“Exocapitalism (2025)— Scales of Virtualisation”
Interview with Marek Poliks & Roberto Alonso Trillo by Geert Lovink
Geert Lovink:
We haven't met before. I was excited to read the book, then, of course, I read it for a second time in preparation for this interview, but the first reading was for the blurb, so it was a while ago.
Marek Poliks:
Thank you very much for that.
Roberto Alonso Trillo:
Yeah, yeah. Thank you. Yeah.
G.L.:
I'm very familiar with the genre, let's say, and also with the content. So shall we start?
R.A.T.:
Yes.
M.P.:
Yeah. I think it would be nice to think about how we're framing this.
G.L.:
Okay. Well, for me, it's quite clear. It has to be as detailed and as speculative and theoretical as possible. Okay. So, you know, it’s really, I would say, for an informed public, and so we want to really see this book as an opportunity to push forward the dialogue and the discourse and, you know, the propositions that you are making.
So, it can also be that you say, “okay, we wrote this three, four months ago. Let's push it further.” So I'm very open to the book; it's always a lengthy process of, let's say, recording and storing ideas that have been forming over a number of years.
At the same time, we have a very, let’s say, fluid situation, to put it mildly, in which things develop very fast, including, hopefully, our own thinking as well. So, in that sense, feel free to not just defend the book as a static object, but to see it as a process that is constantly evolving; that's also how I read it as a proposition.
I wouldn't necessarily, and I don’t think you yourself call it a manifesto, but just in terms of the genre, this is most likely how many people will read it, whether you use the term manifesto or not. But it's in that area—it's a long manifesto.
So, in that sense, it's more like a speculative proposition. I think that's how I would frame it. And then there are all the more reasons to see it as an open text that can be pushed further.
M.P.:
Absolutely. Yeah. I had to go grab my notebook. So now I'm ready for some serious thinking.
G.L.:
Okay, great. I want to start with the first question, which is a very open one for those who haven't read it yet, and that's the question of the necessity to come up with a term like “Exocapitalism.”
Before we go into the question of how it relates to other recently proposed forms of capitalism, there is, I believe, an underlying need to see that this object, which is very large in capitalism, is in need of redefinition, which is why you come up with this term.
So my question would be: what is exocapitalism and how would you explain this wider need to stretch this term, or to push it in new directions?
R.A.T.:
So, I can start, and then I think Marek can take over. In answer to your question, the term is completely unnecessary.
And this might come as a surprise, but the issue is that the term “capitalism” is so charged with meaning, with different ways or different attempts at defining it historically, that it’s difficult to use; it has become difficult to use. So “exocapitalism,” to us, is kind of unnecessary, as it is not a new form of capitalism.
We are referring to capitalism as a whole. But the issue—the terminological issue—is that the term capitalism is so fully charged that it becomes difficult to use it as a space that is clearly defined. We could provide a definition, but we preferred to just add a small “exo” at the beginning to clarify that we're referring to the same thing, but that we had to come up with a new word.
I don't know if that makes sense, but I think Marek can expand on that.
M.P.:
Yeah, I think that there has been some consensus that’s aggregated over the past—you can argue when this started—but there's some consensus that “finance capitalism,” however you want to define that, has produced some challenges for kind of classical leftist critique, especially from the lineage of Marx.
It's produced challenges to how we have come to understand capitalism in a pretty significant way. As Roberto describes, this kind of sedimented conception becomes extreme, to the point that in order to actually think about finance capitalism, the left or the critical apparatus has had to say, “Actually, we are in a different period now.”
“Capitalism is dead,” “No, it's technofeudalism,” “No, it's semiocapitalism, cognitive capitalism,” whatever different type of capitalism. Fine—no objection to that. But it's something different, and what we're trying to propose is a retrojection of finance capitalism backwards through the history of capitalism.
We're not historians, and we know we make historical claims that can be picked apart, but that's not really our obligation as we see it. Rather, we want to propose what we call a retroactive continuity, through which we can understand capitalism through finance capitalism, because we think finance capitalism is just capitalism.
So “exocapitalism”—we could talk about what the “exo” means, and that’s another answer—but the necessity of the term is simply to say: it’s all been this thing the whole time.
G.L.:
Yeah. Obviously this started maybe 50 years ago, and it's to do with the relative decline of what used to be called industrial or 19th-century capitalism, as it functioned back then and as it was defined through political economy and Marx.
I’d like to know how you relate to recent attempts to redefine capitalism through the lens of finance capitalism. There is technofeudalism, which emphasizes a retrograde move where people are no longer actively involved, not as workers, not even as customers, but more abstractly as victims of financial capitalism.
