Watch the keynote of Disruption Network Lab‘s conference Shadows of Illiberalism: Resisting the Radical Right.
The conference took place in Berlin from 13 – 15 June 2025.

In this keynote, Franco Berardi will try to understand the contemporary political crisis as a manifestation of the techno-anthropological mutation that is underway. This is followed by a presentation by Yasmeen Daher reflecting on the issue of hyper-colonialism and the topics covered in the keynote speech.

Disintegration
The illiberal oligarchy has taken control of the most powerful nuclear powers, US, and Russia, and now it is striving to take control of a number of European countries, while Liberal democracy is losing ground. However, the fight between the two political forms is far from over, and it is resulting in a disintegration of both geopolitical and socio-economic order. This is resulting in a process of disintegration of the Western system. But if we want to understand the roots of this process we must go beyond the political surface and dig up the cultural and psychological roots of the present unravelling. These roots lie crisis of the white supremacy over the world, and the emergence of hyper-colonialism.

Exhaustion
After the crisis of colonial rule after the Second world war, colonialism has taken a new deterritorialised form (that Franco Berardi labels hyper-colonialism), and has been resurfacing in the new Century, together with the aggressive return of the mythology of white supremacy. Illiberalism is based on the furious return of racism, fuelled by the perception of the exhaustion of white supremacy. Exhaustion is the reversal of the Futurist expansionism of the past Century has cultural, economic, and demographic features, but it is also (and basically) an effect of the aging of the white population, following the prolongation of life-time, and the unstoppable fall of birth-rate.