Brian Kuan Wood (left) and Franco “Bifo” Berardi at Miss Read: The Berlin Art Book Festival, June 13, 2025
The following is an edited transcript of a conversation that took place between Franco “Bifo” Berardi and Brian Kuan Wood celebrating the release of Berardi’s Chaos and the Automaton (e-flux and University of Minnesota Press, 2025) at Miss Read: The Berlin Art Book Festival on June 13, 2025.
Brian Kuan Wood: “I know that it is dangerous to write in simultaneity with events that cannot be precisely foreseen, that can only be vaguely intuited, but the only way to imagine something about the becoming of the psycho-sphere is to run ahead of the dynamics of the disaster.” This quote is from “The American Abyss,” which we published in the September 2020 issue of e-flux journal. Today we seem to be surrounded by multiple disasters and a climate of extreme hostility. Can you share some strategies for this kind of vanguardist mode of thinking and writing? Or to ask the question more generally: How are you? How have you been?
Bifo: I’m not in great shape, actually. But who cares about me? I am not an interesting subject. I may be perhaps a symptomatic subject. My unusual diseases are prophetic insights.
First of all, I remember that my collaboration with e-flux started in 2010. I received a message from Anton Vidokle, who asked me to write a text for the journal. I did not know the journal at that time, but Anton’s message was so kind that I decided to say yes. And I wrote a text titled “Cognitarian Subjectivation,” which was published in e-flux journal number 20, in November 2010. Then I came to befriend the e-fluxers, and I realized something of their origins and their actions. Over the years I’ve been writing for many magazines around the world, but e-flux was special: a link between aesthetics and social movements. Artists, poets, the harbingers of a possible Internationale of our time: the Internationale of cognitive workers.
That was fifteen years ago. I was already an old person, sixty years old. Not so old, but old enough. Nevertheless in those years I still believed in the possibility of an alliance, a marriage between the poet and the engineer. This was my idea, my intuition, my hope, if I may say. Then came the years of Occupy, the Acampada in Spain, Tahrir Square in Egypt, the Arab Spring … It was possible again to imagine a future for the autonomy of the collective mind, outside of corporate governance. But this window of possibility did not last. The Arab spring devolved into a nightmare. I realized that my previous intuition had been wrong. I discovered that, like Auden said: poetry makes nothing happen.
On a symbolic level, Occupy was an attempt by the poet to heal the soul of the engineer. This attempt failed. Poetry doesn’t have the power to heal the suffering soul of the engineer. You know, the engineer is a deeply suffering person. I spent many years working with engineers. Sometimes they are funny people, sometimes interesting people, but they suffer because of the separation between their mathematical minds and their living bodies. But I had the idea that the engineer could be healed by poetry. You engineers will be healed by me the poet, and together we will change the world. We have changed nothing. The world itself has changed for the worse.
Now we know that the poet, as usual, does nothing, while the engineer builds the horrible kingdom that Günther Anders imagined sixty years ago, when he said that Hitler’s Reich had only been an experiment, and that the real Reich will come when Nazism marries with technology. We are now at this point: the kingdom of eternal Nazism. Nazism and technology together are destroying any possible imagination of a human future. In 1977 Sid Vicious screamed that the future is dead. Now it is true.
The Automaton
BKW: In your essay “General Intellect and the Termination Machine,” you describe AI in combination with techno-financial and military systems as giving birth to an “ungovernable automaton.” Can you tell us about the automaton in the title of your book Chaos and the Automaton?
Bifo: The idea of a marriage between the poet and the engineer was not so new. It was an old idea, proposed by Marx in his important text “The Fragment on Machines”: technology can become a tool for liberation. Technology is nothing in itself. It is what our culture, our imagination, our sensibility manages to do with it. Occupy was a massive experience, and it was an experience that involved poets and engineers. But it did not last, and the poet and the engineer went two different ways.
What is the automaton? I see the automaton as a cognitive automaton, as the other face of chaos. Before answering the question “What is the cognitive automaton?” we must answer the question “What is chaos?” Chaos is not an discrete entity that could be located somewhere in the world. Chaos is a relation, it is the relation between the speed of our brain processes and the speed of the surrounding environment, particularly the information environment, the infosphere. Chaos consists of an acceleration of the rhythm of the infosphere. This acceleration jeopardizes mental activity: the human mind is unable to process in a conscious way the hyper-stimulation it receives.
The automaton is the replacement of our intelligence by automatisms, protocols, and algorithms—procedures that we cannot avoid if we want to be able to do what we have to do. If we want to survive we have to accept the automatisms that make survival possible. This is the automaton. We are heading towards the total automation of the relation between natural dementia and artificial intelligence. Human history no longer has a sense. It’s just the demented residuum of the automated universe of death.
