthropocene theory, blaming genetic selfishness and in line with vague statements about supposed efforts toward a green capitalism. Meanwhile, the Great Escape was secretly being prepared.

In the Autonomous Sphere, on the other hand, congenital to the rise of long, sterile debates, Capitalocene couldn't quite reach unanimity. There was no agreement on the date of the beginning of this geological era, which supposedly corresponded capitalism, also somewhat indeterminate. Unanimous, however, was the rejection of the neolib thesis on the responsibilities of the selfish gene as the primary cause of biospheric septicemia. Given the doubts around a supposed "end of capitalism" that could stop the collapse of the biosphere, the hypothesis of an atypical human disease began to emerge, despite much resistance. Since no material agent, however microscopic, had been identified, it was conceded that the disease affecting humans might be due to an immaterial agent. This contagion had been spreading from ancient times in the self-styled sapiens species. A disease that transformed the infected into biosphere-destroying agents now assumed the unstoppable proportions of a pandemic.

It is in this context, the conjecture of an immaterial contagion affecting only one species began to emerge. After all, hadn't the adjective "viral" been used to describe the phenomenon of an incorporeal contagion ever since the beginning of the Internet? Hadn't marketing, one of the pillars of this system, fully adopted it by trying to induce pathological forms of consumerism?

In this case, it would be endemic, a form arising within the human species ever since we had begun to possess, practice and develop techné. Techné, isn't simply technique, but should be understood as metatechnique, that is, "the technique of creating new techniques." It's better than the imprecise, overused and politically connoted term "innovation."  Once acquired, metatechnique generated a shift in the relationship of the human to the biosphere. A dispute also opened up with those who wanted to substitute the term "metatechnics" for "metaculture" (culture capable of producing new cultures). But ultimately the debate was somewhat futile. Metatechnics and metaculture were so intimately entwined that it was impossible to separate them. The research and debate over this alleged immaterial disease was not spurred by "an obsession with origins" (like the one denounced by the ampullistic rhetoric of the 19th century), but by a vital need to discover its causes, in the hope of finding a chance for survival. To metatechnics – conditioned from the beginning by social, environmental parameters – belonged not only early artifacts such as arrowheads or other rudimentary tools or instruments, but also intangible ones like proto-languages. Since the distant discovery of mirror neurons, it became clear that language and its gestural genesis were not a transcendental gift like neo-mystics claimed, but a foundation of metatechnics, if not its basic structure. Language itself is already a metatechnique based on a set of cognitive skills fostered by the social needs of hominids, who were probably driven to develop a greater capacity for cooperation and coordination in order to survive and establish themselves.

Although there were undoubtedly periods of acceleration, long stases, or sudden jumps in the history of human animals, we could tell from the spatial records of the time machine that the transition from instrumental technique (which many nonhumans also possess) to metatechnics arose over a long process. A transition that probably occurred when orientations of subjective experience toward determined ends began to be inserted into the unreflective transmission of behavior between generations.

In other words, sapiens ancestors began to use their conscious thinking and planning skills to direct learning and transmission of behaviors toward specific goals, rather than just transmitting them automatically and unreflectively. This change in the transmission of behaviors enabled living things to adapt faster and more efficiently to environmental conditions, and to create new opportunities for survival and reproduction. Plus, this was an important step toward the evolution of gestalt first, and language later, since it enabled humans to communicate and convey orientations of subjective experience and purposeful goals more effectively and accurately. So, conscious feedback mechanisms modified the evolutionary principle that all traits and behaviors were formed as adaptations to the environment.

...

But back to the hypothesis of this mysterious intangible disease: what could have been the vector of such contamination?

At a time when memes had become an important channel of communication and political action, people in various circles began to think that memetic flows had something to do with the mysterious immaterial disease. The concept of meme, understood as an immaterial entity that spreads by imitation from person to person within a culture, seemed to fit this function perfectly. Curiously enough, such a concept had been proposed by a certain Dawkins, who ascribed the qualification of selfhood to the gene. According to him, memes took life by propagating themselves through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, music or other imitable phenomena and, like the gene, were capable of self-replication and mutation. No one, until then, had thought of the existence of a quantum of informational energy as a basic building block of the transmission of behaviors, ideas, symbols or cultural practices.

