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 truly utopian vision of the future, has ended in a clash, and left behind an ever-growing system of virtual life and actual death, of virtual knowledge and actual war.

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