Fascism as Senile Dementia
BKW: In the interview with Andreas Petrossiants that opens the book, you pinpoint how political impotence can fuel “mass humiliation and reactionary rage, pushing the social brain into a whirlwind of madness: racism, nationalism, fascism, expressions of psychopathologies that were no longer marginal or fringe.” Is this not already familiar to us as the formula for fascism? Or is today’s techno-financial machine even more sophisticated—more efficient yet also more volatile?
Bifo: We use the word “fascism” because of our lack of imagination. We have not been able to invent a better term to define … what? The return of racism, the return of genocide in world history, and the untrammeled destruction of human sensibility by the brutalism of power. In Death’s End, a novel by Chinese science-fiction writer Liu Cixin, the bad guy of the story, Thomas Wade, utters a sentence that I cannot forget: “If we lose our human nature, we lose much, but if we lose our bestial nature, we lose everything.”
It is crystal clear in the history of our time: only ferocity can give us the possibility of survive. How can we explain that the world is watching the systematic destruction of humanity by a state like Israel? How can we accept the idea that a national state that was created outside of international law is now destroying any possibility of trusting in law, of trusting in reason. How can we accept this negation of humanity that is called Israel?
We accept this because we know that humanity means nothing. Humanity means nothing, because in 1943 when the Nazis were arresting and deporting Jewish people, humanity was not there. Humanity was absent in Auschwitz. It was hidden, secret, invisible. Humanity is absent in Gaza, and this is perfectly documented; this absence is visible on our screens every day.
Some people try to reach Gaza. The Freedom Flotilla tried to bring food to people who were being starved by Itamar Ben-Gvir; but as you know they were arrested, rejected, ridiculed. This is fascism. I know something about fascism, not only because I am an Italian, and my father was a prisoner of the fascists. I listened to my father tell me a million times that I was lucky because my generation would never see war, it would never see fascism. My father was wrong, because I am experiencing something that is worse than fascism.
Fascism was a phenomenon of young people who wanted to expand, to colonize, to conquer, to win, to aggress … Now there are no young people. They do not exist anymore. The majority of the white Western population—can I use this horrible word that means nothing but is linked to a mythology of supremacy?—yes, the white race, this horrible nonexistent thing, is made up of old demented people. There are many people who were born twenty years ago but are not young. A friend of mine, the young writer Christian Nirvana Damato, explained that mental age is determined by the amount of information you receive over time. So I was young when I had received only a small amount of information, of info-stimulation. I then received more and more, and I have grown old. My mind is old because it has experienced much.
Now when you are three years old you spend your days in front of a cell phone. Three-year-old babies are already old. Psychiatrists say that young people are depressed. I don’t think so. Depression does not explain the reality of young people’s brains. It is rather an accelerated senility that is taking over the world, particularly the Western world. So is this fascism? No. This is senile dementia, a widespread dementia. This is no better than fascism. Senile dementia is very bad when it is linked to an obsession with supremacy, to the delirium of the eternity of money. Senile dementia is dangerous when it is linked to the hyper-potency of weapons.
Remember Samson: may Samson die with all the Philistines. In modern terms, Philistines are Palestinians.
Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World
BKW: Chaos and the Automaton draws on many examples from films—from Pasolini to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey to the 2011 film Take Shelter, my personal favorite of your examples. Take Shelter is about the blurry line between madness and the actual premonition of a catastrophic event. It portrays a cosmic unity between intuition and the biosphere, but expressed in the negative. To what extent do films serve as examples or as inspiration for your thought?
Bifo: This question gives me the possibility of saying something about my current cultural hero: Radu Jude, a movie director who lives and works in Bucharest. He made the most beautiful, the most intelligent film about our times. The title of the movie is Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World.
Ten years ago I was invited by a group of Romanian artists to give a talk at the Modern Art Gallery, built in the back of the Ceausescu building in Bucharest. There’s a huge hall with white marble all around, and in the hall the group of artists that invited me unfurled an enormous banner: NO HOPE… I smiled. One of the makers of the banner told me: You know, we experienced Ceausescu communism, then we experienced the neoliberal nightmare. So comrade Bifo, if you’ve come here to propose a new hope, please go back to Bologna immediately.
This was my first contact with Romanian intellectuals. They know something we don’t: only despair can help us understand the truth. Jude’s film is a declaration of poetics, based on an awareness of the irreversible sordidness of life in the age of absolute capitalism. Jude suggests that we should be more ironic about the ongoing extinction of humankind. Becoming nothing is a good alternative to eternal sordidness. Nonhuman humans are sordid, sinister, horrible. Why should we be afraid of the obliteration of the human race?
The movie tells the story of Angela, a woman who drives around Bucharest all day interviewing injured workers. She is trying to cast someone for a video for some multinational corporation, and the lucky worker will receive five hundred euros. At one point, while driving through heavy traffic to yet another interview, she realizes that life is horrible. She decides that when she writes posts on her blog, she will adopt the persona of a repugnant man. She starts to use horrible words, unspeakable blasphemies … I fuck you, fucking dirty asshole, etc. A sort of glossolalia. She goes deep into her consciousness, and accepts that she cannot expect too much from the end of the world.
