Exocapitalism:
economies with absolutely no limits (2025)
by Marek Poliks & Roberto Alonso Trillo
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Authored by Marek Poliks and Roberto Alonso Trillo
Foreword by Charles Mudede
Afterword by Alex Quicho
Illustrations by Avocado Ibuprofen
Art & Design by Palais Sinclaire
Layout & Typography by Polymnia Tsinti and Palais Sinclaire
Metadata:
Cat#: BECOMING010
Dimensions: 13x19cm
Binding: Perfect Bound
Pages: 218 pages
ISBN: 978-9925-8156-7-8 (Print), 978-9925-8156-8-5 (Digital)
Language: English
Edition: First
Released: August 2025
To be cited as:
Poliks, M., Trillo, R.A.(2025) Exocapitalism: Economies with absolutely no limits. Berlin/Nicosia: Becoming. 978-9925-8156-7-8.
About:
It’s been called, provocative, emancipatory, cutting-edge, and even, in some places, a bit caustic. Perhaps it is provocative because it begins to depart from Marxism as-we-know-it, and, with all the relevant necessary reverences applied, it attempts, dare I say, to step forward from the discourse of labour & production—not that what follows is somehow simpler, because it’s not. Yet as the authors contend, the world has already moved on, and capital, that same old capital, continues to do what it has always done, at myriad different scales, and in myriad worlds. Capital may well have already broken free of us, and so where exactly does that leave you, homocapitalus?
It would be in-keeping with the style of Charles Mudede to raise the question of whether we are on the cusp of a second ejection from Eden, and that means that whether we are ready or not, we have to step through the looking glass into a new conversation. That is what the authors wish to do here, to push the conversation to a new position, a position which understands DoorDash drivers, MMORPG gold farmers, and remote workers, accounts for AWS architecture, for memecoins and blockchain, for BlackRock, for the Internet (but for reals this time), for High-Frequency Trading and the LinkedIn economy, for Scale, for Airplane Miles and Club card points, and for ADHD & Adderall.
This book is provocative because it is the proverbial elephant in the system, but it is nonetheless rigorous, and written in good spirit—this isn’t a downer, this is cleaning up after a bender, after a 500-year drug-accelerated romance with a creature that counts its age in millennia. So what is left in this wasteland? Well, Arbitrage for one; other monumental processes like Lifting, Holding, Dragging and Folding roam around above our heads.
These two researchers have an enormous insight into contemporary economics, technology and finance, and yet they write as musicians, as the poetic theorists of antiquity, which, for us, makes this text epic. With Charles Mudede and Alex Quicho holding Exocapitalism down, it looks as though Marek Poliks & Roberto Alonso Trillo are here to stay.
What are the critics saying?
NEW MODELS:
Berlin based community and media space
Alessandro Sbordoni:
Theorist, Editor
Author of Semiotics of the End (2023)
Tiziana Terranova:
Activist, Theorist
Author of After the Internet (2022)
Suhail Malik:
Theorist, Lecturer (Goldsmiths) and Author
Sure, human labour has been a pit-stop in this prolific adaptation but, as Poliks and Trillo contend, that's only a domestication of exocapitalism, handy for a little moment in its history—and of course for the self-regard of its benighted (and, honestly, now tired) critics. Detached from this stabilising narcissism, Exocapitalism does us the immense favour of staying true to its anti-object: thematically promiscuous, scale agnostic, attentive to its n-tupled deleteriousness, Poliks and Trillo advance a latency theory of accumulation by which, as they put it, capitalism gets to be done on anything.
You won't get an easy out—you already have the dignity of human labour for that—but you will get to see some shapes of what mutability looks like when it's optimised for accumulation by ubiquitous volatilisation.
Geert Lovink:
Founder of Institute of Network Cultures,
Net Theorist
0nty:
Film-maker, Theorist
Volume editor of Dialogues on CoreCore (2024)
Bios:
Marek Poliks is a researcher in the philosophy of technology, especially with respect to deep learning. He’s based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Marek and his primary research partner Roberto Alonso Trillo (HKBU) have been working to situate deep learning tools as endosymbiotic reproductive infrastructure (inorganic vehicles through which biological, epistemological, and social information is encoded, subject to contingent processes, and transmitted).
Roberto Alonso Trillo is a theorist and artist whose work spans cultural theory, media philosophy, and experimental sound. Based in Hong Kong, his research engages the aesthetic and political dimensions of machine learning, with particular attention to infrastructural critique and performativity. In ongoing collaboration with Marek Poliks, he investigates AI theory and speculative design as part of a broader inquiry into automation and cultural production. His interdisciplinary practice extends into sound art, post-instrumental music, and critical pedagogy.
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