008 Nekomemetic disease

The massively predominant considerations about the characteristics of internet memes were decisive in convincing and spreading the nekomemetic disease theory.

Unlike other epidemics or endemic diseases that afflicted humans, infected memes could pass exclusively from human to human. Any zoonosis origin   – common in so many epidemics, like the Black Plague that developed through mice as unsanitary urban agglomerations formed, or like the more recent HIV or Covid viruses – could be ruled out. But somehow we knew the nekomemetic disease became an epidemic as the consequence of a further negative cycle of the human species in the ecosystem. This was likely to be the last, precisely because capitalism was a decisive catalyst in accelerating the spread.

There were indications, however, that the nekomemetic disease was primordial and related to metatechnics and probably due to its misuse. Native Americans, for example, would also have been affected by a mild form of nekomemetic contagion that had altered their environment, proven by the Orbis Spike I already told you about.

There had probably been two decisive turning points in the last five or six centuries: One, related to the original existence of a nekomemetic viral strain decisive in subsequent spreads; the other, related to the emergence of a new, immaterial environment particularly conducive to its propagation.

The nekomemetic virus was lost in the mists of time, people speculated about the ancient strains that would most help perpetuate it in the human mind and spread it. Wasn't there, after all, a transmission of nekomemetic stem in reading the great texts of ancient religious thought, such as the Bible, the Koran or the Talmud when they state that their god creates the world and all creatures in his service, and entrusts humans with the task of governing the Earth and all its resources? Then, a relatively newer strain had been identified that had assumed great importance: the memes related to the Nature-Society dichotomy and its Nature-Culture variant, which generated a new way of seeing the world. These Cartesian dualisms fed the nekomemetic contagion and generated the first symptoms of biospheric septicemia, visible from the eye of the time machine. The contamination became increasingly widespread as this strain affected the European ruling classes and drove them to colonize the rest of the world. In the acute stages, the elites, now deranged by the  effects of the disease, entered into a delusional state in which they wanted to make believe that the ravages perpetrated under the influence of the disease were gifts of nature to their Societies or Cultures.

In any case, with the advent of the industrial phases of capitalism, one of the most decisive transformations and accelerations the spread occurred. The nekomemetic disease went from an endemic disease to a global pandemic.

Don't think I want to launch into a political tirade against capitalism like the ones I used to do when I was young, even though I certainly don't regret them. Besides, like I'll explain as I go along talking about my travels into the future, it would have been a mistake to blame everything on capitalism alone; other parameters came into play. For example, the staggering increase in the human population, of which capitalism was particularly proud, proclaiming that no regime in history had increased the average life expectancy of humanity so much, even though later in the course of the 21st century it fell into great decline.

Be that as it may, the great capitalist epic of putting humans, nonhumans (animal and plant) and even the inanimate substrate to work on a global level radically changed the scale of the spread of the nekomemetic disease. Obviously, as our Karl had so clearly explained, the dynamics of accumulation were pushing in this direction, but only his great-great-great-grandchildren (ie us) understood that capitalism did not pay for a good portion of this labor (human, nonhuman and biosphere in general); it was in fact free labor! But discussing this now would take us far from our history...

In forcing labor in its own ways, capitalism introduced massive doses of the nekomemetic virus into large masses of humans on a daily basis. Since the beginning of the industrial era, relatively immune peasants or artisans became infected when they were dispossessed of their land or deprived of their livelihoods and became laborers. This occurred in virtually all industrial production, but in certain industries, such as chemistry, metallurgy and then especially in the mining, processing and transportation of fossil fuels, nekomemetic viral loads skyrocketed. The work transformed hundreds of millions of workers into pathogens of the biosphere's septicaemia, without their being able to choose or, often, even realize it. But they suffered the consequences on their own skin. Strains of viral nekomemes were not always directly linked to metatechnics and its implications in production, but were even present in the so-called humanities, from philosophy to literature and poetry.

Later a second paradigm shift in the memetic function took place. This time it related to the mode of transmission: the advent of the Internet had been so disruptive that contagious nekomemes took advantage of it by finding a new vehicle that guaranteed them frantic expansion.

