Franco “Bifo” Berardi

In the [YOU] on AI Field Guide

The cycle that began with [YOU] on AI encounters Berardi as its most uncomfortable interlocutor. Where the cycle celebrates the twenty-fold productivity multiplier, Berardi asks where the extracted value goes: the builder who previously produced one unit of value per hour now produces twenty, but if she is salaried, her compensation has not changed. The twenty-fold gain flows to whoever owns the amplification infrastructure. Where the cycle documents the joy of building—the creative flow, the sense of partnership with the machine, the exhilaration of shipping something extraordinary—Berardi insists that the joy is real and the exploitation is also real, and that the coextension of the two is semiocapitalism’s most elegant achievement.

Berardi’s concept of the general intellect—his reading of Marx’s 1858 fragment—provides the cycle with its most precise account of what AI training data actually is. The language models that power the AI transition were trained on the aggregate cognitive output of billions of human minds: every scientific paper, every novel, every forum post, every code repository. This is the general intellect in crystallized form, scraped, processed, and embedded in a mathematical structure that reproduces the patterns of human thought without any human’s ongoing participation. The programmer whose code is in the training data has contributed to the machine that will make her unnecessary. The exploitation has a specific structure: the general intellect was produced collectively and has been captured privately, converted from a public resource into corporate infrastructure. The builder who pays Anthropic a subscription fee to access a tool built partly from her own contributions is purchasing access to her own collective knowledge.

The cycle’s concept of cognitive dams—the deliberate structures that redirect the river of productivity into sustainable channels—engages directly with Berardi’s analysis of the burnout factory. He would regard the dam as necessary and insufficient: necessary because the depletion is real and requires genuine interruption, insufficient because a dam that keeps the worker functioning at maximum sustainable intensity without challenging the conditions of extraction is not a remedy but a maintenance program. The honest conversation between the cycle and Berardi is a conversation about whether building better dams is the right goal, or whether the river itself needs to change course.

Berardi’s concept of conjunctive versus connective communication—the structural distinction between communication that connects bodies and minds through shared embodied presence and communication that routes tokens through digital channels—supplies the cycle with its account of why the semiosphere’s acceleration produces a specific cognitive pathology. The builder who is maximally connected and minimally conjunctive is in the condition Berardi predicted: rich in information, impoverished in meaning, capable of producing signs at extraordinary speed, and gradually losing the capacity for the embodied, slow, ambiguous communication through which meaning—as opposed to information—is actually generated.

Origin

Berardi came of age in the Italian Autonomia movement, the political tradition that extended Marx’s analysis of factory labor to encompass every form of social activity that capitalism had learned to make productive. The Autonomists recognized, earlier than most Marxists, that capitalism was not confined to the factory: it was colonizing communication, affect, creativity, and sexuality—every dimension of human life that could be converted into value. Berardi co-founded Radio Alice in Bologna in 1976, one of the landmarks of the Italian free radio movement, which embodied the Autonomist conviction that media was a site of political struggle as important as the factory floor. After the collapse of Autonomia and his flight from Italy (he spent time in Paris, associated with Felix Guattari’s circle), he returned to Italy and developed the theoretical framework that would eventually be named semiocapitalism.

The major works are The Soul at Work (2009), which traced the transition from industrial labor through cognitive labor to the full colonization of the soul; After the Future (2011), which analyzed the collapse of the progressive temporal horizon that futurist optimism had sustained; and Futurability (2017), which attempted to recover an alternative future through the concept of the possible. His 2023 essay “Who Wrote This Text? Me or Franco Berardi?”, written in direct response to ChatGPT, and his 2023 essay “Unheimlich,” which described the cognitive automaton as “rising on the ruins” of human mental capacity, are the most direct engagements with the AI transition he has produced. His 2025 admission that he was unable to answer the question of whether AI threatens creative workers is, in its honesty, more valuable than the confident positions he has been urged to adopt.

Key Ideas

Semiocapitalism. The phase of capitalism in which value is produced by the generation and circulation of signs. The semiotic worker does not manufacture objects but meaning—code, content, narrative, data—and the production requires her creative, cognitive, and emotional capacities: her soul. Semiocapitalism is not a departure from capitalism’s logic but its culmination: each phase has colonized a previously private dimension of existence, from the body through attention to the soul.

The Soul at Work. The condition in which the labor process has penetrated the deepest dimensions of human inwardness. The soul at work is not the soul at play: it is harnessed, productive, fulfilled, and being quietly consumed by the process that fulfills it. The exploitation is invisible because the work is creative, the product feels personal, and the fulfillment is genuine. Semiocapitalism’s achievement is making exploitation and self-expression coextensive.

The General Intellect, Captured. Marx’s 1858 prophecy—that the accumulated knowledge of the species would become the primary productive force—has come true, but rather than liberating workers it has been captured: embedded in corporate-owned AI systems that reproduce its patterns without the original producers’ participation or compensation. The general intellect was produced collectively; the tool is owned privately; the builder must pay to access her own collective knowledge.

The Attention Economy’s Inner Logic. The pathology of the AI age is not distraction but hyperfocus: the total absorption of attention in productive activity to the exclusion of everything else. Where distraction at least maintains contact with the world outside the screen, the builder in hyperfocus has contracted the world to the screen and the conversation with the tool. The contraction is experienced not as loss but as flow—and semiotic overload produces a cognitive fragmentation that flow cannot repair.

Depression as Political Symptom. The epidemic of burnout and depression among knowledge workers is not a failure of individual character but a structural consequence of an economic system that demands unlimited creative output from organisms with finite creative resources. Depression, in Berardi’s framework, is the psyche performing the only act of resistance available to it: shutting down. The appropriate response is not wellness programs but political analysis of why unlimited output is being demanded.