Tag Archives: Franco Berardi

Post-Pandemic Landscapes: Behavior Modification as the New Consensus Reality

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By Kingsley L. Dennis

Source: Waking Times

The ‘Covid Event’ gave the unreal world its great coup over the place of the real. This perception intervention gave the final stimulus necessary to tip the twenty-first century into an awaiting technologically manipulated reality. A new landscape is emerging where, for the first time, the human mind is finding itself out-of-place within its own territory. What are now being termed the emerging ‘post-pandemic’ landscapes are likely to be hazardous territory for our mental, emotional, and physical states. The human condition is under modification.

New forms of power are on the rise, embedded within structures of health security, that are re-imagining our social lives, living and workspaces, and our physical and digital movements. Until now, the spider’s web of social control mainly operated below the waterline in a space where an almost intangible world existed beyond governance or accountability.  Now the Kraken awakes and is unashamedly coming to the surface. The beast of behavior modification is spreading its tentacles through our most established social and cultural institutions without shame – all in the name of health security (the new nom de plume of social management).  These institutions include the media, city life, the office, and – perhaps most of all – the online-digital world. The modification of these spaces is set to further desensitize, anesthetize, and dehumanize us. It is as if the collective human mind is being groomed and prepared for a new consensus reality of ‘normalized dissonance.’

The post-pandemic landscape is merging physical pandemics with its own viral digital epidemics that are infecting the human psyche. The Italian philosopher Franco Berardi has noted that our ‘electronic mediascape’ is putting ‘the sensitive organism in a state of permanent electrocution.’[1] The social body is being deliberately targeted by strategies that cause anxiety, fragmentation, exhaustion, confusion, polarization, and fear. We can see this through national and local lockdowns; social distancing; anti-social interaction; social ostracization; loss of economic independence, and more. In early July, Prof Sir Venki Ramakrishnan, president of the Royal Society (the UK’s national academy of science) stated publicly that face masks should be worn in all public spaces (as they already are in many places in Europe and worldwide). Not wearing a face covering, he added, ‘should be regarded as “anti-social” in the same way as drink driving or failing to wear a seatbelt.’[2] This is nothing short of encouraging a regime of public shaming. The human condition is being subjected to a new rhythm of the modern power-machine that is breaking down our social alliances.

The established conditions that created a sense of social reality are being dissolved and replaced with processes aimed at managing the masses through forms of separation and quantification. That is, the techniques necessary to begin the formation of a technologized humanity. These processes seek to reduce human life, and its environment, to something measurable and predicable – a life ordained by algorithms. These imposed changes are creating a disequilibrium in the human psyche – a fragmentation of the human self. Furthermore, they are seeking to break down our trusted social relations.

There is something insidious creeping up into the global collective that is attempting to create a world of sleepwalkers, plied with fear-pills, updated with vaccines, programmed with nonsense, and dismissive of alternative thinking. As a conscious, biological organism we are being prepared to mimic the automation of the machine. Humanity is mentally sleeping and slipping into the void where a new form of the ‘social collective’ awaits us.

Techniques are being devised and employed to produce normalized and standardized behavior in order to create a socially managed populace. The collective human mind is being adapted and adopted into an infrastructure of control that operates largely through modes of digital connectivity. I refer to this rising mechanism of social engineering as the modern power-machine (MPM) that exerts control over human expression and autonomy of behavior. To enact this, a consortium of institutions have been selected to structure contemporary societies toward specific functions that give the promise of security and human well-being whilst developing increased social dependency. This is the post-pandemic landscape now rapidly arising and to which all future generations shall be born into.

Childhood’s End

Luciano Floridi, a professor of philosophy and the ethics of information, believes that human civilization is shifting into a phase of ‘hyperhistory.’ A hyperhistorical society that is dependent upon integrative technologies, says Floridi, could also become human-independent – that is, not needing us. Life on this planet is being developed into an infrastructure that favors machinic intelligence and artificial organisms, thus de-territorializing the human experience. Our urban environments may soon be more conducive to artificial life than biological ones. No one is yet ready for the mutation at hand. We are being programmed to take on a new position in the world that will erode the possibility of human transcendence; a world where the ‘flesh robot’ will eventually become the reality consensus.

We are witnessing an unprecedented migration of humanity from its physical space to the digital-sphere – an environment of surveillance and technocratic social management. The incoming generations will recognize no fundamental difference between the digital-sphere and the physical world as this mergence will form the reality they are born into. To the new generations, the digital-physical-sphere will be their only reality for they will have been born without the offline-online distinction. In the words of Luciano Floridi, they were born onlife. This is now their reality, and it is ‘onlife.’ The world that many of us recognized as being human will never be the same again. With the ‘onlife’ mode, a new era of history begins. Childhood comes to an end when they stop being a child and become a user. It is then that they inhabit whole new realities – realities they may believe to be ‘user-generated’ when in fact the reverse is more the case.

