Zepke Stephen: Head in the Stars. Essays on Science Fiction

fragmented experiences of the infosphere has led, Bifo
concludes, to a ‘dis-empathy diffused in social action’
(2009 134), a kind of generalised anti-sociality causing fear,
solitude, depression, and panic.
How can we resist this new reality? Bifo’s position
initially seems to be a kind of technophobia, an unplugging
from the interface in favour of a return to ‘planetary
humanism’ (2009 133), so that we can ‘sing of the danger
of love, the daily creation of a sweet energy that is never
dispersed’ (2009a). 34 In this light, Bifo’s appeals for a
renewed humanism sounds rather conservative, giving
the impression that our bodies must be ‘saved’ from
the interface. This is reinforced in passages influenced
by Baudrillard, where Bifo’s apocalyptic descriptions
of the interface suggest a nihilistic ‘digitalism’; ‘Digital
technology’ Bifo writes, ‘makes possible a process of
infinite replication of the sign. The sign becomes a virus
eating the reality of its referent’ (2009 149). 35 This is a claim
illustrated by the Matrix, where a copy of Baudrillard’s
Simulations makes a famous appearance. The problem
with this ‘dandyish necrophilia of the System’ (Pasquinelli,
70) is that its rhetorical mushroom cloud proclaims
an upload of the world that completely subsumes the
material level of the parasite, along with its potential for
resistance. ‘The proliferation of simulation viruses,’ Bifo
writes, ‘has swallowed the event. The infinite capacity of
replication of the recombining simulator device erases the
originality of the event. What is left is suicide.’ (2009 161)
Such virulent nihilism leaves little room to move, except
towards the ‘sweet energy’ promised by withdrawal and the
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