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I never met Aaron Swartz, but he was my brother.

Written by Franco Berardi Bifo, 28.01.2013
I never met Aaron Swartz, but he was my brother, although much younger than me.
I cannot interpret his suicide. Suicide is never the effect of a single cause, and it is always impossible to “explain” death.
Nevertheless.
Nevertheless I know something about the causes that pushed Aaron to do what he did.
He was a computer programmer, creator and developer of the web feed format RSS, and a writer, an activist and also a Harvard researcher. Recently he played a prominent role in the SOPA campaign (Stop online piracy act) which had a successful outcome.
Aaron was known – by his friends and by FBI as well - for a history of downloading massive data sets, both to use in research and to release public domain documents from behind paywalls.
In 2008, Swartz downloaded, and released, approximately 20% of the Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) database of United States federal court documents managed by the Administrative Office of the United States Courts.
According to federal authorities, over the course of a few weeks in late 2010 and early 2011 Swartz, having a JSTOR personal account as a research fellow at Harvard University, downloaded a large number of academic journal articles via JSTOR.

Semio-capital and the problem of solidarity

Written by Franco Berardi Bifo, 12.12.2012
This text is based on a panel talk (together with Nina Power) by Bifo during the event ‘We Have Our Own Concept of Time and Motion’, organised by Auto Italia in collaboration with Federico Campagna, Huw Lemmey, Michael Oswell and Charlie Woolley in August 2011.
 
I beg your pardon for the frantic way of my exposition, but the problem is that the object of my reflections is frantic. We are doing so many things without really understanding what is the framework of our actions. I do not pretend to clarify this framework or our understanding of it; I don’t even pretend to come to some conclusions in this short time. But I will try to say something about the coming problem; the coming collapse; the coming insurrection.
 

Europe's Agony

Written by Franco Berardi Bifo, 01.11.2012
The form is swallowing the content.
Capital as a form is no more able to hold together the entropic force of global society, but so far the agony of capitalism is not coinciding with the emergence of autonomous forms of society.  Biopolitical innervations of capital in the collective mind and the body are producing in fact a spasm paralyzing the process of subjectivation.
The black hole of financial abstraction is swallowing and destroying the product of two centuries of development and civilization, and is aggressing its content: the productive potency of the general intellect. The social civilization, created during the Modern age is invested and corroded by the metastases of the financial cancer.
How can the content get free from the form? This is the question that we should answer, while, as you can see, the building of civilization is crumbling.
 

Reassessing Recomposition: 40 Years After the Publication of Anti-Oedipus

Written by Franco Berardi Bifo, 12.03.2012
1. Post-Oedipal
 
The process of subjectivation is based on conditions that have dramatically changed in the forty years since the publication of Deleuze and Guttari’s Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Reading that book was a defining moment in my intellectual and political experience, in the first years of the 19070s, when students and workers were fighting and organizing spaces of autonomy and separation from capitalist exploitation. Forty years after the publication of that book the landscape has changed so deeply that very concept of desire has to be re-thought, as it is marking the field of subjectivation in a very different way.
 
The proliferation of sources of enunciation in this age of the networks, the globalization of the economy and the media, was predicted and in a sense pre-conceptualized Deleuze and Guattari, but they could not know in advance the effects that global capitalism has produced on the unconscious and the dynamics of desire. As production, media and daily life have been subsumed into the sphere of semiocapital we need to reconsider the unconscious from this transformed position.
 
My starting question is thus: what is capitalism and what is schizophrenia after the psychosocial landscape has been reshaped by the tendencies described by Deleuze and Guattari?
 

The Right to Insolvency and the Disentanglement of the General Intellect's Potency

Written by Franco Berardi Bifo, 05.12.2011
Austerity in Europe
 
"The German worker does not want to pay the Greek fisherman's bills," the fanatics of economic fundamentalism are saying, while pitting workers against workers and leading Europe to the brink of civil war.
 
The entity that is "Europe" was conceived in the aftermath of the Second World War as a project to overcome modern nationalism and create a non-identitarian union based on principles of humanism, enlightenment, and social justice. What is left of this original project, after the recent financial collapse that has stormed the American economy and jeopardized the Eurozone? Since the beginning of the European Union, the constitutional profile of the European entity has been weakly defined, such that economic goals of prosperity and monetarist financial constraints have taken the place of a constitution. In the 1990s, the Maastricht Treaty marked a turning point in this process. It sanctioned the constitutionalization of monetarist rule and its economic implications: a decrease in social spending, cuts in labor costs and an increase in competition and productivity. The effects of a narrow application of the Maastricht rules became evident in 2010: overwhelming Greece and Ireland and endangering other countries, the financial crisis exposed the contradictions between the desires for economic growth, social stability, and monetarist rigidity. In this situation, the Maastricht rules have been shown to be dangerous, and the overall conception of the EU, based on the centrality of economic competition, has revealed its frailty.
 
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