Connectivity and access will be part of the regime of the new power-machine. And the rights of access are going to be a matter of consensus health security (as addressed in New Dawn 180/181).  To be a part of the power-machine will mean opting-in to its sanctioned, and on-surveillance, connections. Soon, opting out will be made an almost impossible alternative. Connecting into the power-machine will become the new cartography of the ‘human reality.’ Living ‘manually’ will become one of the last few remaining sites of resistance as human life becomes regulated-by-automation.

The City as Machine Cradle

Modern living, especially within dense urban metropolises, as well as within poverty-stricken neighborhoods, severely affects the human psychological condition, as well as affecting the nervous system. Journalist Naomi Klein has noted how a form of ‘Pandemic Shock Doctrine’ is emerging where city metropolises are forming suspicious partnerships with large tech conglomerates to re-design city living. Klein has stated that the quarantine lockdowns were not so much to save lives ‘but as a living laboratory for a permanent — and highly profitable — no-touch future.’[3] One tech CEO that Klein interviewed commented that: ‘There has been a distinct warming up to human-less, contactless technology…Humans are biohazards, machines are not.’[4] Several local city governments are in negotiations with large private tech companies to create a ‘seamless integration’ between city government, education, health, and policing operations. Further, the individual home will become a smart-enclosed hub for the urban dweller. All this, and more, as a ‘frontline pandemic response.’

Online learning, the home office, telehealth, and online commerce are all now a part of an emerging investment landscape to convert existing physical-digital infrastructures to cloud-based ones that will be incorporated into the arriving fully-completed 5G network. All in the name of providing citizens with a securitized ‘virus free’ landscape. Erich Schmidt, ex-CEO of Google/Alphabet and now chair of the Defense Innovation Board that advises the Department of Defense on military A.I., announced publicly with a straight face:

‘The benefit of these corporations, which we love to malign, in terms of the ability to communicate, the ability to deal with health, the ability to get information, is profound. Think about what your life would be like in America without Amazon.’[5]

Schmidt has now been hired to head up the task force commissioned to reimagine New York’s post-Covid reality. And he won’t be alone. High-tech is now jumping to get into partnerships with local governments in order to bring a safer, more ‘securitized’ landscape into civil society – all for ‘our’ benefit.

The business office landscape is also under re-organization to further regulate and isolate the social interactions of working colleagues. It can be said that a new form of business behavior modification is in the works. In a recent business analysis published in Bloomberg by Jeff Green and Michelle F. Davis, they suggested that:

The pre-Covid workplace, with its shared desks and common areas designed for “creative collisions,” is getting a makeover for the social distancing era. So far, what employers have come up with is a mash-up of airport security style entrance protocols and surveillance combined with precautions already seen at grocery stores, like sneeze guards and partitions.[6]

The authors of the report also foresee that the newly returned office worker will likely be encased in a makeshift cubicle made of plexiglass sheets. A new mode of anti-interaction is clearly in the works.

Hundreds of major companies, at least, are planning what they call ‘employee re-orientation programs’ and have already hired ‘thermal scanners’ to monitor employees for fevers, according to the article’s sources. The authors also noted that there has been a spike in job postings for ‘tracers,’ who would track down the contacts of anyone who tests positive for the covid-19 virus. In short, companies are now looking for a range of solutions to keep people away from one another throughout the working day. IBM, for example, is looking into using existing sensors or finding new technology to detect when people are too close together or ‘trending’ in that direction. Another report from the UK[7] noted how companies were looking into developing their own specialist employee smartphone apps that would operate elevators hands-free. The language employers are using includes creating ‘safe bubbles’ around employees and monitoring so that these ‘safe bubbles’ do not overlap. How would they manage such monitoring?

Various companies, the UK report goes on to say, are looking to teach artificial intelligence (AI) to monitor the video cameras that are monitoring the employees. Dr Mahesh Saptharishi, Motorola Solutions’ chief technology officer (based in Boston) explained that AI algorithms can offer feedback about ‘pinch points’ where people are too close together. Instead of employers (read ‘humans’) having to spend time (read ‘waste time’) watching the actual video, they can ‘ask’ the AI how well social distancing is being observed overall, and where problem points are.[8] So that’s the issue solved then. We’ll just rely on AI algorithms to tell us how to ‘social distance’ in our non-interacting bubbles and we can modify our behavior accordingly. Job done!

What this also signifies is that in order to be able to modify our behavior, machine intelligence will need to gather ever greater datasets about us. That is, ‘smart cities’ and ‘secure offices’ equals increased surveillance which equals expanded datasets. The ‘Black Iron Prison’ that Philip K. Dick saw coming is now hitting us squarely in the form of surveillance capitalism.

