CONCEPT
Semiocapitalism
Berardi's name for the phase of capitalism in which the production and circulation of signs becomes the primary source of economic value — and in which the worker's mind, not body, is the factory.
Semiocapitalism designates the historical mutation by which capitalism shifted from extracting value from physical labor to extracting it from semiotic labor — the production of code, text, images, narratives, data, and every form of sign-work that constitutes cognitive and communicative life. Berardi developed the concept across four decades of work following the collapse of the Italian Autonomia movement, drawing on Guattari's analysis of capitalist subjectivity and the Operaist tradition's attention to real labor conditions. The term is diagnostic rather than descriptive: it names not merely an economy that involves communication, but an economy in which the capture of attention, creativity, and meaning-making has become the central mechanism of value extraction. In the AI moment, semiocapitalism reaches its most advanced form — machines that capture the general intellect itself and rent it back to the workers who produced it.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The conceptual origin lies in Berardi's engagement with Guattari during the 1970s, when the Italian radical left