The nekomemetic contagion had plausible aspects. If we take the hypothesis of Internet-enhanced viral nekomemes, it was clear that the temporary or permanent pathological transformation of humans into an agent of environmental inflammation and infection could only be cultural in origin. In this case, the meme that infected humans had a function equivalent to a virus or bacterium capable of attacking some organ or function of its host. That is, it would have been a recognizable element, reproduced and transmitted through the imitative drive of an individual or collective by others. An element that, like a virus, could mutate in reproduction through contagion.

Just like viruses and bacteria which, although at the origins of life and indispensable, could become harmful and lethal to other living entities, so was the case with the circulation of memes within the human species. While they had been indispensable in evolution, they were also potentially destructive. Certainly there were other memetic streams that could be lethal to humans, for example all those related to belligerence. But the nekomemetic one had a unique feature that, except in some cases, it did not directly degrade the health of humans, except by making them harmful agents who attacked the surrounding ecosystem. Although the exact mechanisms of nekomemetic viral action were never fully elucidated, it was inferred that it acted on the mind and nervous system. When infecting nekomemes entered via classical sensory interfaces or through new modalities such as hypno-streaming, they generated pre-programmed concatenations of emotions and feelings that led to the suspension of all inhibitions of aggression and violence against the biosphere. This could occur on very different scales depending on context, subject, and many other parameters. There was a huge difference between building a nuclear power plant and throwing a simple plastic bag on the side of a country road, but they had at least one point in common: the presence of an active nekomemetic virus. But those who decided or directed the construction of an atomic power plant didn't have the same viral charge as those who, as mere laborers, poured the concrete of their containment enclosures. There were notable exceptions to this principle, because even within the subaltern classes there was no shortage of seriously ill people, especially in certain circles such as the working-class aristocracy, which perhaps I will tell you about later.

In the early days of the Internet, memes were often considered simple cultural elements taken up and propagated en masse because they could be used in different cases with different purposes. This could give them a multidimensional aspect and extend their lifespan, but they usually were just a flash in the pan.

So how was it possible for a nekomemetic contamination to last for millennia? Should it too not have died out as fast as a common fad?

The viral nekomemes represented memes' dark side of the moon. First, they were different and not to be considered individually or even as a multimodal family. Although in the early and distant past it might have been possible to isolate and identify them, from the beginning of modernity and the emergence of electric media, they thickened into a stream in which it was difficult to extract a single image, a single atom. Infectious memes became part of the multitudes' daily life. And when television became mass media, the user was exposed passively and with little protection to heavy daily doses. Just think of the memes contained in advertisements that brought about the new consumerism. Huge was the viral charge of the continuous stream of nekomemes boasting the merits of plastics, automobiles, detergents and other mass-produced industrial products. But there were often much more disguised and subtle memes that did not represent overtly polluting objects and did not belong in advertisements. This was, for example, the case of foodporn, a craze that induced the indiscriminate consumption of nonhumans turned into hamburgers or whatever.

But after electric media, the infectious nekomemas insidiously spread to all channels in the biohypermedia environment.

In my obligatory forays into the future, it seemed clear to me that the techno-tycoons' takeover of bioipermedia constituted a decisive step in the dissemination of the nekomemes that had litterally and figuratively "gone viral". A bundle-effect, to be precise, that relied on network technologies as a site of intra-action between machines and the biosphere. The failure of China's Long Spring project had been the straw that broke the camel's back, undermining the main function managed by techno-tycoons on behalf of the Ecofin AltaSphere: shaping subjectivities to make them increasingly productive and indebted. A political-algorithmic set that some had dubbed neurocapitalism.

Here the decline that became precipitously accentuated when the nekomemetic pandemic and the resulting septicaemia of the biosphere began to take on a dramatic dimension for the networks of the living, to which humans also belonged. In retrospect, the period and environment of neurocapitalism represented a true cultural soup of memetic flows and thus of the nekomemetic virus. The omnipresence of individual interaction devices in almost every moment of conscious life (and sometimes beyond), from which nobody except a privileged few of the ruling class could or even would escape, increased a hundredfold the possibilities for the spread of the virus.