Une analyse rigoureuse, originale et provocatrice de la dynamique autonome du capitalisme et de la finance spéculative d'aujourd'hui.
At the centre of Marek Poliks and Roberto Alonso Trillo's argument is the idea that capital does not belong to humans, it belongs to—and is governed by—itself. Traditional economic theory struggles to keep up with the rapid rate of acceleration, and this book steps in to address this:
"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."
This book details, like no other book has yet, how capital is miraculously gleaned from the abyss like Lucretian matter that creates more matter from itself:
"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."
While at times, the language is academic, precise and drenched in meticulous citations, a vivid and charismatic voice takes charge throughout:
"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."
There are three chapters dedicated to three philosophical concepts that exemplify the theoretical work being done here: Fold, Drag & Lift. These well-elaborated concepts help situate this theory within a very contemporary discourse, one which winks at Baudrillard or the CCRU; one where, as Achim Szepanski wrote: "Capital might, at moments, seem like the Evil Twin of Deleuze".
« A masterpiece... Nick Land for adults. »
0nty
« 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. » Alessandro Sbordoni
« 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. »
New Models
« 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 modeled 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. »
Tiziana Terranova
Marek Poliks est un chercheur en philosophie de la technologie, en particulier en ce qui concerne l'apprentissage profond. Il est basé à Minneapolis, dans le Minnesota.
Roberto Alonso Trillo est un théoricien et un artiste basé à Hong Kong dont le travail couvre la théorie culturelle, la philosophie des médias et les pratiques expérimentales du son. Ses recherches portent sur les dimensions esthétiques et politiques de l'apprentissage automatique, avec une attention particulière pour la critique infrastructurelle et la performativité.
