marek poliks & roberto alonso trillo, exocapitalism — review
marek poliks and roberto trillo are really scared of capitalism, but really want to make it sound cool and to forgive it for what its doing to us. they do mostly succeed at this, but the cost is that the theory becomes a local glorification rather than a stable global account.
- cultural weight
aside from the review, its important to situate marek and roberto since the work itself isn't a finished book but a rare case of a "live book" a heavy and nearly constant promotional campaign by everything circling around m&t. the book isn't critiquing capital from outside or even alongside it. it's a product of someone whose professional existence is already fully inside the "lifted" economy — google award, mit touring, the disintegrator podcast featuring largely post-anthropocrisal authors, metalabel, foreign objekt, bianjie systems and antikythera — m&t use theory to describe and implicitly legitimate the conditions of their own practice. this isnt always a bad thing, on the contrary, their status doesnt matter when considering the actual work. the reason this does matter is because the book turns from an object study into a partial subject study, they're holding seminars and genuienly working towards this concept because they want to understand salesforce as a phenomenon present in reality, not as something that can hinge on a particular point. this motivation is a quirky and insightful one, it locates immanent critique within the subject itself, it's the same level of interest that d&g operated on back when they were writing their own works. the difference here is that the position that they're encountering capitalism from is not necessarily one that allows them to see it nearly as well as someone far from their particular standings. the lifted position produces a specific blind spot, you can describe lift accurately but you can't feel its drag.
through successful networking endeavours they have in a sense opened up vantage points for themselves inside the current ai discourse, and not only that, but also to justify their own authorship, to be given the platform and attempt to convince a broader public that they arent just practically, but theoretically valuable, situating themselves alongside the strongest names in the history of the discourse surrounding capital, audaciously but not necessarily even unjustifiably alongside marx, even to the point where they use land's derogatory partial dismissal of their work as idealist "hegel's grandchildren" for even more promotion of the same piece. yet, the ai discourse itself is a product of a type of meta-discourse that perpetuates the new prerogatives of capitalism in a way alienated from previous discourses. this same alienation is visible in the work, where, as will be shown later, m&t argue scrupiously against most current understandings of capital "marvel avengers universe of theory" from within the frame of understanding they have acquired through their own lives, a rare and dangerous move which requires the book to hold far more weight than it ends up being able to most of the time.
this move has been done plenty of times, over the last ten years the term capitalism has been gored half to death, rather than featuring analysis of the gore it supposedly produces. land himself spoke negatively about the "gore capitalism" publication, valencia sayak's recent title for semiotext. some more famous titles in the last ten years include zuboff, pistor, piketty, bregman, duflo, brill and giridharadas, not to even mention collqhoun or anyone circling that sphere. in fact, marek poliks and roberto trillo do this exact same move in their own work, they literally have a section just like this one where they also list down what everyone has said about capitalism, yet, contrary to this one now that clearly blends them in, their move is supposed to isolate their work from everyone elses, to show how they're the supposed first (or maybe audaciously second, after land) to conceive of capitalism in contemporary lenses. it is in fact and as a result of this clear that most analysis of capitalism today is abstracted so deeply into academic research circuts that the imament critique of figures like lefebvre, adorno etc are long gone, with more accessible forms of the same otherwise heavy past discourse appearing through more recent figures like byung chul han. what distinguishes poliks however is precisely the commitment to question the conditions of his own labour rather than to question the conditions of labour as an abstract topic.
this is directly contra-linear to his writing style, which is abstract yet not detached, analytically postulated yet polemically backhanded, and far too strongly argued when compared to the attitudes this book has been exposed to in its own background writing process. in the new center research conferences, the genuine tentativeness that marek expresses "did we introduce a demon into the world? i've had late-night conversations with my wife about whether this is good or bad" is absent from the book's tone but could suggest that he's more uncertain about the normative stakes than the book itself presents. marek regularly features this book in his own reels, networking with peers around the idea of simplifying the work for a live audience, and doing interviews for platforms like novara media, where the viewer reception seems not only to be negative towards his theory but also antagonistic towards the entire frame marek inhabits. in the beginning of this year, marek wrote in an instagram post "why are we fighting for the ownership and monetization of ideas and information [...] why is the left in general consigning itself to finding its meaning and dignity in labour [...] the fight for artists has to foremost be the fight for universals and not for the microfinancialization of creative enterprise".
marek situates himself along the graeber line, not only in this writing but in his book, where he accepts the now well defended near consensus premise that debt preceeded barter historically, together with the bullshit-jobs inspired idea that ubi is the only way the working class will be able to support itself in an increasingly reified global market economy. marek's fight against microfinancialization seems to not even be about the way in which subjects project or re-introduce the same logic that large conglomerates do surrounding intellectual property, but more distinctly, that microfinancialization itself is opposed to care, and that the state's main role isn't to mediate between violence and resource extraction (that for marek is the "empire's role" in a decisive move which he weaponizes against hardt&negri, arguing their own conception failed due to them writing it right before 9/11), but to mediate between capitalism's lifting of the market economy away from slow physical substrates and into abstract currents, and the protections and securities that humans need on multiple levels, including dignity.