Then there are other terms—platform capitalism, which I’m particularly working on, and green capitalism, which emphasized the financialization of ecology and climate solutions. That whole process is now in crisis, because no one is actively promoting green capitalism anymore.
What do you make of these terms—green capitalism, platform capitalism, technofeudalism? According to Yanis Varoufakis, capitalism itself has ended, partly due to this terminological chaos.
M.P.:
Which he does by coining another neologism, which is his prerogative—and arguably a more immediately descriptive neologism than ours.
I do feel that platform capitalism and technofeudalism are critical narratives largely coming from Europe into the U.S., which makes sense given the U.S. is effectively a testing ground for some of these dynamics.
I think platform capitalism is very useful. I'm delighted it entered the conversation because it enabled the left to actually talk about software—how software works, how it moves. It’s much more precise than the “gig economy,” which describes experience but not mechanics.
We are interested in the dynamics of software. But we’re also hitting the elasticity limit of the term “platform.” Software platforms include tools like Unreal Engine, social media platforms, but also massive infrastructural systems like AWS and Azure.
Platforms are not worlds; they are porous, membrane-like systems full of interpenetrations. Thinking of them strictly as platforms only captures a small surface of the actual software economy. Roberto can talk about technofeudalism.
R.A.T.:
My take is slightly different. I think left criticism often takes a phenomenological approach—analyzing situated variables and correlations. This is essential. But it remains within what we call “drag,” the human impulse to embed ourselves into capitalism’s lift.
What we’re interested in is what happens when we go trans-scalar—when we attempt an ontological analysis of capitalism itself. At a certain scale, teleological agency vanishes. And then the question becomes: what can we actually do?
Should we still treat capitalism as something we can modify, or are we engaging an entity that is fundamentally external to us?
M.P.:
And that’s why technofeudalism doesn’t quite work for us. It suggests that capital wants to structure human life intentionally, but capitalism is not interested in humans at all. Humans are interested in being noticed by capitalism.
If you look at Amazon or Google, these are fully automatic dreadnoughts composed of millions of interacting modules. The idea that they intentionally structure the world misunderstands how these systems actually operate.
Situations like Amazon camps near distribution centers can resemble feudalism or slavery, but that results from what we call “the last mile”—the tethering of abstract systems to human reproduction and our lack of imagination for organizing ourselves otherwise.
So we’re not interested in technofeudalism. We think platform capitalism is useful but incomplete, and green capitalism is effectively dead.
R.A.T.:
And finally, on technology—equating technology with capitalism is risky. Technology exceeds capitalism. We are technological animals regardless of the economic system we live in. Capitalism may be tethered to particular technologies, but confusing the two obscures more than it clarifies.
G.L.:
I’d like to move to another central concept in your text: scale. Can you explain what happens when something scales and how this differs from growth or hypergrowth? Clearly, scale has a specific meaning for you.
M.P.:
I’ll start from a software perspective, then R.A.T. can talk about experiential scale.
One thing we’ve noticed is that the critical apparatus struggles with scale. We've grown accustomed to thinking about agency in bounded environments, but we live in a world where everything touches everything, and not equally.
We don’t believe in parity of relations. Some things affect other things far more than the reverse. Scale allows us to understand worlds that are partially or entirely non-reactive to us—where agency becomes extremely limited when dealing with large systems.
G.L.:
And would you say that emergence is still too much referring to the natural world or to something like natural growth or something?
M.P.:
Exactly, exactly. I totally agree with you. I don't think it's the right term. I think actually the right term is scale, because that's the term that we use in software. The idea is that it is functionally different to build a system for different magnitudes. The example I give in the book is building an application designed to tell you the weather.
On one hand, I might pull in an API to some weather system and load it on a website. Serving that to myself as a single app looks very different than serving that to a million people. The way the software looks is different. The types of tools you use are different. The location of the software is different. The way the software is broken up and sharded across thousands of servers across the world is very different from coding something that exists locally in my environment. When we think of scale, my initial association is algorithmic growth.
G.L.:
So a lot of things in software scale algorithmically. Can you say something about what happens when something “grows algorithmically”? What happens inside? In finance people often talk about hypergrowth, but what is algorithmic growth?
M.P.:
Absolutely. I think the best way to think about it is the relationship between resources and efficiency. If you're thinking in terms of Big-O notation, when you're structuring an application, some things get more efficient the more inputs you add.