Surveillance Capitalism

Professor Shoshana Zuboff, the author of the widely acclaimed The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, has said that digital connection is now a means to others’ commercial ends. With the rapid rise of data collection for commercial gain, Zuboff says that: ‘The result is that both the world and our lives are pervasively rendered as information.’[9] People are reduced to being less than products because they are rendered into being a mere ‘input’ for the creation of the real product which is the data. Predictions about peoples’ futures are sold to the highest bidder so that these futures can be profited from or altered to favor better commercial gains. Zuboff considers surveillance capitalism to be, at its core, parasitic and self-referential – a parasite that feeds on every aspect of every human’s experience.

Human experience is considered free to be taken as raw material and it is this that becomes the product of value. From this material, organizations decide to intervene in our lives to shape and modify human behavior in order to favor the outcomes that are most desirable for commercial gains. Behavioral modification is now in the hands of private capital – and undertaken with the minimal amount of external oversight. At its most basic, humans have been reduced to ‘batteries’ that produce datasets for algorithms and machine learning to process. What is most worrying is that, by and large, the general populations are ignorant of what is going on quite literally beneath their fingertips. As Zuboff notes, people unknowingly end up funding their own forms of domination.

Through its operations of technocratic ‘normalization’ and the deliberate breaking up of social alliances, the power-machine age is manufacturing a new standardization of the human body and mind. With the encroachment of socially managed interventions, people are made vulnerable to the increased destabilizing of the human self. The human sense of ‘self’ and identity has become a fragile thing; it is analyzed, scrutinized, and criticized through social media; it is modified through surveillance capitalism; and it is increasingly being rendered by AI facial recognition systems such as Clearview. As these post-pandemic landscapes become increasingly rolled out in more social environments, we are likely to see, as a consequence, an ever-greater fragmentation of the human self.

The Fragmented Self

It is no exaggeration to say that humanity is entering a period of existential crisis that has perhaps not been last witnessed since the Middle Ages. Only this time, we don’t have our religious institutions to offer us salvation. The responsibility is upon our shoulders of finding salvation through becoming fully human in the face of dehumanizing forces. At present, we are being bombarded with such contradictory information that many people are unable to find coherence or to make a whole picture out of the shards. That is, the human mind is finding it increasingly difficult to see the patterns and to connect the dots. Many people will also now be experiencing forms of cognitive dissonance. One definition of this state is: ‘Cognitive dissonance refers to a situation involving conflicting attitudes, beliefs or behaviours. This produces a feeling of mental discomfort leading to an alteration in one of the attitudes, beliefs or behaviours to reduce the discomfort and restore balance.’[10]

The result of this is that the mind desperately wishes to reduce this discomfort and restore balance by seeking – or being provided with – a coherent picture, or closure. The danger here is that this ‘closure’ or ‘coherent picture’ may be provided by an external source, institution, or body (a structure of orthodox ‘authority’) and many people will jump onto it as a way of gaining closure, and thus comfort. When, in truth, we need to find this coherence and closure within ourselves, through our own resources. With the increasing breakdown of social relations and an interactive human environment, people’s consciousness is being further pushed into compartmentalization where events are seen as random rather than interrelated and meaningful. This lack of meaningfulness will be compensated for by the rise of virtual attractions as the digital-sphere increasingly becomes the ‘safe and secure’ home that people turn to. Critical thought, perceptive observation, and intuitive knowing will be under the onslaught of nullifying behavior modification.

As we are now seeing in the public space, self-identity (race, sexuality, etc) is becoming a target of division, further creating doubt, anxiety, and social polarization. Psychologically, people are being pushed to acquiesce, submit, and accept the measures that are being implemented as the ‘new normal’ post-pandemic landscapes. And the more we submit, the more we become vulnerable to further submission and disempowerment. Bureaucratic regimes and administrative structures will creep further into our living, work, and leisure lives until a form of what French philosopher Michel Foucault calls disciplinary power will dominate over the human condition. New forms of social discipline and collective obedience are fostering an artificial and engineered state of perception. We are right in the middle of a time of intense ‘enforced socialization,’ or what Edward Snowden recently referred to as an ‘architecture of oppression.’ For some, the only response to this overwhelming ‘architecture of oppression’ will be to find their comfort zones – such as sitting in their chairs at home with their ‘surrogates’ roaming the digital-physical landscape on their part.[11] Or, as the 2008 computer-animated sci-fi film Wall-E depicted, growing lazy and obese while robots cater to all their needs, while indulging in infantile entertainments. We can only hope this shall never be the case.

