Exhaustion caused by semiocapitalism fuels extinction through fascism

The hyperacceleration that digital technology has imposed upon the world in the last few decades has provoked an effect of exhaustion: physical, psychological and mental. At the same time the demographical trends of the Northern Hemisphere of planet Earth point to a rapid process of senescence of the population. The more the digital machine is powerful and fast, the less humans can rationally decipher and politically govern their environment, and the more impotent they feel. In Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, Günther Anders writes about the humiliation that is implicit in the confrontation of men with their own automatic creatures, and he announces that in this kind of humiliation there are the seeds of the Übermensch returning in all his fury. Nazism, according to Anders, is not to be remembered as a bad memory of the past but has to be considered as a nightmare ready for the future. In his appalling prediction, future Nazism will be the effect of the humiliation of humans overwhelmed by the enormity of their own products that are ruled by forces of economic automatism and subtracted from conscious control. The Anders prediction comes true with the rise of worldwide Trumpism, when the humiliated get their revenge by destroying the Reason embodied in the algorithmic machine. But the humiliation has been intensified during the months of the lockdown, when billions of humans have been obliged to hide in order to escape the overpowering invisible force of the virus. This is where we are now: the wave of dementia that has been overwhelming the world since the year 2016, which erupted with Brexit and the victory of Trump, can be read, in my opinion, as a sort of furious reaction to the invincible power of the techno-linguistic automatisms embedded in the financial machine. What now? What will be the reaction of the social psyche to a new overpowering force which is more pervasive and more frightening than finance: the unconscious force of contagion? Will we at last be able to face reality, to renounce to the presumption of human omnipotence? Will we finally accept the idea that we are part of a system of reciprocity, of mutual interaction? Will we accept the idea that we are mortal? This is the point: facing mortality, and abandoning the obsession of total control. The crucial point here is the relation between reason and chaos. The modern project was based on the dubious assumption that the infinite complexity of the universe can be reduced to rational knowledge expressed in mathematical terms and therefore can be submitted to political control. That project has been enormously productive, enriching and progressive, up to a certain point. Then the extreme complication of the social exceeded the sphere of scientific knowledge and rational control. At that point complexity grew into chaos, and political reason was confronted by its limits. The intrinsic madness of capitalism was exposed at that point: capitalism cannot exist without a never-ending strain of accumulation, acceleration and expansion, so that the collective brain is engaged in a struggle against chaos, aimed at dominating chaos and submitting chaos to the principle of valorisation. But remember: those who wage war against chaos will be defeated, as chaos feeds upon war. Therefore capitalism slammed against the impenetrable wall of Chaos, and social life crashed as a result. The virus reminded us of our limits and obliged a slowdown that is not a provisional pause but the arrival point of the modern race. Now we are facing the alternative between reframing the expectations of future or paving the way to extinction.