The example we use is something like an Amazon fulfilment centre. It's not very efficient for sending individual packages, but it becomes more efficient—within limits—the more things you push through it. It becomes much more capable and elastic. In the software domain, you can scale to some extent without hard limitations, and in doing so, you can actually gain efficiency the more elements are placed into the system.
That allows you to build structures that are difficult to understand, difficult to manage, and extraordinarily powerful. These systems also enjoy a kind of indifference—there’s no fixed correlation between resources and efficiency. The system cares less about the individuality of inputs and begins to resemble the structural patterning of computation itself: axiomatic, ultra-efficient.
This doesn't mean our world is efficient—far from it. But many of the structures that pattern our world are incredibly indifferent to what gets placed inside them. That indifference is the problematic of scale.
R.A.T.:
I think that's a great way to put it. Marek has this inner vision from his engagement with software. When we think about scale more broadly, our human engagement with scale is complex. We hallucinate scales into existence to cope with sensory overload. We have to scale things into human dimensions to survive.
That’s liberatory in some ways, but it's also a simplification of the outer world into something manageable.
G.L.:
But it's always scaling down, right? To the human level.
R.A.T.:
Yes, to us.
G.L.:
Never scaling up.
R.A.T.:
Never. So in the book we discuss four aspects of scale. First, “at scale”, meaning the translation of relations across magnitudes. Second, “scalability”, meaning the flexibility of a relationship—what happens when you try to expand a car, for instance. Eventually it stops being expandable. Third, “scalarity”, which concerns how the components of a system relate to one another. And finally, the most important one for us: “the scaling problem”, meaning how flexible relationships break down at scale, and why.
G.L.:
I want to move to another related term you introduce: lift. Obviously a lift goes up and down, but why is this term so important for you? What happens when things lift?
M.P.:
Weird stuff. Really weird stuff. I was talking to my mom about a similar experience she had in a hotel. The room was advertised as having air conditioning. It didn’t work, so she went to the front desk and spoke with the manager-on-duty, who promised to send maintenance.
When maintenance arrived, they said there was no air conditioning at all—anywhere in the hotel. Both the front desk staff and the maintenance crew were outsourced third parties who didn’t actually work for the hotel.
The obvious reading is neoliberal outsourcing, but we're interested in why companies don't want to do certain things. For us, it's an economic issue of fixed costs. Physical things are slow, expensive, and predictable. The margins on physical commodities are limited.
Maintaining a hotel is expensive. Buildings are physical assets that need constant upkeep, and there's a ceiling on how much you can reasonably charge for a room. Software is different. Software margins approach infinity. Your real cost is hosting—essentially energy.
This is what we call lift: businesses wanting to become software, then software that manages physical assets, then software that manages the management of physical assets—layer after layer of abstraction. Lift is about escaping the marginal determination of price grounded in material reality.
G.L.:
Previous generations would have called that virtualization.
R.A.T.:
It’s slightly different. We focus on abstraction as a recursive process that folds infinitely. There's also a temporal component—arbitrage has to do with time dilation. In physical production, time is human and slow. In software, time becomes compressed, synchronous, almost timeless. That accelerates abstraction and increases lift infinitely.
M.P.:
And it doesn’t stop at virtualization. Virtualization gets virtualized again and again. When you get to something like high-frequency trading, you’re no longer tethered to physical assets at all. You're working directly in the space of computation.
Citadel Capital, for example, uses stochastic mathematics to analyze curves—any curve—and make fractional profits at massive scale. That’s lift: moving from representations of the physical world to computation alone.
That’s the moment of detachment—the takeoff from the ground. There's a real break between what these entities are doing and the world of commodity production or human circulation.
R.A.T.:
And then the question becomes: what happens when capitalism forgets it has a material substrate? When it untethers from labour and resources?
G.L.:
Ecologists would say that moment happens when electricity or water is cut off from data centres—the revenge of resources.
M.P.:
That's an important point. It’s why firms like BlackRock are investing in energy infrastructure—not to power human activity, but to keep data centres running. But we think it's a mistake to assume computation depends on a particular material substrate. Computation is transcendental. You can compute on slime moulds, on crowds of people holding signs, on horse tracks.
Capitalism can run on anything. Even if you unplug one regime, it can scale into another. To us, capitalism is, to some extent, transcendental.
G.L.:
I want to distinguish abstraction from speculation. They're related, but not the same. Speculation involves betting—subjective decisions—whereas abstraction seems inevitable. How do these relate?
M.P.:
There’s definitely a relationship. The provocation we're making is that speculation doesn’t have to be subjective. It can be objective. You can make bets using mathematics alone. The only real limit is scale.