Humanity has entered unprecedented times. Such times demand an unprecedented response. It appears that we are now being asked to ‘step up’ to accept our responsibility for our human becoming, and so to become fully human. By doing nothing, we are allowing our behavior to be modified and our self-identities to be splintered. In these post-pandemic landscapes, the choices we make will be choices that, like never before, determine our future as a human species. I suggest it is time now for declaring our unity as an empowered fully human species – by not accepting the push of the power-machine into distanced and disempowered individuals.

Accelerating Capital: Completed Nihilism and The Indebted Man

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By S.C. Hickman

Source: Southern Nights

In his book Data Trash (1993), Arthur Kroker writes that in the field of digital acceleration, more information means less meaning, because meaning slows info circulation. In the sphere of the digital economy, the faster information circulates, the faster value is accumulated. But meaning slows down this process, as meaning needs time to be produced and to be elaborated and understood. So the acceleration of the info-flow implies the elimination of meaning.

—Franco Berardi, And: Phenomenology of the End

The pursuit of profit is the engine of Capital, accumulation is its outcome. Profit is from the Latin profectus, meaning  “advance, increase, success, progress,” out of which the need to benefit or provide income derived. This sense that progress and success drive the need for profit, that the goal of capitalism is this abstract movement toward increasing and advancing one’s success in the world has always been at the heart of the competitive spirit. To compete or strive against others for the foremost place, this sense of the competitive spirit that has been with us at least since the first Greek Olympics. The term itself “compete” is etymologically to enter or be put in rivalry with an other,” from Middle French compéter “be in rivalry with” (14c.), or directly from Late Latin competere “strive in common,” in classical Latin “to come together, agree, to be qualified,” later, “strive together,” from com “with, together” (com-) + petere “to strive, seek, fall upon, rush at, attack”.  A sense of violent taking and war against all comers for the top prize, the best or foremost place in the Sun.

As Berardi reminds us in the old industrial economy described by Marx, the goal of production was already the valorization of capital, through the extraction of surplus- -value from labour. But, in order to produce value, the capitalist was still obliged to exchange useful things, so he was obliged to produce cars and books and bread.

When the referent is cancelled, when profit is made possible by the mere circulation of money, the production of cars, books and bread become superfluous. The accumulation of abstract value is made possible through the subjection of human beings to debt, and through predation on existing resources. The destruction of the real world starts from this emancipation of valorization from the production of useful things, and from the self-replication of value in the financial field. The emancipation of value from the referent leads to the destruction of the existing world. This is exactly what is happening under the cover of the so-called financial crisis, which is not a crisis at all, but the transition to the self-referential financial capitalism. (A: 125-126)

Financial capitalism is no longer the pursuit of profit in the Greek or Latin sense I described. No longer is there a sense of the old value of the pursuit of excellence or an ill-defined sense of virtue. Rather there is no value at all in the outward sense, but rather value has itself lost its luster and only the sheer accumulation of abstract value in the form of debt remains. But what is debt? What exactly is this debt economy of financial capitalism. And, most of all, how does the spirit of capitalism in itself bring about the death of meaning (i.e., nihilism). If as many suspect we are in the moment when Capital is completing this process of nihilism, what does that entail for humanity?

As Berardi said in a recent essay,

The colonization of time has been a fundamental issue in the modern history of capitalist development: the anthropological mutation that capitalism produced in the human mind and in daily life has, above all, transformed the perception of time. But we are now leaping into the unknown—digital technologies have enabled absolute acceleration, and the short-circuiting of attention time. As info-workers are exposed to a growing mass of stimuli that cannot be dealt with according to the intensive modalities of pleasure and knowledge, acceleration leads to an impoverishment of experience. More information, less meaning. More information, less pleasure.

This sense that there is a connection between time, language, and capitalism that is playing out the endgame of nihilism in our generation is foremost in this equation. At the forefront of this is the notion of debt, and that we are entering an era of a new Guilt Culture based on an infinite and unpayable debt. A future imploding into a black hole of guilt and shame that will leave us and our planet bankrupt and without sense or value.

I’ve written of debt in other essays: here and here in which I follow Deleuze and Guattari down the rabbit hole. Alberto Toscano in an excellent essay on Maurizio Lazzarato’s book The Making of the Indebted Man talks of the indebted this way:

Artificially kept alive until they repay outstanding debts, they stalk the landscape of commodity refuse, scavenging, salvaging, recycling to shave off infinitesimal portions of their liabilities, living-dead labour both unproductive and profitable. Telescoping hi-tech financial expropriation and the lo-tech labour in the breakers yards of global capital, the indeadted embody a moment in which subjection to capitalist imperatives subsumes life to the point that it trespasses into death…2

Thanatropic capitalism feeding off the living dead, the zombies of a system that has become total predation on human life and the planet.

