Our thesis: Neoliberalism has fundamentally changed our interactions with the material

world. Semiocapitalism is ingrained in our society and has created an oversaturation of

information. The affirmative’s fantasy of political change just reentrenches semiocap by
ignoring how future orientations are always rooted in modern capitalism. Berardi:
By the end of the decade, notwithstanding the victory of Barack Obama in the United States, the
prospect was gloomy. Corporate capitalism and neoliberalism have produced lasting damage in
the material structures of the world and in the social, cultural, and nervous systems of
humankind. In the century's last decade, a new movement emerged and grew fast and wide,
questioning everywhere the power of capitalist corporations. I use the word "movement" to
describe a collective displacing of bodies and minds, a changing of consciousness, habits,
expectations. Movement means conscious change, change accompanied by collective
consciousness and collective elaboration, and struggle. Conscious. Collective. Change. This is
the meaning of "movement." From Seattle 1999 to Genoa 2001 a movement tried to stop the
capitalist devastation of the very conditions of civilized life. These were the stakes, no more, no
less. Activists around the world had a simple message: if we don't stop the machine of
exploitation, debt, and compulsory consumption, human cohabitation on the planet will become
dismal, or impossible. Well, ten years after Seattle, in the wake of the 2009 Copenhagen summit
failure, we can state that those people were speaking the truth. The global movement against
capitalist globalization reached an impressive range and pervasiveness, but it was never able to
change the daily life of society. It remained an ethical movement, not a social transformer. It
could not create a process of social recomposition, it could not produce an effect of social
subjectivation. Those people were silenced by President Bush, after the huge demonstrations of
February 1 5, 2003, when many millions of people worldwide gathered in the streets against the
war in Iraq. The absence of movement is visible today, at the end of the zero zero decade: the
absence of an active culture, the lack of a public sphere, the void of collective imagination, palsy
of the process of subjectivation. The path to a conscious collective subject seems obstructed.
What now? A conscious collective change seems impossible at the level of daily life. Yes, I
know, change is happening everyday, at a pace that we have never experienced before. What is
the election of a black President in the United States if not change? But change is not happening
in the sphere of social consciousness. Change happens in the spectacular sphere of politics, not in
daily life-and the relationship between politics and daily life has become so tenuous, so weak,
that sometimes I think that, whatever happens in politics, life will not change. The fantastic
collapse of the economy is certainly going to change things in daily life: you can bet on it. But is
this change consciously elaborated? Is this connected with some conscious collective action? It
isn't. This is why neoliberal fanaticism, notwithstanding its failure, is surviving and driving the
agenda of the powers of the world. The so-called counter globalization movement, born in
Seattle at the close of the century, has been a collective conscious actor, a movement of
unprecedented strength and breadth. But, I repeat, it has changed nothing in the daily life of the
masses; it hasn't changed the relationship between wage labor and capitalist enterprise; it hasn't
changed daily relationships among precarious workers; it hasn't changed the lived conditions of
migrants. It hasn't created solidarity between people in the factories, in the schools, in the cities.
Neoliberal politics have failed, but social autonomy hasn't emerged. The ethical consciousness of
the insanity of neoliberal politics spread everywhere, but it did not shape affective and social
relations between people. The movement remains an expression of ethical protest. It has,
nonetheless, produced effects. The neoliberal ideology that was once accepted as the word of
God, as a natural and indisputable truth, started to be questioned and widely denounced in the
days following the Seattle riots. But the ethical demonstrations did not change the reality of
social domination. Global corporations did not slow the exploitation of labor or the massive
destruction of the planet's environment. Warmongers did not stop organizing and launching
deadly attacks against civilian populations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, and many other parts
of the world. Why? Why did the largest demonstration in human history, the antiwar Global
Action that the movement launched on February 15, 2003, fail to stop the bombing of Baghdad?
Why was conscious collective action, although massive and global, unable to change things?
This is the question I've been trying to answer for the last ten years. This is the question that I am
trying to answer in this book. I'll say here, in shore, that the answer is not to be found in the
political strategy of the struggle, but in the structural weakness of the social fabric. During the
twentieth century, social struggle could change things in a collective and conscious way because
industrial workers could maintain solidarity and unity in daily life, and so could fight and win.
Autonomy was the condition of victory, because autonomy means the ability to create social
solidarity in daily life, and the ability to self-organize outside the rules of labor and exploitation.
Autonomous community was the condition of political strength. When social recomposition is
possible, so is collective conscious change. In social history we can speak of recomposition when
the forces of labor create common cultural flows and a common ground of sensibility, so that
they become a collective actor, sharing the same questions and sometimes the same answers. In
conditions of social recomposition, social autonomy from capital becomes possible. Autonomy is
the possibility of meeting the power of capital, with counterpower in daily life, in factories,
neighborhoods, homes, in the affective relationships between people. That seems to be over. The
organization of labor has been fragmented by the new technology, and workers' solidarity has
been broken at its roots. The labor market has been globalized, but the political organization of
the workers has not. The infosphere has dramatically changed and accelerated, and this is
jeopardizing the very possibility of communication, empathy, and solidarity.
(Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi is a writer and theorist based in Bologna. His work revolves mainly
around the aesthetics of the contemporary psychosphere. His latest books include Futurability,
Phenomenology of the End, and The Soul at Work. In the 1970s he was one of the founders of
the pirate radio station Radio Alice, the magazine A/traverso and of the political movement
Autonomia, “After the Future”, https://libcom.org/files/AfterFuture.pdf) o