G.L.:
But can this apply to concepts themselves? Speculative concepts, theory?
M.P.:
Absolutely. We identify as speculative because we’re trying to articulate something partially unknowable. That’s inspired by speculative realism—how do you build a framework to access something beyond human experience? Think of Meillassoux and the arche-fossil.
G.L.:
Speculative concepts start abstract but get loaded with meaning and eventually become protocols. In your work, can concepts scale? Can theories lift?
R.A.T.:
We come from outside disciplinary thinking. That gives us freedom but also bluntness. What's different is that the book has no messianic belief that capitalism will collapse under its own contradictions. We’re not outlining praxis. We’re offering an analytical framework—something others can use to think differently.
G.L.:
You mention software finance. I want to ask about crypto and blockchain. They’re examples of speculative concepts becoming protocols. Why, in such an infinite system, are there only 21 million bitcoin?
M.P.:
That’s a fascinating question. Is the hard limit about number, or is value logarithmic? We keep subdividing bitcoin infinitely. Will we ever reach 21 million, or will we just keep approaching it? I don’t know the answer.
G.L.:
There’s a whole economy of speculative concepts, mediated by venture capital. How do you see that, since VC isn’t central in your book?
M.P.:
We’re more interested in private equity. Venture capital is a gate, but once things reach scale, capital decouples. Venture capital decision-making feels random, tempestuous, almost computational to me—more like a downstream expression of capital itself.
Marc Andreessen’s meme-coin investment is a good example. It feels less like human judgment and more like a computational mechanism.
G.L.:
Yet philosophy seems absent from Silicon Valley, with the exception of people like Peter Thiel. Why this gap?
M.P.:
Our answer is blunt: theory hasn’t done its homework. It lacks technical understanding of software, finance, and enterprise realities. It’s a skill issue. That said, whenever I go to San Francisco, I’m overwhelmed by how present theory actually is there—just not in the ways we expect.
You're right that a lot of it comes downstream from Peter Thiel. But I was just in a very strange, interesting little incubator there with some Peter Thiel people, some Antikythera people for example. And on the bookshelf was a lot of the books that you and I love, for sure.
So I think that you're right, perhaps with respect to the current generation, but I think that the youth is hungry for some real concurrency between the things that we like to talk about and the way that their actual world looks, that we're not providing. I think that actually there's a failure on behalf of theory to speak to the real conditions on the ground.
And I don't mean… that doesn't mean that we don't have to be speculative. I think we have to be speculative. I think being speculative is great. I think the problem is that we're not being speculative in a way that's recognisable. And to this, that's where the book kind of begins, with this very bombastic statement about how actually a lot of theory doesn't really feel like it's describing the world, certainly the world that I walk around in, which tends to be about a real mass misapprehension of what Silicon Valley looks like.
So again, I'm going to software, but that's the American economy right now.
G.L.:
From your perspective… in the book you've really failed to mention, at least, how you retrospectively look back at hacker culture. I mean, it's not playing a role in the book, even in terms of a critical reassessment, let's say, of its dominant obsession—for instance with surveillance, with privacy, with the whole protocol around open source and free software. All of this is not playing any role in your assessment, not even in a critical framework.
I understand maybe these are things of the past, or maybe they were related to a hacker culture that was closely aligned to the globalists, to neocon or neoliberal factions, to a world of NGOs dominated by Soros or whatever. I don't know. But it's quite remarkable that, even though you have this obsession with software, hacker culture and hacker ethics, and all the values I just mentioned, are completely absent.
M.P.:
Another victim of the beautiful, re-consumptive capacity of capitalism that we all know and love, right? I mean, if I think about the latest hackathon I went to, it was an institutional, organized hackathon within a company. I participated, I had a lot of fun, but hacker culture is… yeah, I think it's unfortunately a kind of “C object.”
Open source is not. Open source is interesting. We could have an extensive conversation about this, for sure. I'm thinking about, for example, the tools that are used right now to develop large language model applications. LangChain, LangGraph—these are open source tools, right? That's pretty amazing. That's really powerful.
G.L.:
And the Chinese are using it in optimal ways.
M.P.:
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. But I think the question then is to what extent these tools are actually the surface through which value is being generated within a given market. I think the answer to that, I would say, is no. But I'm certainly very interested in open source software.
I wouldn’t say it’s a blind spot in the book. I would say it’s something that we are writing off for now, principally because of the problematics of scale. China is another thing—that if there’s an Exocapitalism 2, it’ll be called Exocapitalism 2: Coal in China. There are certainly a lot of capitalist ways to read China. Maybe R.A.T. can comment on that.
