Bifo on the arrest of Julian Assange
Franco Berardi (AKA Bifo, whose book, After the Future, AK will publish in the Spring) just emailed me to say that he’s contributing to a new online news & theory project with the irresistible title of URGE: Ultimate Reseau General-intellect (after)Europe. I’ll be reposting some of his ruminations here from time to time, but I urge (ha) you to check out the site in its entirety! In the meantime, here’s what Bifo posted today about the arrest of Julian Assange, founder, as you all know, of WikiLeaks:
The arrest of Julian Assange sounds the death knell for Western democracy. They caught him, they cut off the wires and the funds. But what did this man exactly do? Simply demonstrate the power of the Network. Western authorities, despite their disdain for Chinese Censorship, behave exactly like Hu Jintao as soon as the power of the networks threatens to introduce Glasnost, to suggest any form of transparency or even, perhaps, expose the realities of power.
What does the experience of Wikileaks teach us? That the military was paid to suppress civilians, that diplomats had been paid to sugar the pill; this we already knew. But that was not the lesson that comes from Wikileaks.
This experience, rather, teaches that the diffuse network of the Cognitariat can challenge and beat the institutions of power. In these structures (military, diplomatic and financial) are cognitive workers: computer programmers, journalists and technicians, who are rapidly discovering the infinite power of collective intelligence.
The battle against the dictatorship of financial idiocy, of Semiocapitalism, has begun.
And it is a battle of collective intelligence, against the systematic enforcement of ignorance, that must be pursued systematically.
Students and researchers, taking to the streets by their thousands in London and in Rome, in Milan and in Bologna, are fighting this battle.
Governments are increasingly locked into a liberal obsession with monetarism, with obscurantism. Do not give into pressure from the palaces! Let them hurdle into recession, continue towards the general impoverishment and destruction of social civilization.
Sarkosy would not stop when three million people took to the streets for months at a time. Still, he continues.
Berlusconi’s government falls apart, but the design of a privatized education system does not stop; the destruction of public schools goes on. Still, they continue.
But we need you to know: whether you win this particular fight over public education, the struggle between the dictatorship of ignorance and collective intelligence has only just begun.
The student protests and the uprisings of workers in recent months are just the beginning of a process that will last a very long time.
The collapse of Europe we just witnessed is only the first scene of this act; for the movement will soon create the conditions for the self-organization of collective intelligence and for its autonomy from the rule and from the idiocy of profit.
Bifo’s book, After the Future, will be released by AK Press in May 2011. Stay tuned for more of Bifo’s writings, and exclusive excerpts from the book in the near future!