Their lustful extrapolation of catastrophe is a psychological blindfold used to serve the

purposes of governmentality and ignore the disaster of the everyday. Unable to ever be
realized, Armageddon becomes simulated in order to summon a specific solution already
decided in advance, creating a desire for real disaster as a relief from continually
constructed anxiety—semiocapitalism captures this desire and creates exhaustion The
Invisible Committee 16:
The Invisible Committee is a collective and anonymous pen name, it is believed to be a group of
French insurrectionist anarcho-communists. Its writing discusses the current epoch of
insurrectionist movements around the world in relation to theory, movements, capital,
governments, and other topics. “To Our Friends” Semiotext(e), Intervention Series, No. 18, pg
35-37.
One shouldn’t underestimate the craving for apocalypse, the lust for Armageddon that permeates
the epoch. Its particular existential pornography involves ogling prefigurative documentaries
showing clouds of computer-animated grasshoppers descending on the Bordeaux vineyards in
2075, juxtaposed with “climate migrants” storming the southern shores of Europe—the same
migrants that Frontex is already making a point of decimating. Nothing is older than the end of
the world. The apocalyptic passion has always been favored by the powerless since earliest
antiquity. What is new in our epoch is that the apocalyptic has been totally absorbed by capital,
and placed in its service. The horizon of catastrophe is what we are currently being governed by.
Now, if there is one thing destined to remain unfulfilled, it’s the apocalyptic prophecy, be it
economic, climatic, terrorist, or nuclear. It is pronounced only in order to summon the means of
averting it, which is to say, most often, the necessity of government. No organization, whether
political or religious, has ever declared itself defeated because the facts contradicted its
prophecies. Because the purpose of prophecy is never to be right about the future, but to act upon
the present: to impose a waiting mode, passivity, submission, here and now. Not only is there no
catastrophe to come other than the one that’s already here, it’s evident that most actual disasters
offer an escape from our daily disaster. Many examples attest to the relief from existential
apocalypse that real disaster brings, from the earthquake that struck San Francisco in 1906 to
Hurricane Sandy that devastated New York in 2012. One generally assumes that the relations
between people in an emergency situation reveal their deep and eternal bestiality. With every
destructive earthquake, every economic crash and every “terrorist attack,” one desires to see a
confirmation of the old chimera of the state of nature and its train of uncontrollable violent acts.
When the thin dikes of civilization give way, one would like for the “vile core of man” that
obsessed Pascal to show itself, that “human nature” with its evil passions—envious, brutal, blind
and despicable— which has served the holders of power as an argument at least since
Thucydides. Unfortunately the fantasy has been disconfirmed by most of the historically known
disasters. The disappearance of a civilization generally doesn’t take the form of a chaotic war of
all against all. In a situation of extreme catastrophe, that hostile discourse only serves to justify
the priority given to the defense of property against looting, by the police, the army or, for lack
of anything better, byvigilante militias formed for the occasion. It can also serve to cover
misappropriations by the authorities themselves, like those of the Italian Civil Protection
Department after the Aquila earthquake. On the contrary, the decomposition of this world, taken
on as such, creates openings for other ways of living, including in the middle of an “emergency
situation.” Consider the inhabitants of Mexico City in 1985, who, among the ruins of their
neighborhoods struck by a deadly quake, reinvented the revolutionary carnival and the figure of
the superhero serving the people—in the form of a legendary wrestler, Super Barrio. In the
