Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, a leading thinker in contemporary media, cultural, and social theory.
For Chinese readers, the name Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi may appear somewhat unfamiliar; however, within global academic and intellectual circles, Berardi is regarded as a “theorist among theorists.” One of the most influential contemporary cultural critics, Mark Fisher, drew inspiration from Berardi’s concept of “the slow cancellation of the future” and used it as the starting point for his seminal work Ghost of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Similarly, renowned media theorist Geert Lovink has engaged in sustained intellectual dialogue with Berardi, exploring the intersection of the digital age and the human psyche. Lovink’s Sad by Design: On Platform Nihilism contains numerous instances where he responds to and extends Berardi’s ideas.
After a decade, Typesetter Publishing introduces Berardi’s insights to the Chinese-speaking world with the 2025 release of the Chinese version of The Second Coming. Originally published in 2017, the book’s remarkable prescience is striking when viewed today. Berardi predicted that the collective social psyche would further fragment with the rise of automation, and that a new wave of global conflict would centre on racial and religious identification. He also warned of the looming emergence of technologically enhanced forms of racism and fascism.
On the occasion of the publication of the Chinese translation of The Second Coming, Typesetter Publishing invited Berardi to share his thoughts and insights on the latest developments in the global socioolitical situation:
- Does the unfolding of a third world war is inevitable?
- How can people in the age of AI resist the automated simulation of social relations and cognition on a broader scale?
- Is it possible for people today to be liberated from the need to exchange their time for money?
- In such a depressing and devastating world, how can we rediscover the possibility of joy?
Typesetter: In The Second Coming, you begin your analysis with the year 1968. Many of our Chinese readers may not be familiar with the context of the 1968 movement. Could you kindly explain why this year is significant for your investigation of the contemporary world? Why do you believe revisiting the events of 1968 can help us uncover possibilities for the future of our world?
Bifo: Berkeley is an important place for the history of the movements, and it is also an important place from the point of view of scientific and technological research. On the day December 2nd of 1964, while American imperialists were starting the war in Vietnam, a crowd of 5000 anti-war students marched along the Telegraph avenue until the main square of the campus of the University of Berkeley and in this place Mario Savio, a student and a socialist militant, took the microphone and said some words that in my opinion are exceptionally interesting, and contain in a nutshell the meaning of the worldwide revolt that in the following years shook universities, schools and factories. These are the words of Mario Savio:
There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part, you can’t even passively take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.
Mario Savio is speaking against the war, of course, he is particularly focusing on the relation between the war and the University. He says that the University is an autocracy. He calls students and young people to refuse to be used by the war machine.
Mario Savio talks about a subject that will mark the following history of global capitalism: the soul at work, the social ability to know, to investigate, to create submitted to salaried labor in the new age of capitalism.
’68, in my view, was essentially a cultural and political movement spreading by the consciousness that socialism is possible thanks to the alliance of the working class and of cognitive work.
Typesetter: In your book, you discuss the techno-media complex controlling hyper-connected minds, the spread of civil wars driven by a thirst for revenge, and the divergence in interests between white workers and migrants, refugees, and the unemployed from the Global South. Do you believe the unfolding of a third world war is inevitable? How can contemporary left-wing movements prevent this and restore the sense of internationalism you emphasize in your writing?
Bifo: You know, I wrote The Second Coming in the year 2017. Almost a decade has passed since then. And the current decade is revealing a disquieting scenario: the human kind may not survive the final spasm of colonialism. In 2017 I was warning against the danger of global civil war. Now global civil war in underway. After the global collapse of the pandemics, white suprematism has taken the upper hand in the West, and it is going to deploy all of its destructive potency – which means it is poised to destroy human civilization.
This war is deploying on two main fronts that are interweaving and feeding each other. On one side it is an aggression of Western imperialism on the South of the world, a war of extermination of the migrants, a genocidal war that is epitomized in the Gaza massacre.
