The long version of an interview I did with Franco Berardi, for the art mag Metropolis M, winter 2011.

Franco Berardi, better known as “Bifo”, is an Italian autonomist philosopher and media activist. One of the founders of the notorious Radio Alice, a pirate radio station that became the voice of the autonomous youth movement of Bologna in the late 1970s, Bifo is the author of multiple works of political theory, including The Soul at Work and the recently published After the Future.

MO: How do you look at the present crisis from the perspective that you have developed in your work, which revolves around the interconnectedness of economy, language and psychology?

Do you remember what happened at the end of the nineties and especially in the spring of the year 2000? After a decade of development, of growth and also of hope; after the belief in the possibility of infinite expansion of a virtual capitalism based on new technologies, there was a collapse. The bursting of the Internet bubble. It was a very important moment. And in a sense, what happened in September 2008 in the United States and what is happening now in Europe, can be considered as the long aftermath of the crisis of 2000. Because in that crisis, all the elements of novelty, of the new forms of capitalism which I like to call semiocapitalism, manifested themselves openly.