euphoria of regaining control of their urban existence, they conflated the collapse of buildings
with a breakdown of the political system, releasing the life of the city from the grip of
government as much as possible and starting to rebuild their destroyed dwellings. An
enthusiastic resident of Halifax said something similar when he declared after the hurricane of
2003: “Everybody woke up the next morning and everything was different. There was no
electricity, all the stores were closed, no one had access to media. The consequence was that
everyone poured out into the street to bear witness. Not quite a street party, but everyone out at
once—it was a happy feeling to see everybody even though we didn’t know each other.” The
same as with those miniature communities formed spontaneously in New Orleans in the days
after Katrina, faced with the contempt of the public authorities and the paranoia of the security
agencies, communities that organized daily to feed and clothe themselves and attend to each
other’s needs, even if this required looting a store or two.
The aff’s use of fiat is an instance of mythological progress- the notion of a better future
was fabricated by capitalism to expand the economy and knowledge but now in the age of
semiocapitalism nothing is changed besides our infiltrated psyche Berardi:
The rise of the myth of the future is rooted in modern capitalism, in the experience of expansion
of the economy and knowledge. The idea that the future will be better than the present is not a
natural idea, but the imaginary effect of the peculiarity of the bourgeois production model. Since
its beginning, since the discovery of the new continent and the rewriting of the maps of the
world, modernity has been defined by an amplification of the very limits of the world, and the
peculiarity of capitalist economy resides exactly in the accumulation of the surplus value that
results in the constant enhancement of the spheres of material goods and knowledge. In the
second part of the nineteenth century, and in the first part of the twentieth, the myth of the future
reached its peak, becoming something more than an implicit belief: it was a true faith, based on
the concept of "progress," the ideological translation of the reality of economic growth. Political
action was reframed in the light of this faith in a progressive future. Liberalism and social
democracy, nationalism and communism, and anarchism itself, all the different families of
modern political theory share a common certainty: notwithstanding the darkness of the present,
the future will be bright. In this book I will try to develop the idea that the future is over. As you
know, this isn't a new idea. Born with punk, the slow cancellation of the future got underway in
the 1970s and 1980s. Now those bizarre predictions have become true. The idea that the future
has disappeared is, of course, rather whimsical-since, as I write these lines, the future hasn't
stopped unfolding. But when I say "future," I am not referring to the direction of time. I am
thinking, rather, of the psychological perception, which emerged in the cultural situation of
progressive modernity, the cultural expectations that were fabricated during the long period of
modern civilization, reaching a peak in the years after the Second World War. Those
expectations were shaped in the conceptual frameworks of an ever progressing development,
albeit through different methodologies: the HegeloMarxist mythology of Aujhebung and
founding of the new totality of Communism; the bourgeois mythology of a linear development of
welfare and democracy; the technocratic mythology of the all-encompassing power of scientific
knowledge; and so on.
(Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi is a writer and theorist based in Bologna. His work revolves mainly
around the aesthetics of the contemporary psychosphere. His latest books include Futurability,
Phenomenology of the End, and The Soul at Work. In the 1970s he was one of the founders of
the pirate radio station Radio Alice, the magazine A/traverso and of the political movement
Autonomia, “After the Future”, https://libcom.org/files/AfterFuture.pdf)