On the other side it is a inter-white war, that has its centre in Ukraine, but is deploying all over, a war between the agonizing forces of the fake Liberal democracy and the emerging forces of Trumpist Nazism.
In 1965 the leader of the Liberation Army of China, Lin Biao wrote the following words: “In the future the countryside will strangle the metropolises of the world.”[1] But simultaneously Chairman Mao asserted that “the worker class must be the leading force.”
You know, at the present I would say that the prediction of Lin Biao is coming true: the South of the world is going to strangle the North. China and India, Brasil and South Africa, and many more countries that suffered and still suffer the consequences of white colonialism are joining forces against the senescent North. The Western arrogance is a sign of dementia and of isolation.
But the worker class is nowhere leading the process, so the result will not be communism. The result will be a worldwide genocidal war, that is already underway at the border between the North and the South of the world, where migrant people are rejected, drowned, detained, deported and murdered.
I don’t forget the words of Chairman Mao, who said: “All reactionaries are fools[2] who lift a rock only to drop it on one’s own feet.[3]“
But these fools hold weapons that can completely destroy the planet, and their senile despair may lead them to use all of their destructive strength.
Typesetter: The intensification of hyperconnectivity between human minds and machines, along with the cognitive automation it brings, has been especially prominent in recent years, particularly with the rapid advancements in artificial intelligence (AI). How can people in the age of AI resist the automated simulation of social relations and cognition on a broader scale?
Bifo: We must dare to reverse your question. We must dare to advance an hypothesis: the human mind will not resist the capture. This is what is happening already.
Paul Graham[4] wrote about the relation between thought and automated intelligence.
In a couple decades there won’t be many people who can write.
AI has blown this world open. Almost all pressure to write has dissipated. You can have AI do it for you, both in school and at work.
The result will be a world divided into writes and write-nots. There will still be some people who can write. Some of us like it. But the middle ground between those who are good at writing and those who can’t write at all will disappear. Instead of good writers, ok writers, and people who can’t write, there will just be good writers and people who can’t write.
Is that so bad? Isn’t it common for skills to disappear when technology makes them obsolete? There aren’t many blacksmiths left, and it doesn’t seem to be a problem.
Yes, it’s bad. The reason is something I mentioned earlier: writing is thinking. In fact there’s a kind of thinking that can only be done by writing.
So a world divided into writes and write-nots is more dangerous than it sounds. It will be a world of thinks and think-nots. I know which half I want to be in, and I bet you do too.
Writes and Write-Nots, https://paulgraham.com/writes.html
The intelligent automaton does the work of writing for us.
But writing is the activity that enables the logical organization of thought.
That means that the automation of intelligence disables the faculty of thinking in humans.
This is not a far-fetched fantasy, this is what is happening already.
The generation that learned more words from a machine than from the voice of the mother, catapulted into hyper accelerated info sphere is already manifesting a cognitive mutation that resounds in political choices.
Typesetter: You mention the creation of “memes of disentanglement.” Could you elaborate on whether this refers to developing a new work ethic that transcends the traditional fixation on salaried labor? Is it possible for people today to be liberated from the need to exchange their time for money?
Bifo: Disentanglement means the process of getting free from the obligations of history.
History has proven to be only the history of violence, of war, of exploitation. A part of the human kind is deserting, defecting, quitting this dimension.
In the ’60 and in the ‘70s, when the working class was organized and strong it was possible to fight for the reduction of work time. Actually labor hours were reduced in the European countries thanks to the Unions and to the autonomous struggles of the working class. Then things have worsened, and now in Europe people are obliged to work much more than 40 hours per week. Slavery is back in many countries of the West and of Asia.
After some decades of liberation from salaried labor now capitalism has reaffirmed its grip everywhere, not only in the West.
Memes are the hyper-synthetic fast way of circulating a message.
Presently memes are the communication tool that has fueled the reactionary movement worldwide.
Artists, activists, people who desert war and oppose capitalism must invent hyper synthetic and contagious signs for desertion, for frugality, autonomy from consumerism and competition.
