To desert

In 2019, we released a film titled "Desertor," filmed in Uspallata, in which we participated as producers alongside colleagues from Córdoba and Mendoza. The story tells of a young man's quest to discover secrets about his father's past, a military deserter, and embarks on a journey to find the truth. The plot is premised on a breakup, a decision that challenges imposed loyalty, and an escape that entails an act of courage.

The film passed and little is remembered, but it serves as an introduction to this note:

The word "deserter" comes from the Latin " desertoris , " "one who abandons," and " deserere , " "to separate from something or someone." Deserting, then, means a gesture of rupture. Of deliberate abandonment.

"Desertemos" (Prometeo, 2024 ) is a publication by Franco Bifo Berardi—Italian philosopher and cultural activist—that proposes something strange: a way of existence that doesn't conform to the productivist, digitalized, and exhausting mandate of current capitalism. He proposes Desert! Which is not abandoning the world, but its logic, of withdrawing from within, like someone discovering a side corridor in a ruined building.

To desert, says Bifo, is to reclaim oneself before the machinery shapes us.

One of the most effective narratives of the present is the one that urges us to be entrepreneurs of our own lives. Not people, not citizens, not lovers: a lot of personal branding, emotional scalability, constant management.

Berardi lucidly dismantles this: “When every vital dimension becomes part of the economy—the body, desire, free time, insomnia—there is no longer room for life as experience. Only as management. And in that management, the subject consumes itself as a resource.”

It's worth mentioning Miguel Benasayag, from another perspective, who reaches a disturbing conclusion: the contemporary brain, saturated by performance demands, reduces its plasticity. There's no time for thought. There's no pause for questioning. Everything becomes automatic and superficial.

It's not about going to the countryside or throwing your phone into the water. The desertion Berardi proposes isn't primitivist or romantic. It's more radical: it means disengaging from the dominant flow of meaning. Not abandoning the network, but ceasing to be its servant.

Speed, according to Bifo, is no longer a technical attribute: it's a form of control. We've become incapable of processing what we experience. The immediate has replaced the real. That's why abandoning it also means abandoning our own cell phones (a difficult task, if ever there was one) , those devices that have become extensions of our bodies and targets of our attention.

The addiction to infinite scrolling takes away our time for thought and for real encounters with others and with ourselves.

In his critique, Berardi points out how late capitalism has colonized even our affections. The monetization of intimacy, the conversion of every gesture into content, of every bond into a contract, has emptied desire itself of meaning. Even love becomes an app with filters and algorithms that promise emotional effectiveness.

We live by measuring the value of our relationships as if they were transactions, and Berardi invites us to abandon that logic as well. To recover silence. To deactivate, even for a moment, the machinery of hyperconnectivity.

This book doesn't ask us to run into the woods and ask a walnut tree a question on a rural morning. What it proposes is to imagine from another place. And there, culture, creativity, and art become fields of active desertion. When one can no longer fight with the weapons of the system, another language is created. When reality becomes unlivable, art transforms it.

To desert is to recover memory and redefine history. In every book, every film, every cultural space inhabited by other meanings, there is a crack that lets in a new way of being.

It's about knowing that, even when everything seems blocked, there's still room to desert without disappearing, to resist without shouting, to create without obeying.

To desert is also to withdraw from politics as an empty stage, transformed into a repetitive spectacle; where people's problems dissolve into accusations of bribery, violent speeches, and electoral tactics, with a complete inability to respond to real crises. Meanwhile, the genocide, visible on the screens, passes by with the indifference of the established powers. Systematic violence, hunger, war, the extermination of entire populations seem distant, untouchable, unchangeable.

To abandon this policy is to reject the system that legitimizes such violence. It means seeking other forms of action, other networks, other spaces where meaning can reappear.

To desert is to find oneself in a different place. Where there is no emotional return or social metric. Where shared time isn't measured in productivity or transformed into content.

Berardi calls this “social composition without consensus”: a way of being with others without a contract, without a program, without utility. Friendship, he says, can be a form of desertion. And so can art. And so can silence.

Deserting is an act of silent insubordination that breaks into the dominant narrative, a way of passing through this world without submitting to so many certainties.

It is deliberately choosing productive uselessness as a space of freedom , where value is measured in the intensity and authenticity of each act.

Deserting is an act of faith in the possible, in what has yet to be said, in what remains to be imagined, and in the human capacity to invent new forms. It is that space where rebellion is not displayed as a spectacle . It is where daily resistance to the logic that seeks only numbers and data is cultivated.

Dropping out is neither a destiny nor a slogan. It doesn't promise solutions, nor does it avoid the complexity of the world, but it opens up spaces where tension can be transformed into movement.

Perhaps, in that voluntary abandonment, in that suspension of certainties, lies something that has yet to be named. Something waiting to be thought about and experienced, without the urgency of calculation.

Deserting is an invitation to explore those invisible margins where life insists on reinventing itself, despite everything.

* The author is president of FilmAndes.