This oversaturation of information disidentifies people and distances them from themselves
– resulting in mental exhaustion and apathy. Thus, the ROTB is to endorse the debater
who better rejects semiocapitalism Berardi:
Technological transformations have displaced the focus from the sphere of the production of
material goods towards the sphere of semiotic goods. With this, semio-kapital becomes the
dominant form of the economy. The accelerated creation of surplus value depends on the
acceleration of the info-sphere. The digitalization of the info-sphere opens the way for this kind
of acceleration. Signs are produced and circulated at a growing speed but the human terminal of
the system (the embodied mind) is put under growing pressure and finally cracks under it. I think
that the current economic crisis has something to do with this imbalance in the field of semio-
production and the field of semio- demand. This imbalance in the relationship between the
supply of semiotic goods and the socially available time of attention is the core of the economic
crisis as well as the core of the intellectual and the political crises that we are living through now.
Semiocapital is in a crisis of overproduction, but the form of this crisis is not only economic, but
also psychopathic. Semiocapital, in fact, is not about the production of material goods, but about
the production of psychic stimulation. The mental environment is saturated by signs that create a
sort of continuous excitation, a permanent electrocution, which leads the individual, as well as
the collective mind, to a state of collapse. The problem of panic is generally connected with the
management of time. But we can also see a spatial side to panic. During the past centuries, the
building of the modern urban environment used to be dependent on the rationalist plan of the
political city. The economic dictatorship of the last few decades has accelerated the urban
expansion. The interaction between cyber- spatial sprawl and urban physical environment has
destroyed the rational organization of city space. In the intersection of information and urban
space we see the proliferation of a chaotic sprawl following no rule, no plan, dictated by the sole
logic of economic interest. Urban panic is caused by the perception of this sprawl and this
proliferation of metropolitan experience. Proliferation of spatial lines of flight. The metropolis is
a surface of complexity in the territorial domain. The social organism is unable to process the
overwhelmingly complex experience of metropolitan chaos. The proliferation of lines of
communication has created a new kind of chaotic perception. 73 In the summer of 2001, Fury, a
novel by Salman Rushdie, was published. On the cover, the Empire State building is hit by a bolt
of lightning. Not long after the release of the book from the printers that cover looked like a
frightful premonition. But this premonition was not just on the cover for the novel describes (or
rather evokes) the psychic collapse of the western metropolis. Rushdie depicts the virtual class
nervous system, intended as a social class of producers of signs as well as a class of those living
a common condition of evanescence and existential fragility: cellularized splinters, fragments in
a perpetual abstract recombination of connected terminals. You feel the psychopathic vibration
that is amassing, after the decade of permanent electrocution, after the desire for economic
investment decade. You feel anxiety growing, and the urban libidinal economy going insane.
Millions of mobile phones are calling each other, mobilizing the lipid energy postponing the
contact, the pleasure of orgasm from one side to the other of the city, from a moment of
compressed urban time to another.The action of Rushdie’s novel develops mainly on the roofs of
Manhattan skyscrapers. Scary black birds wondering about the fates of buildings announce the
next collapse. Some time ago, Mike Davis mapped the urban territorial perception of Los
Angeles in City of Quartz (1990), and the New York City version in Dead Cities (2003) through
the rebuilding of the mythologies of fear, security and privatization policies that have a
devastating effect on social space. For Davis: “The neo-military syntax of contemporary
architecture insinuates violence and averts imaginary threats. The pseudo-public spaces of today,
the big malls and the executive centers, the cultural acropolis and so on are full of invisible signs
to keep the underclass far away” (Davis 1990: 226). After S11, the securitization paranoia
became the main tendency in the imaginary, in the production of high technology goods, and in
urban design. Again, Davis writes: The fear economy grows in the middle of an overall
famine... . The low paid security guard army will grow by 50% during the decade, while video-
surveillance fed by facial recognition software will snatch what is left of privacy from the daily
routine. The airports’ departure security regime will provide a model for the regulation of the
urban masses, in the shopping centers, in the sporting events and elsewhere... . Security, in other
words, will become an urban service completely developed like water, electricity and
telecommunications. (Davis 2003: 12-13) The city of panic is the place where there is no longer
time to get close to each other; there is no more time for caresses, for the pleasure and slowness
of whispered words.
(Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi is a writer and theorist based in Bologna. His work revolves mainly
around the aesthetics of the contemporary psychosphere. His latest books include Futurability,
Phenomenology of the End, and The Soul at Work. In the 1970s he was one of the founders of
the pirate radio station Radio Alice, the magazine A/traverso and of the political movement
Autonomia, “After the Future”, https://libcom.org/files/AfterFuture.pdf) o