Only desertion is a way of decent survival, because the forces of colonization of the mind and of devastation of the environment have taken the upper hand.
Typesetter: For many of our readers, the idea of “memes of disentanglement” may seem abstract or unimaginable. Could you provide some examples to illustrate what these memes might look like and how they might function in practice?
Bifo: My life, your life, the life of everybody can be turned into a meme of disentanglement. Radio Alice, [5] the pirate radio that launched an insurrection in Bologna in 1977 is a meme of disentanglement.
The Freedom Flotilla Coalition[6] that these days is trying to overcome the Zionist maritime wall in order to bring food to starving palestinians is a meme of disentanglement.
Those who rebel even if there is no hope of Future, those who desert work, those who desert procreation, those who do not expect anything from the future—these are memes of disentanglement
Greta Thunberg saying: “how do you dare to destroy our lives?”[7] is a meme of disentanglement.
We are at the beginning of a period of global devastation. The Ku Klux klan of Donald Trump is pursuing an agenda of White Terror, deportation and torture. Look at what happens in the North American cities: the comeback of the worst kind of racism.
We must invent new ways of escape.
It’s quite possible that the human kind will not survive the Twenty first Century. War, environment collapse, panic are going to jeopardize the fabric of social life.
The point is: how will we survive in this Maelstrom? How can we create spaces for good life during the process of self-termination of the human civilization?
Typesetter: Toward the end of the book, you stress that even in the face of despair, we must continue practicing the art of thinking and philosophical imagination. Given the intense and ubiquitous nature of cognitive automation, how can we train ourselves to preserve and cultivate the ability for philosophical imagination?
Bifo: Do not forget that this book (The second coming) has been first published in the year 2017.
It was a reflection about Communism hundred years after the Russian revolution. It was a reflection about the possibility of a second coming of the communist project.
In the last decade we have gone through a pandemic, an acceleration of the environmental collapse, an explosion of aggressive racism, and the comeback of the nuclear war in the context of the decline of the white domination of the planet.
I do not see any subjective force, any social front, any political ideology that is able to push back the aggression of the Suicidal criminals who are governing the West.
Only one thing has been left to us: the ability to think and to imagine.
But we must think out of dogmas, out of the pre-conceived schemas of explanation. The modern concepts (politics, democracy, human rights, Universal Reason) have been trashed by the senescent West. These values will not come back. Politics, democracy, human rights are empty words after Gaza.
We must create new concepts within a framework that has not been foreseen by the political science: the framework of self-termination of the human kind within this century.
Typesetter: Some of our readers are familiar with your work through your more recent bookQuit Everything: Interpreting Depression. In The Second Coming, you describe humanity as entering an age of dementia, while in Quit Everything, you focus on the theme of depression. How do you see these two states of humanity as being interconnected? In such a depressing and devastating world, how can we rediscover the possibility of joy?
Bifo: This is the most difficult question.
My focus is on the collapse of the Western mind. The disintegration of the mental environment is at a particularly advanced state in the West, but it is a process that is developing worldwide, as an effect of the subjection of mind to the automation of cognitive activity
The collapse of mental health is the result of two converging processes: the competition (war of all against all[8]) promoted by the Neoliberal ideology—and the isolation provoked by the digital technology.
Simultaneously we must take into account a process that is enormously important: the senescence of the human kind (not only in the West, but everywhere, tendentially including Africa). This trend is downplayed by the political progressive thought, but it is going to become the most important factor of the coming evolution.
In the first decades of the Century a wave of depression has spread in the digital generation. In the coming decades we’ll be obliged to deal with an unprecedented phenomenon: the senescence of a large share of the population.
This is going to provoke an obvious economic and financial problem – but most of all, this is going to affect the psychological investment in the future. Due to the falling birthrate (a process that cannot be countered by political will) the overall population is going to shrink and is going to grow older and older.
