The century-long obsession with the concept of the future has, at last, come to an end. Beginning with F. T. Marinetti’s “Futurist Manifesto” and the worldwide race toward a new and highly mechanized society that defined the “Century of Progress,” Italian media activist Franco “Bifo” Berardi traces the genesis of future-oriented thought through the punk movement of the early ’70s and into the media revolution of the ’90s. Cyberculture, the last genuinely utopian future vision, has ended in a clash, leaving behind an ever-growing system of virtual life and death, virtual knowledge and actual war.

The future, Bifo argues, has failed us. Our responsibility now is to decide what comes next.

Franco “Bifo” Berardi is an Italian critic and media activist. One of the founders of the notorious Radio Alice, a pirate radio station that became the voice of the autonomous youth movement of Bologna in the late 1970s, Bifo is the author of multiple works of theory, including The Soul at Work, Precarious Rhapsody, and “The Post-Futurist Manifesto.”