World colonisation, the making of a global colon
The world as a giant bowel, digesting and defecating
A long, long time ago. Before humans crouched in dark corners, crapping. The spherical bowel we know as Earth was a different sort of digestive tract. Strange creatures found novel ways of crushing, slicing, and globulising matter in order to turn it into shit. There were howls, barks, and birdsong of a kind no human has ever heard. Then, along came Homo sapiens, the daftest of all apes.
Over time, humans found new ways of reducing the world to shit in addition to defecating. Never so much as in the last 400 years, which is about 1/8 of 1% of the entire history of Homo sapiens. Our fifteen minutes of being masters of the toilet. Much of this destructive impulse has been framed as colonialism, the practice of one culture invading another’s territory in order to steal its resources and impose its ideology. This practice is often analysed through a political or economic lens. However, it would be better to call it by its other name, COLONization.
The colon is where things consumed are finally turned to shit. Colonialism practised a complex and obfuscated form of COLONization. Not solely turning natural resources into dull monocrops, but also forcing their nihilistic doctrines of consumption onto cultures, turning them into shit too. This practice didn’t begin in 1492, nor with the emergence of the 15th century Genoese banking mafia. Consuming, expanding, and churning out crap began with the dawn of life.
Humankind aren’t even a crackle of dust on the long-play record of Gaia the defecator. Her metabolic fires have been raging for billions of years. The first living organisms on earth are believed to be prokaryotes. A single-celled organism similar to modern bacteria. Some call it LUCA. Last Universal Common Ancestor. LUCA didn’t use oxygen, but is thought to have feasted on hydrogen, sulfur, and carbon dioxide, crapping out methane and hydrogen sulfide. The planet would have smelled of bad farts, like being permanently trapped under the duvet of a mannerless partner addicted to Scotch eggs. It was out of this utopia that today’s complex community of crappers emerged.
Some creationists suggest that the continued existence of simple microbes disproves evolution. I won’t expand on this because it makes absolutely no sense at all. It’s unlikely they’ve considered the fact that they are giant, mobile, self-contained planets for housing microbial life, inside and out. Nor that their gut bacteria steers their behaviour through electrical stimuli created via complex biochemical signalling pathways. In fact, gut bacteria even steer sexual reproduction by controlling libido, sex arousal, and pleasure through the production of hormones and neurotransmitters. Human bodies are an effective, short-term, survival and reproduction strategy for them. One species among the millions they gave rise to. If necessary, they’ll conjure the feeling of the divine with their biochemical alchemy to veil reality from their hosts. The good gut is god. Es ist gut, ja? Är gud god?
Once the microbes have finished feasting on the flesh of ten billion corpses, they’ll quickly adapt and move on to something new. Perhaps finding new planets to ingest thanks to the ingenious neurocomputers they developed in the skull sector of their human biome. Cosmic COLONism.
Of course, they aren’t doing this deliberately. It’s a predetermined reflex. Part of the entropic decay of the cosmic suicide. Once they are finished, all will be cold and silent. A carefully sculpted masterpiece, stone chiselled to dust, light transformed to heat and danced into icy oblivion. A place without questions, absent of all suffering. So, the next time you smell that odious odour of off ova, perhaps when trapped in a lift or a small windowless room, remember your ancestors. Remember their Great Work.