In Anti-Oedipus Deleuze and Guattari explain their sense of our current debt regimes:

Society is not exchangist, the socious is inscriptive: not exchanging but marking bodies, which are part of the earth. We have seen that the regime of debt is the unit of alliance, and alliance is representation itself. It is alliance that codes the flows of desire and that, by means of debt, creates for man a memory of words (paroles). It is alliance that represses the great, intense, mute filiative memory, the germinal influx as the representative of the noncoded flows of desire capable of submerging everything. It is debt that articulates the alliances with the filiations that have become extended, in order to form and to forge a system in extension (representation) based on the repression of nocturnal intensities. The alliance-debt answers to what Nietzsche described as humanity’s prehistoric labor: the use of the cruelest mnemotechnics, in naked flesh, to impose a memory of words founded on the ancient biocosmic memory. That is why it is so important to see debt as a direct consequence of the primitive inscription process, instead of making it – and the inscriptions themselves – into an indirect means of universal exchange. (p. 185)

For Deleuze and Guattari it is Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals that teaches us the truth of debt. In fact it was Nietzsche, and Nietzsche alone who provided the first hint of a theory that the “primitive socious” was inherently a “problem of inscription, of coding, of marking…” (p. 190). As they’ll state it:

Man must constitute himself through repression of the intense germinal influx, the great biocosmic memory that threatens to deluge every attempt at collectivity. But at the same time, how is a new memory to be created for man – a collective memory of the spoken word and of alliances that declines alliances with the extended filiations, that endows him with faculties of resonance and retention, of selection and detachment, and that effects this way of coding the flow of desire as a condition of the socious? The answer is simple – debt – open, mobile, and finite blocks of debt: the extraordinary composite of the spoken voice, the marked body, and the enjoying eye.” (AO: 190)

This sense that in financial capitalism is enforcing a cruel mimetic experiment of instilling and inscribing the Word of Capital upon the body socious; and, that we have reverted to the primitive tattooing systems by inscribing of the social body through the cruelest measures, imposing the harshest words of power over the flesh and blood of millions of indebted humans to suck every last ounce of desire from their zombie lives. This is the outcome of our completed nihilism. Capital as a machine of death and consumption, feeding off the desires of the indebted. If capitalism is defined by social production that passes through axioms of abstract quantities, flows of money and labor that are the real relations of alliance and filiation, rather than codes. Codes have become private matters, searches for meaning. This split between production and reproduction constitutes a very particular affective relation as well, which Deleuze and Guattari summarize as, “the age of cynicism, accompanied by a strange piety. These two affects, cynicism and piety, correspond to the division of social production and reproduction. In the first, in the axioms of capital, we have a social order that reproduces itself without meaning or code. Axioms merely set up a relation between two quantities, a flow of labor and a flow of money. One does believe in, or justify, the rate at which labor is exchanged for money—it simply is. Cynicism is an affect attuned to the indifference of the axioms that produce and reproduce social life, the recognition that the flows of the market mean nothing, have no justification, than their brute effectivity. (AO)

As Nietzsche would say,

All the stupidity and the arbitrariness of the laws, all the pain of initiations, the whole perverse apparatus of repression and education, the red-hot irons, and the atrocious procedures have only this meaning: to breed man, to mark him in his flesh, to render him capable of alliance, to form him within the debtor-credit relation, which both sides turns out to be a matter of memory – a memory straining toward the future. (On the Genealogy of Morals, p. 190)

This sense of debt binding us to a system of mnemonics and cruelty, an organized and ritualistic memory system based on marking and pain – inscription of the collective socious as a system of obligation and guilt, debt and the endless deferral of payment into the future. The ancestors require sacrifice and payment, blood and guts. Alliances against this filiation must be formed, struggles against the dead, defensive gestures: the infinite deferral of debt beyond the vampirism of the dead. This whole triangular process of voice – inscription – eye becomes in our time the “spectacle of punishment”: “as primitive justice, territorial representation has foreseen everything” (p. 191).

Even while we are punished and inscribed, ritually sacrificed to the modern Moloch and his retinue of High Priests and Financiers, the Oligarchs of the World we discover that Capital no longer needs to produce visible commodities, no longer needs to produce useful goods for its wage slaves, it can now bypass us, bypass our needs, our desires, our dreams for its own infinite and digital accelerated world of pure circulation and profit. As Berardi attests,

In the sphere of the financial economy, the acceleration of financial circulation and valorization imply the elimination of the concrete usefulness of products (no matter if material or immaterial, industrial or semiotic). The process of realization of capital, namely the exchange of goods with money, was obviously slowing the pace of monetary accumulation. The virtual technology has created the possibility of skipping this slow passage through concrete meaningful useful goods. (A: 126)

