Semiocapitalism subjects laborers to an infinite cycle of suffering

In the book, Bifo articulates his thinking about semiocapitalism, the system whereby capitalism and the media are connected, arguing that today it is not possible to reflect on one without linking it to the other. His main argument is that today we are living through individual and community pathologies caused by semiocapitalism, and in particular by the specific relation between cyberspace and cybertime. Cyberspace is the totality of the information and stimuli that circulate via media systems. Cybertime is the organic bodily capacity to deal with and elaborate information, which therefore has bodily a limit. The dramatic relation between the two, what he calls “splitterkapitalism”, creates clashes that bring about a multitude of problems for people in spheres such as labour, mental health, sexuality and affective life. Bifo observes that the current semiocapitalist order started to take this direction in Western societies in 1977, when hope and ideas of changing the economic, social and political organisation of society which had characterised many of the political movements in the previous decades, started to fail.

Bifo considers the 1990s to be a period of total identification, within the general Zeitgeist, with capital. Because of this identification, all technological changes were seen as forms of liberation and as creations of new spaces of freedom. The following decade, the 2000s, has for Bifo been characterised by a form of cultural depression resulting from the realisation that the mania of the ‘90s could not last. Monopolies emerged violently from the new world created by the internet and digital technologies. The potential for the internet and new digital technologies to allow people to live well, work less and have more time for affective and intellectual life were not realised. Indeed, the opposite occurred. The sphere of labour encroached on all aspects of individual and social life, and daily life became submerged under a continuous flux of information. Bifo discusses the end of previous social class divisions, and speaks about the ‘“cognitariat’”, the international group of workers involved in cognitive and emotional labour. He does not see any way for this form of spittlerkapitalism to end, but he proposes the creation of autonomous spaces in people’s lives as an antidote to some of the problems created by this wider context.