G.L.:
Yeah, the Chinese reading of your book is something I look forward to. I want to maybe go to a last topic of this interview, and that is the question of the terms that you're using to describe these obvious processes of regression. You are using the terms retardation, drag, and malaise.
These are things that so many people see around them, and of course Europe is completely dominated by these processes. But we can see them happening globally. It’s not like the whole world is dominated by dematerialisation and lift and scale—if only! We would all have to suffer from hypergrowth here and there.
Quite the opposite. Especially in ideological terms, many people feel the drag. So can you say something about the specific choice of these three terms and what they mean to you? Because you seem to link them only to this kind of human, all-too-human need to drag the system down in order to get some attention from the system.
But are there also objective forms of regression, not only subjective ones—from the human side?
R.A.T.:
There are a bunch of concepts in the book that are important to us. That trilogy is kind of the core of lift’s counterforce: drag, and fold, which is a very important term.
Fold filters through from Leibniz through Deleuze and so on. And I think maybe the starting point is understanding fold and unfolding as dual forces that lift and drag at the same time. There is a conceptual richness to drag that has to do with the human attempt to embed ourselves into a process that we know will not lead us anywhere good or interesting—an attempt to imitate the lifting process.
So folding happens in a two-way relationship: as things lift, and as we try to drag. When we speak about dragging mechanisms—retardation, the development of bureaucratic mechanisms that imitate the lifting of capital—we are portraying this kind of funny, performative engagement with a reality that is alien to us, and that gets translated into daily management and administration.
Marek, maybe you want to discuss the idea of an objective possibility?
M.P.:
Yeah. By objective, I think you mean… certainly there’s the affective domain of drag, which is malaise. There’s drag as in drag show—drag performativity—which we’re definitely playing with.
But the most important component of drag is bureaucratization: roughing up surface area so that businesses can inject weird meta-managerial software or protocols into things.
G.L.:
Some call that protocolization.
M.P.:
Yeah, absolutely. We’re trying to incorporate protocolization into a wider object. And it has something to do with scale. Once a business gets big enough, a human resources department becomes necessary. There’s a gradual tendency for organizations to assume particular structures simply because of size and regulatory requirements.
This involves bringing humans back into the system to do specific things. That’s the drag layer: bureaucracy, regulatory incision, performative state functions. And importantly, drag creates an accelerative feedback loop with lift. The more you cut open, the more lift you generate. The faster lift moves, the weirder things get.
G.L.:
There’s another term you use often in the book—arbitrage. Is that part of this as well?
M.P.:
For us, arbitrage is the seed through which capitalism exists. We don’t read capitalism through labour dynamics so much as through arbitrage.
G.L.:
But still as a regressive form?
M.P.:
Regressive in what sense?
G.L.:
It upholds the unlimited force—
M.P.:
Oh, yes—regressive in that sense, absolutely.
R.A.T.:
At the beginning of the book we introduce capitalism as a translation between different worlds, almost a cosmology. That translation is where arbitrage plays a role. Through translation, something becomes something else, and that’s where value is extracted.
We also apply this to labour: moving away from a Marxist conception of labour as value added to material reality, toward labour as an injection of volatility. That explains why hardware economies—labour-heavy systems—produce less volatility than software economies, where labour has been lifted out of the process.
G.L.:
I associate arbitrage more with processes of capture—the almost cancerous liberation of the sciences, as Baudrillard described it. There’s a moment of arbitrage where capture becomes possible.
R.A.T.:
Baudrillard uses the term fractal states.
M.P.:
And the index there is volatility.
G.L.:
Are you going to extend this speculative proposition into further work, or do you want to continue pushing concepts to their limits?
M.P.:
This book was a speculative exercise, or almost a hyperstitional one. Publishing it was a way to test whether something was actually there. And it worked. It generated a flurry of conversations.
In a way, we followed our own prescriptions: we released it, watched the market, and the market looked good. So we may double down. We’re completely bootstrapped, institutionally independent, but we are working on another book—very much about AI. And I’m especially interested in situating this work in China, which represents enormous speculative and protocol-level potential.
R.A.T.:
Publishing is always an act of naivety and modesty at the same time. The engagement that has emerged—from interviews like this, from the book tour—is feeding back into our thinking. A book is always partial, no matter how good.
We’re absorbing these energies now before releasing something else in the hopefully near future.
G.L.:
Okay, I want to leave it here. Thank you very much, and good luck with the book and the launch.
R.A.T.:
Thank you so much
M.P.:
It’s such an honour—thank you so much. We’re really delighted.