The alternative is to play a game of imaginary ruins – a critique of the semiocapitalist

world around us by imagining its implosion. Our negativity and imagination becomes a
place for radical thought that foments hatred for capitalism into new potential
subjectivities. It’s unconditional. Cunningham:
There’s a game that can be played when walking through the city. Any zone of the contemporary
capitalist metropolis will do but it’s best played in one of the centres of accumulation, say
London, than one of the less developed sectors. This rule is not absolute since decaying post-
industrial cities also have their attractions. The game involves an imaginary testing of the city’s
buildings and neighbourhoods for their worthiness for destruction. This testing asks the question
whether or not these office blocks, shops, apartment blocks, and other excrescent forms of the
built environment deserve to exist in some imaginary post-capitalist future. And needless to say,
whether the forms of life and social relations the contemporary metropolis helps to engender are
not also worthy of a similar negation. It’s a game that can be played singularly or in groups, and
does not so much open up the metropolis as reduce it to a series of potentially empty spaces.
Most of the time this game is disturbingly easy, with the city throwing up future ruins at every
street corner. That squat, concrete block of a police station needs to be reduced to rubble if only
for the misery encrusted in its walls. The many-storied, uninhabitable financial office block
deserves ruination despite the odd attraction of its well-tended atrium as a place of rest. Other
husks of brick, glass, concrete, and dead labour are much less straightforward. A shopping mall,
enlightened glass arcade of circulating bodies and commodities, might also serve other purposes,
glass surfaces and transparencies being capable of reflecting more than the relations of exchange.
The utopian potential of glass architecture, the revolutionary virtues of transparency and
openness, might be realised in the midst of a wider negation of capitalism. Utopian and
revolutionary thinkers such as Charles Fourier and Walter Benjamin thought that such
architecture promised a break with the opacity and interior poverty of private life. Perhaps, the
game suggests, this break could be made actual if the glass cages of the present were put to use
by new collectivities and subjects. It’s a shame that this game is little more than a way of
critically passing the time walking through the shadows cast upon us by the metropolis, its
structures, and apparatuses. Walking around transcribing the potentially empty spaces of the
metropolis, enjoyable as it is, also traces the lack of agency that might make such a negation real.
And such a lack ironically makes negation more necessary than ever. Negation and negativity as
such, that inchoate combination of affects and passions such as boredom, hatred, depression, is
more like a knot pulled ever tighter by this seeming lack of anti-capitalist negation in the present.
Despite the rigours of a long drawn out socio-economic and environmental crisis, the actuality of
the negation of capitalism seems as far away as ever. However, even if critique must operate in
this suspended space it can still register the subjective and political brokenness that accumulates
through the exertions of capitalist value production. The activity of the communist critic can
hopefully be negative enough to find some purchase upon the contradictions of capitalism that
might be valid tender in the marketplaces of negation. The stalling of negation might in itself
provide the possibility of rethinking it
John Cunningham, 2015 "Negation At A Standstill" published in "Bad Feelings" a collection
produced by Arts Against Cuts and published by Book Works as part of Common Objectives
DISARM BY CURRENT NUCLEAR ARMED STATES LEADS TO BREAKOUT BY
SMALLER STATES AND NEW ARMS RACE AS SMALLER STATES SEEK
SECURITY AND TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THE OPPORTUNITY TO ESTABLISH
HEGEMONY. Wald:

“The road to zero, however, faces a silo of skepticism, inertia, and practical and psychological
complexities. Current nuclear security umbrellas provide protection to states like Japan and
Poland, which aren’t ready to have their safeguards abandoned [nuclear security]. States like
India and others see nuclear status as a matter of prestige. China isn’t yet ready for disarmament.
Smaller states view nuclear weapons as a hedge against large states with hefty conventional
armies. Nor are Pentagon strategists dancing in their bunkered hallways about zero nukes. Some
analysts argue that if nukes are outlawed then only outlaws will have nukes – the nations that
don’t conform to international treaties. ‘The American nuclear arsenal doesn’t encourage local
arms races; it forestalls them,’ writes Ross Douthat, a New York Times columnist.”
Wald, Matthew. “Disposal of plutonium from US-Russian disarmament is likely to take
decades.” New York Times, April 8, 2010.

These countries are more likely to start nuclear wars because their militaries lack effective
civilian control. Kaiser:

“Finally, one can point to [A] further characteristic common to East and West which represents
[is] an indispensable prerequisite for nuclear stability: the primacy of politics. Although the
military are influential – and sometimes even turn into politicians – in both East and West
politicians have authority over the military. This does not apply to many third-world countries,
where a wide variety of military regimes have developed, or where military thinking has masked
over political thinking. Civilian control through the primacy of politics ensures that nuclear
weapons are not treated as simply warfighting weapons but keep their special character as
weapons of deterrence, hence serving stability instead of destroying it.”
Kaiser, Karl. “Non-proliferation and nuclear deterrence.” Survival; 31:2, pp. 123-136, 1989.