brenticus reviewed After the Future by Franco Bifo Berardi
Prescient in the most depressing ways
4 stars
This is a bit of an odd read in that Bifo's thoughts are all over the place and following his arguments gets a bit tricky now and then. Despite the fact that I had to skip back occasionally to make sure I was following along, he makes very good points about what the world looks like in the post-post-modern era, how it differs from the past, how we got here, and where it would go from when he wrote this.
The unfortunate thing is that he mostly predicted bad things, and he was mostly right.
In a way this book is a synthesis of several other books I've read, combining concepts from Degrowth Economics, Technofeudalism, Capitalist Realism, and more into a coherent worldview capable of making predictions on the future. Considering this predates most of those books, that's quite impressive. It speaks to Bifo's analytical abilities that he is able …
This is a bit of an odd read in that Bifo's thoughts are all over the place and following his arguments gets a bit tricky now and then. Despite the fact that I had to skip back occasionally to make sure I was following along, he makes very good points about what the world looks like in the post-post-modern era, how it differs from the past, how we got here, and where it would go from when he wrote this.
The unfortunate thing is that he mostly predicted bad things, and he was mostly right.
In a way this book is a synthesis of several other books I've read, combining concepts from Degrowth Economics, Technofeudalism, Capitalist Realism, and more into a coherent worldview capable of making predictions on the future. Considering this predates most of those books, that's quite impressive. It speaks to Bifo's analytical abilities that he is able to syncretize ideas from vast swaths of theory into a practical tool for looking at the world.