Invisible, immaterial, the new financial economy runs at the speed of light in an absolute timeworld, where profit is based on the virtual circulation of abstract value (not even money, but algorithms, electronic impulses) that has been accelerated and sped up to the point of totally escaping the possibility of human understanding and— obviously—of political control.(A: 126)

Value does not emerge from a physical relationship between work and things, but rather from infinite self-replication of virtual exchanges of nothing with nothing, whose outcome is more money. Digital abstraction leads to the virtualization of the physical act of meeting, and the manipulation of things. These new levels of abstraction do not only concern the labour process, they tend to encompass every space of social life. Therefore, digitalization and financialization are transforming the very fabric of the social body, and inducing mutations in it. (A: 127)

Berardi tells us to look at the reality of debt, look at the awful effects of submission, impoverishment and exploitation that debt is provoking in the body of society. Debt is a weapon against social autonomy, a transformation of money into a blackmail. Young people are obliged to borrow money from the bank in order to pay for their studies, as the public system of education has been destroyed by the Neoliberal fanatics, and private school is costing more and more. As soon as they come out from the university they have to start paying back their debt, and they are obliged to accept any kind of precarious job, and to suffer any kind of blackmail. (A: 128)

For such creatures the future can only be bleak and full of misery and endless years of untold grief as they strive to pay their debt. Many forgo such a Sisyphean project and commit suicide. Others mentally and spiritual die inside and live out the remainder of their lives as zombies under this terrible debt system. In our time whole nations have been blackmailed into this system of debt as we ponder the EU. This same process has already happened to much of the Third World nations for years under a predatory capitalism well documented by Naomi Kline in The Shock Doctrine among other works of like caliber.

Commenting on this dark scenario Berardi says “Money, which was supposed to be the measure of value, has been turned into a tool for psychic and social subjugation. The metaphysical debt is linking money, language and guilt. Debt is guilt, and as guilt it is entering the domain of unconscious, and shapes language according to structures of power and submission.” (A: 128)

The notion that our age old systems of power and coercion have migrated into the digital age and brought about a new guilt culture to subdue and channel the desires of nations into the profit bins of a minority of Oligarchs seems ludicrous at first glance as if this were some nefarious planned and intentional affair. But is it? Is anyone or anything behind such a sinister system of slavery and control? Is this a conspiracy of madness against the human species? Berardi will liken this process not to some power behind the scenes, but rather to the inherent power of language itself and how we for two hundred years have obliterated the hold language had on the referent:

This process of de-referentialization of language—emancipation of the linguistic sign from the referent—which has been the mark of poetic and artistic experimentation with language during the twentieth century, shows an interesting similarity with the transformation in the relation between economy and monetary exchange.

On August 15, 1971, President Nixon announced dramatic changes in economic policy. Particularly he ended the Bretton Woods international monetary system. The Bretton Woods system, created at the end of World War II, involved fixed exchange rates with the US dollar as the key currency—but also a role for gold linked to the dollar at $35/ounce. The system began to falter in the ‘60s because of an excess of dollars flowing out of the US which foreign central banks had to absorb. All of this was ended unilaterally by Nixon’s decision. After a brief attempt to create a modified fixed exchange rate system, the world moved to flexible rates.

Breaking the Bretton Woods’s agreements, the American President declared that the dollar has no referent, and its value is decided by an act of language. This was the starting point of the long lasting process of financialization of the economy, based on the emancipation of the financial dynamic from any conventional standard and from any economic reality. The Neoliberal offensive started in that very moment of arbitrary assertion of the value of the dollar outside the conventional standard. The neoliberal school of the Chicago Boys said “money is creating reality” like the Symbolist poets had said: “words are creating reality”. (A: 128-130)

Words had lost touch with their referent, the natural world and environment within which we all live and have our habitus. The disappearance of the natural and the virtualization of language produced the effects we see in the world today. We are the product of a process that undermined the ancient metaphysical systems of the world that guided primitive, feudal and early modern societies. In our bid to overcome the religious and metaphysical systems that held us in their clutches we also lost the world, our world. We lost the natural in life and ourselves, lost touch with the signs that kept us anchored to the natural environment that our brain had been tied to for sex and survival from the beginnings of the human. We ourselves in our bid to transcend the animal and inhuman in ourselves became non-human. We have brought upon ourselves the semantic apocalypse we see all around us. This is the guilt we bare and the debt we will have to pay, not the tributary debt to those few dark controllers who seek to lord it over us.

