Exocapitalism: economies with absolutely no limits (2025)

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"The critical orthodoxy is slowing; it’s tired, it’s not especially good at the internet, it’s probably never manned a Starbucks counter or an anonymous cubicle. Its younger adepts – though digitally native – are chronically underemployed, unavailable, drowning in the student debt (or student opportunity cost) required for entry into the critical apparatus. Few have any patience for the numbing slop-speak of the LinkedIn economy, the libertarian enclave of forex and HFT and memecoins, the quarter-zip depravity of employment at the charnel houses of McKinsey or Deloitte or Accenture, the blazingly random mood-swings of venture capital that lubricate all of the above. This impatience is – in the parlance of the above – a blocker: it means that the critical apparatus underestimates the power of the software economy, struggles to articulate the morphological density of digitally-realized capitalism, comprehensively ignores the functional death of labor, and doesn’t understand scale."

"Our cosmology borrows foremost from Elena Esposito and Suhail Malik, whose work on financial ontology we hold in an almost sacred loose-grip. From Suhail Malik, we come to interpret a fundamental axiom at the core of capitalism as we understand it, that inefficiency (time-dilation, friction, interposition, mediation) is the same as value – a principle contrary to that enhoused in Marx and Weber and their heirs, for whom capitalism is the reckless scramble for time-efficiency at all costs. This principle also flips the Marxian construction of value on its head, from a thing that is extracted by a capitalist from a labor force, to a thing that can be generated out of nothing, independent from any material logics, simply by virtue of the interposition of latency between worlds."

"Mergers and acquisitions happen constantly, a wet market where hulking translucent beasts swap organs with each other for liquidity, or where freestanding, inchoate bodies are pulled in into endosymbiotic relations. Blobs accrete to titanic scales, at which point they either bud off with parthenogenetic thrust or become so dotted with advanced cancers that they cease to be recognizable as single blobs at all. Others just pop into puffs of spores.— It’s hard to even situate this organ market as competitive, it’s a free-for-all of limitless organs. These translucent hulks simply reach through each other. Sometimes they get stuck and merge."