Try to imagine a planet in which one third of the population is 60 years old and over, and the majority of young people are both hyper-connected and sexually alone. This is the likely landscape of the second half of this Century, assuming that nuclear war and climate change do not destroy human civilization before the middle of the twenty-first century.
You know, in the wake of the Genocide committed by the Zionists we are obliged to think that something deeply wrong has happened in the human mind, something that could be avoided only by an egalitarian and humanist revolution: Communism.
Communism was the last possibility of escaping the apocalypse. But Communism has failed. We have failed.
In the second decade of the Century it was possible to expect a wave of social solidarity, announced by the Occupy movement, by the Arab revolutions of 2011. That wave never materialized.
Then we have experienced the pandemic, the coming back of war in Europe, and the return of genocide in that cursed place called Holy Land.
Now, in the Third Decade we are witnessing the Collapse of human Reason, and the spiral of Chaos and of the Automaton.
The automaton is poised to prevail, while a demographic deflation is deploying. In this context it’s easy to understand the (conscious and unconscious) feminine decision not to generate the victims of the impending apocalypse.
Nevertheless one question remains: how can we find a possibility of joy? How can the generation that has been generated in the Century of termination live a good life?
My suggestion is: desertion. Good life will be possible only in islands of autonomy from History. We have to create those islands in a territorial sense but mainly in a symbolic sense.
We have to create a symbolic dimension that is disentangled from the grip of historical vengeance.
[1] Here, Berardi references Lin Biao’s statement, published on 3 September 1965 in the People’s Liberation Army Daily under the title “Long Live the Victory of People’s War: In Commemoration of the Twentieth Anniversary of the Victory in the Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japan.” Lin famously articulated the strategy of “encircling the cities from the countryside and ultimately capturing the cities,” further asserting that “the current world revolution, in a certain sense, also reflects a situation of the countryside encircling the cities.”
[2] From “Talks with American Journalist Anna Louise Strong,” 6 August 1946.
[3] Mao Zedong frequently used this proverb to assess the actions of opposing factions. One such instance is documented in “Talks on the New International Situation with a Xinhua Daily Reporter,” published on 1 September 1939 in Xinhua Daily.
[4] Paul Graham is a renowned programmer, entrepreneur, and author. He is one of the co-founders of Viaweb, the earliest Web APP company, which was later acquired by Yahoo!, as well as the venture capital firm Y Combinator, which successfully incubated startups such as Scribd, Reddit, Dropbox, and Airbnb. In addition to his entrepreneurial achievements, Graham is also a bestselling author and blogger, writing extensively on topics including technology, entrepreneurship, and writing.
[5] Radio Alice was a seminal media experiment of the Italian Autonomia movement in the 1970s and one of the earliest pirate radio stations in the world. It was co-founded by Berardi and a collective of radical artists and activists. Radio Alice broke the monopoly of mainstream media and state power over broadcasting, adopting a free and innovative programming format. Its broadcasts included music, poetry, political commentary, and live listener participation through call-ins. In 1977, Radio Alice was shut down by the police due to its support for student movements and anti-capitalist protests.
[6] The Freedom Flotilla Coalition (FFC), established in 2010, is an international alliance composed of NGOs and peace activists from multiple countries. It is dedicated to challenging Israel’s maritime blockade of the Gaza Strip and advocating for the freedom and human rights of the Palestinian people. The coalition organises flotillas in an effort to break the blockade and deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza. Through non-violent actions, it seeks to raise international awareness of the blockade and its implications.
[7] Greta Thunberg, a Swedish environmental activist, gained international prominence at the age of 15 (in 2018) when she initiated the “School Strike for Climate” campaign in Sweden, which subsequently sparked the global “Fridays for Future” movement. She rose to further recognition in 2019 with her impactful speech at the United Nations Climate Conference.
[8] This phrase is likely derived from Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan: “the war of all against all” (bellum omnium contra omnes) Hobbes describes the state of nature as one in which human society, lacking effective laws and order, is marked by relentless competition for survival and self-interest, often leading to mutual destruction. In such a state, human life is characterised as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”