By Yu Yu
Once upon a time—before the smooth, frictionless hum of “civilisation”—there was an occupation known as the switchboard operator. Seated before a dense thicket of wires and sockets, she connected caller to recipient, voice to voice, by hand.
Then civilisation arrived. The good news: automated switching rendered manual labour obsolete. The bad news: it rendered the switchboard operator obsolete as well. The room was left to the whirring of cooling fans and the mute blinking of signal lights. Data centres require no illumination; their automated outputs flicker on our screens brightly enough to blind us.
In The Second Coming (2017; Chinese edition 2025), the Italian philosopher Franco “Bifo” Berardi begins with automation and proceeds, with unnerving precision, to diagnose the contemporary human condition. Under the breakthrough of A.I., automation spreads across the surface of the planet like a new atmospheric layer. We, wrapped beneath it like fleas under fur, endure the ceaseless bombardment of auto-generated stimuli. Drawing on his psychoanalytic background, Berardi describes this regime of “info-nervous stimulation” as exceeding “beyond the limits of conscious processing” (p. 2). The world appears chaotic not because it is inherently so, but because we cannot metabolise it.
我To make sense of automated information, we increasingly rely on automated systems—A.I.-generated CVs filtered by H.R. algorithms, machinic speech parsed by machinic ears. Automation connects to itself. The human recedes into a secondary position, managed and rearranged. More importantly, everyday life is seamlessly automated, efficiently operational. Each time I read about robotaxis, I find myself wondering whether human drivers will soon be banned from the roads altogether—too inefficient, too prone to error. Best, perhaps, to empty one’s mind and sit still. We doomscroll our way to the apocalypse.
Or might doomscrolling itself conjure one?
Berardi traces how, over the past three decades, neoliberalism—understood as the capture of reason by economic logic—has incubated a resurgence of the far-right, a second coming of Adolf Hitler. What most alarms him is the rise of Donald Trump. Published in 2017, at the moment of Trump’s first election, the book reads the phenomenon as intelligible: “The ascent of Donald Trump is understandable,” Berardi writes, “a sort of white supremacist backlash fuelled by fear of decline and by the perception of a spreading, global civil war” (p. 33). Excessive informational stimulation produces neurological exhaustion, which in turn amplifies resentment. Now, in 2025, we are witnessing what feels like Trump’s own “second coming”. The appearance of a Chinese translation could scarcely be timelier.
Yet for me, the phrase “second coming” summons two questions, apparently contradictory yet equally persistent:
- Why do things so often return—like fascism?
- Why do things so often return—like fascism?
We seem suspended between these two anxieties. But perhaps a deeper question lurks beneath them: why do we think in terms of “second comings” at all? Why do we insist on declaring that something has returned—or lament that something has failed to? Why must history repeat?
The answer may lie in our habits of thought. We frame the present with the categories of the past. Measuring reality against prior recognitions, we reach reflexively for recurrence as our interpretative tool. In his final chapter, Berardi tentatively proposes a “second coming of Communism” as a possible exit from our impasse. He does so warily, donning theoretical helmets as he proceeds, aware of the messianic undertow such a gesture risks unleashing. The rhetoric of return is difficult to escape.
I would rather paraphrase—perhaps unfairly—another of his sentences: “You can’t imagine how beautiful life can be” (p. 140). The emphasis, for me, falls on imagination. You cannot imagine how good life could be, because goodness lies beyond the horizon of what you are currently capable of imagining. The task, then, is neither to await a second coming nor to diagnose its inevitability, but to imagine— stubbornly, repeatedly—until the unimaginable begins to take shape.
Only then might we glimpse how good life could be.