Every few days, I’m going to post a quote and a special offer related to my 4-Session online course, The Culture of the Current: A Workshop for Facing the World We Live in Now. The course has a limited amount of space and is mostly a labor of love and excitement on my part. I want to work with interested and motivated people on the problems of the present moment. Today’s quote is by cultural theorist Franco “Bifo” Berardi. The special offer is below the quote.
“Today psychopathy reveals itself ever more clearly as a social epidemic…
If you want to survive you have to be competitive and if you want to be competitive you must be connected, receive and process continuously an immense and growing mass of data. This provokes a constant attentive stress…
(the effect is) devastation on the individual psyche: depression, panic, anxiety, the sense of solitude and existential misery. But these individual symptoms cannot be indefinitely isolated, as psychopathology has done up until now and as economic power wishes to do. It is not possible to say: ‘You are exhausted, go and take a vacation at Club Med, take a pill, make a cure, get the hell away from it all, recover in the psychiatric hospital, kill yourself.’ It is no longer possible, for the simple reason that it is no longer a matter of a small minority of crazies or a marginal amount of depressives. It concerns a growing mass of existential misery that is tending always more to explode in the center of the social system.”
– FRANCO “BIFO” BERARDI, from Precarious Rhapsody
SPECIAL OFFER: EXCLUSIVE WRITING
- Sign up for The Culture of the Current by Saturday, July 9 at 12:00AM PST
- Send an email to connerhabibsocial [at] gmail.com with the subject “FBB” and I’ll send you two exclusive personal essay vignettes about isolation. No one else has these; they haven’t yet appeared anywhere in publication.
Conner Habib 
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