PERSON
Franco “Bifo” Berardi
The Italian philosopher and media activist who named semiocapitalism—the regime in which the production and circulation of signs replaces physical labor as the primary source of value—and who saw decades before anyone else that when the factory moves inside the skull, the worker cannot leave.
Born in Bologna in 1949 and radicalized in the Italian Autonomia movement of the 1970s, Franco “Bifo” Berardi has spent four decades arguing that the wall of the factory has disappeared—not because the factory closed, but because it expanded to fill everything. In the industrial era the wall was a gift: it told you where you stood. When the shift ended, your body was your own. The production process of the twenty-first century needs no brick or iron; it needs neurons and attention and the flickering of ideas at three in the morning. Berardi calls this order
semiocapitalism—the phase of capitalism in which value is produced not by transforming raw materials into goods but by generating, processing, and circulating signs: code, content, data, narrative, and meaning. In semiocapitalism the worker sells not her body or her time but her
soul—the full complex of cognitive, emotional, and creative capacities