UNDERSTANDING EXOCAPITALISM

Instructor: Marek Poliks, Roberto Alonso Trillo Date & Time: February 7, 14, 21, 28 09:00-11:30 ET

DESCRIPTION: Exocapitalism is the idea that capitalism does not belong to humans. The titular book (Becoming Press, 2025) and this accompanying Seminar spring from a dissatisfaction with the sameness of Marxian critical social theory. This theoretical lineage appears to be poisoned by a Marvel Cinematic Universe approach to storytelling when it comes to economics: capitalism is almost always a powerful, demonic, one-dimensional Big Bad against which the accumulated forces of dignified human laborers engage in heroic, planetary-scale battle. The Seminar Instructors (authors Marek Poliks and Roberto Alonso Trillo) push this tired metaphor to its breaking point. What if capitalism is so univocal as to be actually transcendental? What if it cohabits within its share of the Empyrean with things like computation or mathematics? What if capitalism can happen on anything, anywhere, without us?

At the core of exocapitalism is the logical kernel of arbitrage, the burbling contingencies of price and value as buried exploits in simple temporal deferral. Poliks and Trillo collapse tens of thousands of years of human economic activity into this kernel, even labor, which in exocapitalism is strictly and simply the injection of manufactured volatility into a held asset. But labor itself, let alone the simple flows of commodity exchange, is insufficiently volatile for exocapitalism’s hyperfertile scalarity. It is too bound to fixed costs and predictable dependencies to sustain the attention of exocapitalist flows. Instead, exocapitalism treats the entire terrestrial condition as a hyperdimensional random number generator upon which to wage and hedge controlled bets. Yet even this is insufficient. More dimensions, more abstractions, and greater differentials appear with greater and greater velocity. The human is left to consider what happens when this entire process and its operational mechanics leave us behind entirely.

Session 1, Retcon: If arbitrage is the processual unit of exocapitalism, we can build a lineage of authentic capitalisms far into the past (and far beyond Marx’s blind spots outside of Europe). We start with currency speculation in 5th-century BCE Persia, Jiaozi paper money schemes in 11th-century southwest China, the famous cowrie-shell economy in the Maldives and in Africa’s Gold Coast from the 10th through the 19th centuries, the radical hyperstition of the Black-Scholes financial model, the play-to-earn DeFi gaming economics currently wreaking havoc in the Philippines, and the jet fuel futures market that underpins almost all contemporary airline industry pricing. Each of these case studies will focus on relationships between price, value, underlying asset, and volatility (via time, labor, or alternative frictions). Accompanying readings from Elena Esposito and Suhail Malik ground these case studies in theory.

Session 2, Software Economy: This Session introduces students to a side of the software economy almost entirely undocumented by contemporary critical theory or philosophy. Instead of identifying software strictly with celebritarian politics, Silicon Valley ideology, surveillance capitalism, or the reductive and incorrect “Big Tech,” we read commercial Software as a Service (SaaS) through the concept of the fold. This approach helps explain how the software economy proceeds through the production of new dimensions of relations. We discuss the mechanics of orchestration and containerization in enterprise software architecture, the infrastructure platform as a service (for example, AWS and Azure Cloud), the problematics of agentic AI (such as through Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol), and the rise of the Digital Experience Platform (DXP).

Session 3, Lift & Drag: In this Session, we focus on the transformation from service economies into banking economies, in which virtually every major corporation gradually pivots to financial services as their core revenue driver. This transformation is a manifestation of what we call lift: the shift from material to abstract, from dependency to partnership, and from production and consumption to fully automatic capital generation. Lifted capital reproduces itself not through goods or services but through platform effects, derivatives, loyalty programs, and algorithmic arbitrage, which effectively detaches value from the material constraints of labor or logistics. In the wake of this lift, drag becomes the residue, the slow, frictional layer of infrastructure still required to feed, house, and move people. As lifted systems ascend into abstraction, consumers (people) are left with an increasingly shaky infrastructure with which to secure their basic needs. The function of white-collar or professional managerial labor convolves as well, becoming largely performative. Its purpose is increasingly centered on manufacturing conditions for its own necessity, in an attempt to avoid collapse into abjection or precarity. While this begins with a focus on the contemporary American experience, we quickly move to discuss the unique permutations of this problem with case studies in Europe (especially the UK, Spain, and Poland), Nigeria, Brazil, and Southeast Asia.

Session 4, The Last Mile: What happens after exocapitalism has become too fast or too small to engage with, or its value-generative capacities too random and arbitrary to recognize as such? The question ignored by humans until the last moment is sheerly and strictly one of social reproduction, a question that will continue to become more and more urgent at scale. In this section, we grapple with Marx’s “primitive accumulation,” most vociferously through its critique by Sylvia Federici. We contend, contra Marx, that all human social reproduction is and has always been mobilized through primitive accumulation. We conclude with an analysis of terrestrial logistics, working through the theory of Frantz Fanon, Fred Moten, and Stefano Harney. This last session puts exocapitalism in context, offering a brutally critical re-reading of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire through geotrauma (for example, via Reza Negarestani) and Deleuze and Guattari’s “megamachine,” placing both exocapitalism and the (useless, arbitrary, nonexistent) nation-state in their respective pantheonic positions. In this session, we focus on the transformation from service economies into banking economies, in which virtually every major corporation gradually pivots to financial services as their core revenue driver. This transformation is a manifestation of what we call lift: the shift from material to abstract, from dependency to partnership, and from production and consumption to fully automatic capital generation. Lifted capital reproduces itself not through goods or services but through platform effects, derivatives, loyalty programs, and algorithmic arbitrage, which effectively detaches value from the material constraints of labor or logistics.

IMAGE: Exocapitalism: Economies with absolutely no limits (bookcover), Becoming, 2025

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