Second Coming: Communism as a Post-Apocalyptic New Meme

Unfortunately, this book does not teach how to create communist memes, nor is the second coming about Jesus Christ. In 2016, AlphaGo achieved an unexpected victory over top human Go players, and the White House released "Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence." In the same year, civil wars frequently erupted in the formerly colonized Islamic world, and religiously motivated suicide terrorist groups regularly launched attacks in European cities. The fear among Western Caucasians of economic recession and global civil wars materialized in the Brexit referendum, the election of Donald Trump, the spread of mental distress, and recurrent indiscriminate killings. The era of widespread technology and automation is approaching, leading to an imminent "end of history": information overload causes cognitive impairment, and the combination of automated impersonality, universal political dysfunction, and humanity's desire for revenge elevates the efficiency of Nazi-style mechanized extermination to a new level. What is arriving for a second time is a technologically enhanced version of racism and fascism. In response, Bifo (Franco Berardi), a renowned Italian left-wing philosopher active in social movements, media, and information technology thought for sixty years, revives the vision of communist internationalism: to overcome national, religious, and racial divisions, uniting the Western working class with billions of people who have suffered from colonial history, based on the political identity of "exploited workers." Bifo, on the eve of the apocalypse, calls for a meme-like second coming of communism: reappearing in a post-apocalyptic world with symbols, words, images, and gestures that are easy to copy and remember; all unrelated to ideology, but solely to guide technology and automation towards liberating social time and creating equality.