As I read chapters 1-3 of Precarious Rhapsody by Franco Berardi, I had trouble figuring out what Berardi was arguing at first because he was giving a lot of history and it threw me off. I understand he wanted to intertwine his own experiences as a way to provide us with an outlook about optimistic revolts against the capitalist institutions, but it took him a bit long to get to the point.
It took me a while and a lot of re-reading to get a sense of what Berardi was trying to but eventually I got a sense of what his argument was. Berardi basically argued that the new information age allowed for capital to freely exploit the labor of humans, thus moving from the worker being the unit of capital to time being the new subject with the “mobilization of the living labor of cyberspace. (Pg. 33-5)” In other words, the rise of new media and the ease of transferring information has allowed for capitalism to take dominance to a whole new level. This reminded me of the “Googlization of Everything” discussion we had in class on Tuesday. Google is using this cyber culture of “fun and games” to exploit the labor and coax them into implicitly trading their time under the false sense of freedom, when their time actually belonged to Google. Google is controlling the workers like puppets, resulting in a dramatic change of the relationship between labor and capital.
Nice job. I was also thinking of the discussion of Google and how it fits with Bifo. In particular, I was thinking about Google's efforts to integrate their employees fully into their workplace, to keep them there such that they have no separate personal lives. For Bifo, this is indicative of the way that digital networks become biological networks, that is, the way our brains are integrated into and changed via digital circuits. And, as you say, this involves time and time isn't infinite.
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