Semiocapitalism destroys value to life – turns util

Bifo’s recent book AND: Phenomenology of the End deals with processes of subjectivation which, through communication, information technology, and the government of signs, determine our modes of life and affect the political conjuncture. His central argument emerges from describing the transition from a world in which the relation between bodies and signs was processed through sensitivity (a conjunctional concatenation) to a regime in which we only operate with already codified signs, and with combinations that have already been pre-established by a prior compatibility (connective concatenation). This transformation follows the recent virtual revolution in semiocapitalism, in which capital is valorized through the production of signs, that is due both to a technological transformation and an ontological rupture. This transformation and ontological rupture consist of the sign’s aspiration of autonomy in relation to its referent (in language, the link between the signifier/signified, and in finances the link between money/labor). In other words the human animal suffers the consequences of their actions over the environment – the infosphere which is populated with information flows which circulate at a vertiginous speed – that they have irreversibly modified and to which now they only aspire to adapt. The infinite emission of information becomes incompatible with the capacity of the individual and social brain to receive/metabolize, it becomes impossible for the human brain. This transformation of the environment is thus inseparable from an anthropological mutation that the author describes both from the perspective of new technological patterns and from that of the new power of finance and the pathologies that subjects suffer. The digital revolution disrupts the way in which the body is connected to signs, to the detriment of sensitivity, (tactile) sensoriality, and sensuality (pleasure-pain). That is, the loss of all the components that produce empathy. General desensitization neutralizes the critical power of culture and annuls the availability of the necessary time for erotic bonds, without which there is neither individual happiness nor the capacity to articulate counterpowers. This regeneration of sensitivity – in parallel to the loss of the sense of history – is not, however, for Bifo the effect of technological development on its own, but rather the conditions established by large capitalist corporations for this development.