Semiotic Inflation

Inflation in economics names the condition in which more money chases the same goods and each unit of currency purchases less. Franco 'Bifo' Berardi coins the parallel concept for meaning: semiotic inflation is the condition in which more signs are produced per unit of time than can be meaningfully processed, with the result that each sign carries less significance, less depth, and less resonance—not because the signs are badly made but because meaning is not a feature of individual signs but of the time and attention their processing requires. The relationship between sign and meaning is temporal: a poem does not yield its meaning on first reading; a complex idea does not reveal its implications in the moment of its articulation. Meaning unfolds at a pace determined by the human organism's biological clock, not by the machine's processing speed. When the semiosphere accelerates beyond the organism's capacity for meaning-making, the result is not faster meaning but the absence of meaning—a flood of