Franco “Bifo” Berardi

A philosopher, writer and cultural agitator, he has a degree in Aesthetics and trained with Félix Guattari. At present he is a lecturer in Social History of the Mass Media in the Brera Fine Arts Academy, Milan. He was a well-known activist of what was known as the autonomia operaria movement in Italy in the 1960s and, since then, he has produced an insightful body of work as a critic in which he has studied the transformations of work and society caused by globalisation, especially with regard to the role of the mass media in post-industrial societies. His theoretical work goes hand in hand with his activism in the alternative media, a project he initiated by founding the publication A/Traverso, a fanzine of the Movement of 1977 in Italy, after which he founded Radio Alice—the country’s first free pirate radio station—and then TV Orfeu, which gave rise to community television in Italy. He made his debut as an essayist with Contro il lavoro (Against Work, Feltrinelli, 1970) and, since then, has published approximately fifty titles, some of which have been translated into Spanish. They include After The Future (AK Press, 2011), Futurability: the Age of Impotence and the Horizon of Possibility (Verso, 2017) and, recently published in Spanish, Fenomenología del fin (Caja Negra Editora, 2017), La segunda venida (Caja Negra, 2021), and El Umbral. Crónicas y meditaciones (Tinta Limón, 2020). His last book is The Third Unconscious: The Psychosphere in the Viral Age (Verso, 2021).