This is again Berardi on another from of 'tech', relevant to the topic at hand:
"Advertising reasserts at every street corner, at every moment, day and night, the freedom of infinite consumption, the joys of property, and victory through competition. In the '90s, capitalism mobilized an immense intellectual, creative, and psychological energy in order to start the validation process of the collective network. But by imposing an unlimited systematic exploitation on the human mind, the productive acceleration created conditions for an extraordinary psychological breakdown. 'Prozac culture' was another name for the emerging New Economy; hundreds of thousands of managers made innumerable decisions under a chemical euphoria, while they were high from the abuse of psychotropic drugs. Yet the organism cannot take endless ecstasy and productive fanaticism, and at some point it begins to surrender. As happens with patients affected with bipolar disorder, euphoria is replaced by long-term depression hitting the very source of one's motivation: Entrepreneurship, self-esteem, desire, and sex appeal. We cannot fully understand the crisi of the New Economy without taking into account it coincided with a Prozac crash.
Depression comes from the fact that our emotional, physical, and intellectual energy can't bear the rhythm imposed by competitive, chemical, ideological euphoria-inducers for long. The market is a psycho-semiotic space where one can find expectations for meaning, desire, and projection. There is an energetic crisis that affects our energies. Once this crisi exploded, a new effort was made to motivate the depressed Western psychology with a powerful amphetamine therapy: War.
Aggressive suicide, therefore, is not a new phenomenon. Yet in today's context it is terribly more disturbing, not only because anyone who is determined could have access to instruments of destruction, but also because murderous suicide is no longer rare; it has become a spreading manifestation of contemporary despair. Only a sick person would take speed as a reaction to depressive crisis, but the epidemic of unhappiness infecting the world in the epoch of capitalism's triumph has generated a wave of aggression in every area of the globe. At the origin of murderous suicide there is no political reason, or strategic military intention, but a form of pain that affects not only Islamic youth. I am simply saying that the Islamic shahid and the bipolar disorder affecting the Western productive mind are convergent pathologies, two different manifestations of the unbearable pain affecting those who see themselves as competitive, hyper-stimulated winners, and the rancorous ones as desperate and humiliated."
In the wake of 9/11, many of us lived in a perpetual state of low-level agitation while waiting for what was metaphorically known as 'waiting for the other shoe to drop'. It's probably safe to say it fell with a resounding thud in the summer of 2008. Again, Berardi is among the most cogent on what should be seen as these inextricably linked phenomena of global terror, social engineering, and financial catastrophe. The quote above is from another book called "The Soul at Work", which is an ontological analysis of the post-fordist subject as she navigates our brave new world. Oddly enough, Wombaticus, I'd discovered Berardi's writing through Jodi Dean's blog I Cite; she's a colleague of Doug Henwood, I believe. I also read the Berardi book while reading Lanier's "You Are Not a Gadget", which explores similar topics in a different manner. So, cheers! And don't sleep on this guy. Tremendous stuff.
