Semio-capitalism causes both economic and social depression - creates nonstop violence and poverty leaving us without a future. Our society will only ever run backwards.

What seems to characterise our current semio-capitalist, post-cyberculture condition is depression – economic depression but also corporeal fatigue and mental depression. He writes: The future becomes a threat when the collective imagination becomes incapable of seeing alternatives to trends leading to devastation, increased poverty and violence. This is precisely our current situa-tion, because capitalism has become a system of techno-economic automatisms that politics cannot evade. The paralysis of the will (the impossibility of politics) is the historical context of today’s depression epidemic. ( Berardi, 2011 : 59) Berardi’s ‘paralysis of the will’ points to a real foreclosure of the horizon of any future politics, and his thought finds an echo in Mark Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life ( 2014 ), whose first chapter glosses over ‘the slow cancellation of the future’: the disappearance of the future, most visible in the realm of con-temporary culture, where time, instead of going forwards, runs backwards, in a constant return of zombified revivals of cultural forms and styles: If the late 1970s and early 80s were the moment when the current cri-sis of cultural temporality could first be felt, it was only during the first decade of the twenty-first century that what Simon Reynolds calls ‘dyschromia’ has become endemic. This dyschromia, this temporal dis-juncture, ought to feel uncanny, yet the predominance of what Reyn-olds calls ‘retromania’ means that it has lost any unheimlich charge: anachronism is now taken for granted. ( Fisher, 2014 : 14) Both Berardi and Fisher are amongst the strongest advocates for a repoliticisation of mental health, following the attempts of Foucault, Laing, or Deleuze and Guattari in the 1960s and 1970s. Both argue for a direct link between semio-capitalism or – ‘capitalist realism’ (Fisher) – and depression. Fisher describes the realism of capitalism as a ‘deflationary perspective of a depres-sive who believes that any positive state, any hope, is a dangerous illusion’ (Fisher, 2009: 5), whilst the first chapter of his Capitalist Realism claims that it has become easier to image the end of the world than the end of capitalism. For Fisher, himself battling depression, there seems to be little hope for a strategy of de-cancelling future. However, Berardi struggles to find an answer to the question: where is the hope? His answer is bafflingly simple: we must resist because we simply do not know and cannot know what will happen after the future, ‘and I must preserve the consciousness and sensibility of social solidarity, of human empathy, of gratuitous activity – of freedom, equality, and fraternity.