Semiocapitalism causes violent structural impacts – laundry list

In After the Future, Bifo iterates Marx’s thesis in the radically new times of digital capitalism. And he finds that the “automaton” has multiplied its powers to disaggregate and orchestrate the parts or organs of labor; the whole psychosphere of the human being becomes subject to the movement of capital, now operating at digital speeds. With the networking powers of information and communications technology the capacities of capitalist work processes to orchestrate labor have not only been extended spatially, across the globe, but have intensified temporally also. Today’s firms do not purchase the worker as a whole, but a fragment of their activity, sensibility, attention, communicative capacity. One of Bifo’s most compelling contributions to the theory of “semiocapitalism” – capitalism that makes affects, attitudes, attributes and ideas directly productive without materializing them – is the cellularization of labor. As production becomes semiotic, cognitive workers are precariously employed – on occasional, contractual, temporary bases – and their work involves the elaboration of segments or “semiotic artefacts” that are highly abstract entities combined and recombined through an exploitative digital network only at the precise time they are required. The social field is “an ocean of valorizing cells convened in a cellular way and recombined by the subjectivity of capital”. These info-laborers are paid only for the moments when their time is made cellular, yet their entire days are subjected to this kind of production, “pulsating and available, like a brain-sprawl in waiting”, Blackberries and mobiles ever ready. The psychic and somatic form of the human cannot take this, and as our cognitive, communicative, emotional capacities become subject to cellular fragmentation and recombination under the new machine-speed of information, we get sick. Depression, panic, unhappiness, anxiety, fear, terror – these are the affective conditions of contemporary labor, the “psycho- bombs” of cognitive capitalism, each, naturally, with their own psychopharmacology. Nonetheless, we actively submit ourselves to this regime; this is the perversity of contemporary culture. Of course, the vast majority has no choice – these are the structural conditions of work. But the progressive commercialization of culture, deadening of metropolitan life, loss of solidarity, and insidious dispersal of mechanisms of competition are such that we have come to fixate our desires on work. Even as it pushes human affective and cognitive capacities to breaking point, the enterprise form is the only adequate expression of our communicative and affective qualities, and the one most able to confirm our increasingly competitive and narcissistic drives.