I confess my inner struggle between revulsion and attraction towards Richard Dawkins. Like I told you, while I thought that his selfish gene was completely functional to the biopolitics of Gov Neolib, the concept of meme seemed to open up new perspectives for understanding the dynamics that threatened to overwhelm us. Among these was precisely that of the meme as the perfect vector of immaterial contagion.  The concept of the meme, created a few decades before the advent of the Internet, had a much broader scope than subsequently understood by digital natives, who often associated it exclusively with the viral images that circulated on the web. Images that had become increasingly important and sometimes decisive in their ability to influence the connected multitudes. The worsening septicemia of the biosphere and the established responsibility of humans, or parts of us, contributed to the emergence of the theory of a disease caused by a specific type of meme that had the characteristic of infecting humans and making them contagious, just like viruses and bacteria responsible for infectious diseases. In this case, unlike viruses and bacteria, an immaterial contagion induced a particular pathological behavior, destructive of the biosphere, in the infected. Infected memes, called nekomemes, a contraction of not-ekological-memes, were the origin of the nekomemetic disease.

When the first such hypotheses were put forward, detractors ironized by recalling the obscurantism of the past, when people talked about miasmas and Venetian doctors who wore impressive bird's beak masks in which they put protective aromatic essences to guard against contagion during the bubonic plague epidemics of the 17th century.

Dawkins, who belonged to the generation before us boomers, had introduced the meme as an immaterial analogy of the gene. He had also implied that memes behaved in the same way not only like viruses, which "naturally" seek to reproduce inside the host, but also like the supposedly selfish gene.

The hypotheses of a "selfish meme" or "mind virus" –viruses that in Dawkins' intentions mainly affected religion – triggered many reactions. There were those who recalled, and not without reason, that such a view of genes and memes as selfish and autonomous was close to that of certain racial theories of Nazi biologists. They reproached such hypotheses for favoring a pre-eminence of genetic inheritance, one that circumvented any degree of free will in the individual. Or for thinking that anything could thwart that which is expressed collectively and that, over generations, forms our so-called civilization.  And, like the Nazis, it would thereby exalt "the importance of biological kinship ties for the preservation of the genetic heritage" through blood-related selection.

As technoscience advanced, the concept of memes and memetics took on a life of their own, overcoming the ambiguity of their creator and becoming increasingly fascinating. This made the nekomemetic disease hypothesis more and more likely. And then, like I mentioned earlier, the further discovery of mirror neurons formed a basis on which even the concept of meme could better anchor itself in biological sciences. Let me return for a moment to the history of memes, because it seems important to free them once and for all from teleological constraints by considering them rather an archetype of the social behavior of humans. For example: why not assume that a beta version of memes arose with the discovery of fire?

As centuries passed, civilization took shape, and with folklore came one of the oldest and largest memetic streams in history. After all, a primary component of culture was folklore, characterized by the creative engagement that practitioners had in imitating, remixing, and sharing memes with others. Folklore had always been composed of an infinity of genres: ceremonial customs, legends, fairy tales, poems, riddles, aphorisms, rhymes, toys, fashion, food and recipes, music and dances – memes were the basic building block of it all.

A world of memes, initially transmitted from person to person, passed down from generation to generation and across cultures. And so their circulation was proportional to the evolution of media.

The rise of the Internet represented a paradigm shift in the intangible world but it also confirmed the existence of memes as vehicles for spreading ideas. The arrival of memes on the internet opened up new perspectives because, from that moment on, memes could be intentionally modified by human action, thus differentiating themselves from pre-internet genes and memes. This proved to be a crucial point in understanding what was happening to the planet.

The meme-internet outclassed the classic meme, partly because it was capable of instantly bypassing the geographical, cultural, and temporal barriers that had limited its spread. Like certain viruses, memetic streams were also capable of spreading across the planet with a speed proportional to the development of network technologies. But only a few realized that the visible portion of Internet memes was only a fraction of what was actually circulating.

If memes propagated by natural selection and their mutations were random before the Internet (although influenced by the environment, just like those of viruses), now all this had been disrupted. Memes could spread at breakneck speed, both in the biological space of the human organism as well as in the algorithmic space of bots, implanting and replicating ideas, producing emotions, saturating the biohypermedia space.

In memes, human-oriented mutations forever changed the teleological, or even teleonomic, perspective of a specific biological purpose.