It was Jean Baudrillard who wrote in the Symbolic Exchange and Death, where he announces that the economy has abandoned the old law of determination of value, and that the referent for linguistic and economic exchange was dissolved:

“The reality principle coincided with a determinate phase of the law of value. Today the entire system is fluctuating in indeterminacy, all of reality absorbed by the hyperreality of the code and of simulation. It is now a principle of simulation, and not of reality, that regulates social life. The finalities have disappeared; we are now engendered by models… The entire strategy of the system lies in this hyperreality of floating values. It is the same for money and theory as for the unconscious. Value rules according to an ungraspable order: the generation of models, the indefinite chaining of simulation.” (Baudrillard 1976)

We have become mere simulacra of our former selves, simulated creatures in a simulated world. Bound and ensnared in a world of debt, controlled by an algorithmic system of digital hypersystems we live out our lives under the guilt of a system we ourselves helped create. We have no one to blame but ourselves. We know this. We deny this. We seek solace in escape and fantasy worlds of mediatainment that even further suck dry our desires and channel our hopes and dreams into a fantasia of tomorrows that will never come.

For Deleuze & Guattari this primitive system of memory and pain will enter the stage of religion as a debt to be paid ending in the death of Christ as the payer of all debts; and, yet, it will not end there, for debt can never be repaid, so it forms the kernel of the modern State: “the new machine, and the new apparatus of repression” (AO: 192). This system of endless debt: “that finds itself taken into an immense machinery that renders the debt infinite and no longer forms anything but one and the same crushing fate: the aim now is to preclude pessimistically, once and for all, the prospect of discharge; the aim now is to make the glance recoil disconsolately from an iron impossibility. The Earth becomes a madhouse.” (AO: 192)

  1. Berardi, Franco “Bifo”. And: Phenomenology of the End. Semiotext(e) (November 6, 2015) (A) (Page 126).
  2. Toscano, Alberto. Alien Mediations: Critical Remarks on The Making of the Indebted Man. The New Reader #1, 2017

Franco Berardi on the Digital Colonization of Human Experience

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By Franco Berardi

Source: Adbusters

The Spanish colonization of Mesoamerica was essentially a process of symbolic and cultural submission.

The “superiority” 
of the colonizers lay on the operational effectiveness of their technical production. The colonization destroyed the cultural environment in which indigenous communities had been living for centuries: the alphabetic technology, the power of the written word overwhelmed, jeopardized and finally superseded the indigenous cultures. The conquistadors re-coded the cultural universe of nowadays Mexico and Central America.

Before the arrival of the Spanish invaders Malinche (Malinalli in Nahuatl language, Marina for the Spaniards), the daughter
 of a noble Aztec family, was given away as 
a slave to passing traders after her father died and her mother remarried. By the time Cortés arrived, she had learned the Mayan dialects spoken in the Yucatan while still understanding Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs. As a youth she was given as tribute again, this time to the invaders.

She became the lover of Cortés and accompanied him as interpreter. She translated the words exchanged by Cortés and Moctezuma, king of the Aztec population of Tenochtitlan, and she translated the conqueror’s words when he met crowds of indigenous persons. She translated for Nahuatl-speaking people the words of Christian conquerors and of Christian priests. The Christian message melted with pre-colonisation mythologies, and the modern Mexican culture emerged. She and Cortés had a child, Martín, the first Mexican. She betrayed her own people by linking with the invaders. By the moral point of view, however, she owed nothing to her own people who had sold her into slavery, and treated her as a servant. She betrayed the conquerors, too, though they did not realize it as such.

Malinche is the ultimate symbol of the end of a world, and also the symbol of the formation of a new semiotic and symbolic space. Only when you are able to see the collapse as the end of a world, can a new world be imagined. Only when you are free from hope (which is the worst enemy of intelligence) can you start seeing a new horizon of possibility. This is the lesson that Malinche is teaching us.

DEMOCRACY

On 31 October 2011, George Papandreou announced his government’s intentions to hold a referendum for the acceptance of the terms of a Eurozone bailout deal. He wanted the Greek people to decide if the diktat of the financial class that was strangling Greek society would be accepted or rejected. Overnight, the elected Prime Minister of Greece was obliged to resign. In the very place where it was invented and named twenty-five centuries ago, democracy was finally cancelled. It will never again come to life. Financial abstraction has swallowed the destiny of billions of people. European workers’ salaries have been halved in the last ten years and unemployment and precariousness are on the rise. Meanwhile, profits skyrocket.

WAR

The Eurasian continent is heading toward a proliferation of fragmentary conflict. At the same time, the infinite war launched by Cheney and Bush has paved the way to the establishment of the Caliphate. In Japan, the Prime Minister travels the world looking for allies against China. In India, a racist mass murderer (neoliberal of course) has been elected Prime Minister. In Europe, a Euro-Russian war is in the making at the Ukrainian border. In Ferguson, Missouri, another racialized killing reveals the American police state and the poverty industrial complex — two million homeless in the US and counting. In Gaza, Israel bombards the world’s largest open air prison and blames the victims, most of them children, for dying while the world looks on. In Northern Africa, Western powers prepare for the next season of Gaddafi blowback. In Liberia, Ebola fans the flames of civil and regional war, one bleeding eyeball at a time. In Mexico, a momentary silence shrouds the bloodiest drug war humanity has ever known, with cartels ranking among the wealthiest corporations.

