Lucretius wrote of the origin of life, that ecosystems naturally gave birth to those that exist within them by way of spontaneous growth. Later authors took this concept to a microscale with spontaneous generation, where meat would generate maggots and similar from their own rot. The theory is attractive, dovetailing nicely into the interconnected world spoken of by miasma theory and similar, of things emerging as natural phenomena from other phenomena in the world.
Like maggots from rotting meat or the plague’s miasma from still-settling sewage and rot, at the point of decay, harbingers emerge. The old story goes, that a meme is born on 4chan, lives on Reddit, dies on Instagram, and then proceeds through several generations of carrion feeders, from late night talk shows to your parents on Facebook. All culture has this process, akin to a sudden bloom of a plant - a slow trickle upwards where few would descend to sink, then a sudden blooming, before it wilts and decays in a steady decline.
The plant is born underground and snaps off like a horse at the track, life careening forwards. In an explosive blaze it stumbles and trips and collapses, dead. It continues on. Tents trickle down. The corpse is now dead and easy to feast on. Bones are picked clean in the greatest activity ever seen, until they slip away one by two by dozens, until the corpse is alone, a skeleton amidst a vast rocky desert of memory, where the horizon disappears like the ocean’s, into a flat line that seems to go onto the void.
It was spontaneous generation - from the soil beneath the corpse where blood and pus leaked into the soil and turned it putrid, where the maggots emerged. The documentary “Nobody Speak: The Trial of the Free Press” is a show of it all. An endless slideshow of about three different facial types, in varying degrees of slothful degeneration to a melting or tumorous rot, whine about the living beings of the world as they struck out against them. Unable to wait for the usual Nightcrawler type antics of their profession, Gawker made a particularly egregious example, ripping meat off the bones of still-living prey like wild canines, but its contemporaries are much the same. In defending each other they recognize their identical class position, existing as ultimately empty people in themselves - downstream from all life, they live as carrion feeders, forever downstream, in the land of after, feasting on tumors and wounds, twitching and whining.
Like a miasma emerges, we left the trash out too long and the rodents and roaches came to bite us as a scourge. When the printing press gave birth to an entire industry of information like the world had never seen, life became forever suspended. All information was condemned to never die, records upon records upon records keeping a great cloud of data in suspended animation. The corpses are left to pile up endlessly in the open plain, beneath the baking sun, the flesh turning to a putrid soup - and we are shocked the maggots emerge, yes, spontaneously?
In the past I spoke of the “bug dimension” - the seams in spacetime that bugs use to get into impossible places. While I still hold this as the cause behind the invincibility of roaches and bedbugs, and I’d like to offer a small elaboration on this theory here. Humans in society, like the carbon soup of putrefying materia, are nothing but a dull mass of uncreated matter until the environmental conditions cause beings to emerge. in the same way as this, life was born from a primordial soup and beings emerge as products of their time. The caste of the downstream is a wholly new one, only existing with the overgrown mass of rotting organic materia created by information-economies. The downstream, ever larger than before, gives birth to new lifeforms within.
Such is the source of so-called “bug people”. At the bottom of it all is a great stagnant swamp of backwash and silt deposited between the continent and the ocean. From these turbid waters, emerge a people wholly of this strange order created by corpses stratifying into the archivist’s instinct of collecting, journalism, information-gathering, and etc.
The modern consumer economy can be traced back to these new appetites and organisms. Calling it such - “consumer” - is a bit of a misnomer, as what it really is is an information economy, and even more specific, an economy of the corpses of information turned into data. The most ridiculed aspect of bugman culture, the Funko Pop, shows it elegantly. After their life in art, its life is first killed by putting it through the “Wiki” process, where stories and themes are reduced to organized data. From this, emerges the collections, like that of a headhunter, where the story has been reduced to characters who are then transformed into individual objectified things, tokens mounted on pikes until the skin sloughs off and it’s just one skull of countless below the harsh sun.
This is only possible by the over-production of culture-creation mechanisms, where archiving reaches such a point that it becomes this - a self perpetuating tumor of an economy, where information dies and then lives on and on as another replaceable cell in the great blob. That carrionfeeding human life would emerge from this - in the first form as the journalist, then the nerd, and today as the bugperson - is only to be expected. After all, when it comes to information, we seem to be allergic to taking the trash out.
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