I still find that poets, moviemakers, and artists in general have the ability to tell the truth. Once upon a time I believed that poets could improve the world, by uniting with the engineer. Now I know that engineers are poor people. They are unable to understand poetry, to understand life. I beg the pardon of the engineers who are in this room, but I know that if they are here, they are a different kind of engineer. The rest of the engineers, the majority of them, are working for Elon Musk. What more can I tell you?
The Destruction of Solidarity
BKW: You are known as a main figure in the Italian operaismo and autonomia movements, with an affirmative approach to the possibilities of technology and automation for reducing labor time. But you are very clear that the revolutionary horizons of the twenty-first century are “not the same as those of the twentieth,” when “one could envision emancipation from capitalist exploitation and a way out from the colonial oppression that most people in the world lived under.” A necessary link to an egalitarian culture has been destroyed by neoliberalism, but do you see any forms of egalitarian culture reemerging from the extreme pressures of colonial oppression, perhaps even in unexpected forms of technical or social connectivity?
Bifo: I want to make a declaration now: this is the last time I will speak in public. If you ask me why, I will answer that every time I speak, I am obliged to choose: either I say something hopeful, I see a possibility of escaping hell … or else I tell the truth. I don’t like to be trapped in this alternative, but it is what it is. Now I tell the truth.
Yes, I have been for many years a militant in workers’ groups. What was the core idea of my militancy? It was that technology and solidarity could find common ground. But this cannot happen without the conscious collaboration of people who share the same interests—not the same ideals, I don’t care about ideals, I care about interests. The working class was essentially a project of solidarity that enabled a transformation of machines together with scientists and engineers.
The crucial point back then was solidarity: the ability of people to share consciously the same interests. The main effect of neoliberal dictatorship, of absolute capitalism, is the destruction not only of solidarity but of the very possibility of solidarity. Let’s think about the relation between working-class and migrant people. This is the ground where the reactionary movement has been successful: the counterposing of workers and migrants.
Some days ago in Italy we voted in a referendum proposed by the unions. The referendum was based on four points concerning an improvement in labor conditions, and the final point referred to the possibility of migrants obtaining citizenship. Only 30 percent of citizens went to vote, so the referendum failed. But the most interesting (and depressing) thing is that 40 percent of the people who went to vote supported better conditions for Italian laborers, but refused to support better conditions for migrants.
The general framework of the current global disintegration is a sort of reckoning with five hundred years of colonialism. Western colonialist are defending at any cost the privileges accumulated in the past five hundred years. But they are babbling and yelling from within a fog of dementia. The fragmentation of labor, and the contradiction between workers and migrants, have made it impossible to rebuild solidarity. This is what I have learned from present experience.
Slavery is becoming the main form of relation between labor and capital, worldwide.
Labor in precarious times is turning into slavery. Look at seasonal workers in Southern Italy or Southern Spain: migrant laborers who work twelve hours a day under the sun for miserable salaries. Can we fight against slavery without solidarity? I don’t think so.
Desertion as Refusal
BKW: Finally, if we are to “run ahead of the dynamics of the disaster,” what do you suggest? In your conversation with Andreas you ask a question that is at the core of this book: “Is it possible to create islands of egalitarian, collective, joyous life in this hell?” And you suggest that the answer might be yes! Can you elaborate? You often speak of poetry in terms of its restorative function, but is it sufficient against the brutality of techno-financial and military systems?
Bifo: What I propose is not a political strategy. I’m not a political leader. My job is different: I am an interpreter of maladies. I try to interpret what is already happening. So what is happening? What is the mega trend of our century? Look at what’s happening with the birthrate, particularly in Europe. There is a way out. I call it desertion. I call it: quit everything.
The new generation is choosing desertion as a refusal to be a generation that is responsible for creating victims of the climate collapse, of the coming nuclear war, victims of slavery, of brutality. They are refusing to generate a future that is going to be a nightmare. This is a way out. Desertion from war, from slavery, from consumption, and desertion from procreation. Why should we prefer the eternal survival of humankind when it is going to be an eternity of suffering, humiliation, and pain?
At a certain point in Octavia Butler’s novel The Parable of the Sower, Lauren explains her understanding of empathy: feeling the suffering of others and also the pleasure of others. But these days there is not much pleasure around. There is an increasing amount of suffering everywhere. Why not stop offering victims to the omnipotent Moloch? Suspending hell is not a political strategy, it is rather an interpretation of what is already happening. The new generation, the generation that has learned more words from a machine than from a human voice, the generation that is constantly witnessing brutality and war, is consciously or unconsciously deciding that reproductive sexuality has gone out of fashion.