While capitalism will continue to thrive thanks to massive slavery and eco-catastrophe, the next 20 years will be marked by the clash between financial abstraction and biofascism. A social, cognitive breakdown is estranging the masses from the body, so the decerebrated body is taking the form of aggression. Those who have been lost in the competition react under the banners of aggressive identification. We can even see fascism revived by the vengeful spirit of the dispossessed.

BIO-FINANCIAL POWER

Nation states are over, stripped by the global machine
 of finance, computation and all-pervading behavioral Big Data algorithms. Global corporations are replacing nation states as holders of power. We now embrace the first stages of the automation of mind, language and emotions … the architecture of bio-financial power. Power, in fact, is no longer political or military. It is based more and more on the penetration of techno-linguistic automatisms into the sphere of language. Soon, life will be based on the automation of cognitive activity. Who cares if the US military machine is running on empty because of Bush’s self-defeating strategy — it’s a remnant of geopolitical thinking now dead.

THE CIRCLE

Mediocre as it is, Dave Eggers’s novel 
The Circle is a metaphor for the relation between technology, communication, emotion and power. “The Circle” is the name of the most powerful corporation 
in the world, a sort of conglomerate of Google, Facebook, Paypal and YouTube. Three men lead the company: Stockton 
is a financial shark, Bayley is a utopian and Ty Gospodinov is the project’s hidden mastermind.

The main character of the book is Mae, a young woman hired by The Circle during “the Completion,” the final phase in the implementation of TrueYou, a program intended to enforce the recording of every instant of life for pervasive, ceaseless sharing. Mae becomes the corporation’s spokesperson, the face that appears every day on the infinite channels of The Circle’s television network — the ambassador of the new credo.

The Circle is all about the utter
 capture of human attention: ceaseless communication, mandatory friendliness and creation of a new neediness — the obsessive need to express and share. One may remark that Eggers is simply re-enacting Orwell more than 60 years after the publishing of 1984. That’s true, but in the final pages of the novel, Eggers goes further than Orwell, when Ty exposes the transhuman potency of the totalitarian nightmare.

In the last scene of the novel, the inventor and founder of The Circle manages to covertly meet Mae, the newbie seducing
 the global audience. He has lost control of his own creature, the project he originally conceived, and is deprived of all power in its unstoppable self–deployment.

“I did not intend any of this to happen. And it’s moving so fast. I didn’t picture a world where Circle membership was mandatory, where all government and all life was channeled through one network … there used to be the option of opting out. But now that’s over. Completion is the end. We are closing the circle around everyone. It’s a totalitarian nightmare.”

The automaton cannot be stopped, as even the creator himself becomes overpowered by his own invention: the circle of continuous attention, the circle of perfect transparence of everybody to everybody, the circle of total power and of total impotence.

PLEASURE, AFFECTION AND EMPATHY

At the beginning of the 21st century we are in a position that is similar to the position of Malinche: the conqueror is here, peaceful or aggressive, functionally superior, unattainable, incomprehensible. The bio-info automaton is taking shape from the connection between electronic machines, digital languages and minds formatted in such a way to comply with the code. The automaton’s flow of enunciation emanates a connective world that the conjunctive codes cannot interpret, a world that is symbolically incompatible with the social civilization that was the outcome of five centuries of Humanism, Enlightenment and Socialism.

The automaton is the reification of the networked cognitive activity of millions of semio-workers around the globe. Only if they become compatible with the code, the program, can semio-workers enter in the process of networking.

This implies the de-activation of old, subconsciously engrained, modes of communication and perception (compassion, empathy, solidarity, ambiguousness and irony), paving the way to the assimilation of the conscious organism with the digital automaton.

Will the general intellect be able to disentangle itself from the automaton? Can consciousness act on neural evolution? Will pleasure, affection, empathy find a way to re-emerge? Will we translate into human language the connective language of the automated meaning-making machine buzzing and buzzing in our heads?

These are questions that only 
Malinche can answer, opening to the incomprehensible other, betraying her people and reinventing language in order to express what can not be said.

—Franco “Bifo” Berardi is an Italian Marxist theorist and activist in the autonomist tradition. He writes about the condition of media, mental breakdown
 and information technology within post-industrial capitalism. His next book, Heroes, dedicated to the suicidal wave provoked by financial nihilism, will be out in the first months of 2015.