The plan cements digital semio-capitalism by accelerating immaterial production

According to Berardi, the primary reason for the contemporary condition of crisis is the change over the last 50 years from industrial capitalism to finance- and semio-capitalism. One of the most crucial events in this regard was Nixon’s 1971 abolition of the gold standard and the Bretton Woods agreement,11 which Berardi describes as actions of dereferencialization, since the value of the dollar lost its connection to a physical reality.12 This may appear as an excessive conclusion, but it nevertheless aligns with other theoreticians in and outside the field, including Marazzi,13 MacKenzie14 and Appadurai.15, as it stresses the performative and immaterial character of finance capitalism. Berardi refers to this self-referential economic paradigm as semio-capitalism, since the primary production is not based on physical things but rather the exchange of semia—signs: “There are no longer material things, but signs; no longer the production of things which are tangible visible materials, but the production of something that is essentially semiotic.”16 Following this argumentation, in the present age of digital semio-capitalism the spheres of production and language would seem to coincide, resulting in the abstraction of work which is increasingly based on cognitive labour and the immaterial exchange of information. These accelerating processes alienate— whom he designates as—‘the cognitive workers’ from their social, perceptive and affective bodies. Furthermore, in his 2015 book AND. Phenomenology of the End - Sensibility and Connective Mutation Berardi states that “the infosphere acts directly on the nervous system of society, affecting the psychosphere and affecting sensibility in particular,”17 emphasizing how the accelerating infosphere, the dimension of intentional signs surrounding the sensitive organism, affects sensibility.18 As stated above, Berardi conceptualizes this sensibility as the surface of contact between the human being and the world; a sensuous, affective and linguistic attentiveness, receptiveness and capacity for interpretation and comprehension crucial for the social organism to interact with itself and the surrounding world.19 However, this sensibility is inhibited by the semio- capitalist rationalization of language, which becomes operational, standardized and thus exchangeable, so to minimize friction in the still accelerating exchange of information and immaterial value.20 For him, this paradigm of semio-capitalism pervades all spheres of human life, and thus inhibits the ability to understand, express, imagine and create different relations and conjunctions— or alternative futures, if you like.