Exocapitalism: economies with absolutely no limits (2025)

by Marek Poliks & Roberto Alonso Trillo

Specifications:

Dimensions: 13x19cm
Binding: Perfect Bound
Pages: 218 pages
ISBN: 978-9925-8156-7-8
Paper: 300g/m² Bilderdruck Matt & 80g/m² Munken White
Language: English
Released: 1^st August 2025

Credits:

Author: Marek Poliks, Roberto Alonso Trillo
Foreword: Charles Mudede
Afterword: Alex Quicho
Illustrations: Avocado Ibuprofen
Art & Design: Palais Sinclaire
Layout & Typography: Polymnia Tsinti and Palais Sinclaire

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What are the critics saying?

NEW MODELS:

Berlin based community and media space

"Exocapitalism offers an alternative to Nick Land that is desperately needed—not because it is more sober (it isn't), but because it is less horny. The sexy AI alien of technocapital is revealed to be nothing more than a Rule 34 drawing of slime mold, or perhaps a kind of yeast, that meek inheritor of the Earth leaving all of humanity behind."

Alessandro Sbordoni:

Theorist, Editor
Author of Semiotics of the End (2023)

“You will never look at Salesforce the same way... It is one thing to realize that one is a serf for a techno-feudalist master; it is another thing to realize that one is a vavasour to a piece of digital land that is no longer planar but scalar, dragged only in order to be lifted once again. There is no masterdom at the scale of capital: only an algorithm all unto itself.”

Tiziana Terranova:

Activist, Theorist
Author of After the Internet (2022)

“This is not an argument for a new phase of capitalism, but rather a cosmological, retroactive take on the continuity of capital as an inhuman algorithm modelled on finance and software rather than factory and labor, manifesting in the contemporary topology of the spongy and blob-like digital business formations—this is bound to be controversial, but it is worth contending with. So love it or hate it, Exocapitalism is original, enlightening and infuriating: a book to be reckoned with.”

Suhail Malik:

Theorist, Lecturer (Goldsmiths) and Author

Not even a thing, capitalism is mutable; it is only its mutants. It's whatever x-capitalism works right now. So let x = neoliberal / racial / industrial / platform / autocratic / financial / green / techno / bio / etc. as you prefer — even, now, on its way to the another yet-more-whacked variant, let x = X too. Concatenated, meshed without term or unity, capitalism is only beside itself: an exocapitalism, as Marek Poliks & Roberto Alonso Trillo succinctly call it.
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

"From the chain of signifiers—platform extractivism, green deal, crypto, and techno-feudalism—there is no exit, but exo-; your cosmo-finance model for the precarious. Once capital lost its fixed references, new speculative worlds open up, each with their own logic. There may be infinite complexity, yet, in the current geo-political whirlwind it all comes down to a reduction of flows into a simple economic model, and Poliks & Trillo navigate this abstraction ladder in an elegant way. Revolving around software and data-centres, capitalism is a germ which produces worlds."

0nty:

Film-maker, Theorist
Volume editor of Dialogues on CoreCore (2024)

"a grounded masterpiece in accelerationist theory...
Nick Land for adults.”

About:

There is a touch of destiny with this one. We have really pushed it as far as we can, and as we stay up all night trying to put the final touches on everything, the reverberations are starting to return. 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.

Biographies:

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.