in exocapitalism he writes "the more humans and the more dignity afforded to the details of their respective dynamics to the whole group, the greater the complexity of the web, the more difficult it is to manage". he regularly situates capitalism as increasingly hostile not towards labour as such but towards its continued existence, and seems to correlate this microfinancialization to the broader theory of exocapitalism - the idea that as markets lift away from human bodies and abstractions fold and deepen, the human layer may even be left stranded and unmanaged, having to become increasingly hostile over its own labour conditions, an extremely justified and underreported angle. in "the data center doesnt exist", m&t go further into this labour debacle, they argue that the "datacenter" now exists primarily as a financial object: a bundle of contracts, debts, and speculative claims, and they identify the race that will define the following year as one where the financialization of massively-centralized infrastructure will compete with the idea or maybe even the death of software as we currently know it. this is a natural extension of their concept of the fold — if software is already a bundle of contracts that is supposed to create the atmosphere of sovereign capacity, then the datacenter is already a speculation on future compute capacity and not a physical building.
yet, this entire discourse also points to something more difficult. poliks and trillo are writing as subjects within the discourse thats trying to figure out whether theory can still be considered labour within the service and commercial sectors, which makes it seem like the book is a justification of their jobs existence rather than a testament to it. unlike benjamin or junger, who wrote against the grain of their current times even whilst being subsumed by the objects of their own analysis, or considered political adversaries for or against these systems, marek and poliks end up writing something far more cynical in favor of a set of subjects they don't actually seem to be sure about. should we accelerate past human dignity, or is our labour actively being compromised or reconsidered by the very same actors and systems we are in conversation with?
jünger could write narratives pseudo incentivizing or glorifying total mobilization like in marble cliffs and also support narratives against the "war in ideology" to the french president near his death primarily because he wrote against his own comfort and safety. he was both linked to a plot to kill hitler even whilst participating in the german army, and was wounded dozens of times in both world wars. benjamin could write about the artwork in the age of mechanical reproduction because he was being destroyed by the forces he was analyzing. controversially, he died crossing borders in a way that critics have been attempting to link to heideggers "children" for the longest. he also wrote tractacts directly against junger during that time. the existential stakes in the lives of these thinkers often produced the conceptual pressure. in thinkers like ballard, wallace or delilio, the existential mundaneity produces a force in the concepts.
what all these thinkers have in common is that theyre in an intentionally non symmetrical relationship to their own work when looked at from the broader pov of their life. in much the same way, poliks also has an asymmetrical position towards theory, but this one doesn't seem entirely intentionally positioned. in the face of mit and nyu shanghai, and considering himself as a successor to the landian influence, poliks may feel he has to write somewhat positively about machinic intelligence. on the other hand, becoming press itself is a french theory inspired establishment that still has roots not only to psychoanalysis but commitments to post-marxist lenses. poliks is in the middle of all of it much like anyone else in theory who is serious today, yet his statements consistently dont direclty match his rhetoric nor his positioning. yet, this is more of a curious case than a strict contradiction.
yet its also a tell. after an extremely unproductive comparison between deleuze and land (unproductive on its own right since it retroactively compares levels of deterritorialiaztion and then stamps a "capital sticks to itself" at the end as a rhetorical gesture rather than a conceptually valid moment - but also because everyone in the discourse already knows about all of this and its proven time and time again - even with works on it like the recently released xenology - that its difficult to attach directly to those specific concepts and generate something new) m&t randomly drop this line: "exocapitalism recognizes no westphalian agencies, apart from those it lazily indexes as surface complexity onto which to graft the fractal engorgement of arbitrage. and why would it? the state has nothing to offer and nothing to withhold".
whats so funny about a line like this is that its framed to sound exactly like a project, or more specifically, the type of project benjamin bratton loves to imagine in short works like "the myth of blurope" or longer ones like "accept all cookies". m&t are speaking about this supposed transcendental concept through declaratory sentiments, not through speculations or scientific curiosities, but through social-epistemic legislation protocols that frame "exocapitalism loves doing this and that, just look at patricia reed!" or "westphalia, exocapitalism would never!" (both parodic rephrasals not transliteralizations). this positions their own concept within this polemical issue, even if their intention is clearly to conceptually build it up and to genuienly argue exocapitalism doesnt particularly recognize or care for human establishments or institutions that attempt to introduce drag past capital-accumulation-productive-limits.
this part of the text ends with "there is, however, an urgent crisis elsewhere, a crisis that exceeds all the fabulated marxological crisis above in both scope and priority, which is fundamentally a crisis in the continued social reproduction of the human species" since exo has replaced the concept of ideology with drag, of course according to it there would be a crisis in the continued social reproduction of the human species. the crisis is narratively connected with the autonomization of capital, yet, where lift is an extremely strong concept for understanding current market dynamics, its also extremely weak at explaining exactly how human survival correlates with capital's actual use for human creative and sustained intelligence (especially in the building of capital thus far) something m&t never actually challenge in the work. their use of habermas and the legitimation crisis and the "marxological crises" is not only polemical but way too soft on its landing.
"the 21st-century state is already barely a state" doesn't engage the normative dimension of habermas's position, which is about what the state is supposed to do, not what it currently does. even if the book isnt interested in normativity, it doesnt answer its own questions about crisis. it starts them only to make exocapitalism look even cooler in retrospect, it calls land "not sufficiently nihilistic" and then it basically "goons" (their usage) even more than he does about exocapitalism. the drag section is supposed to help out with this problem. except, the drag section does something even more awful than the most staunch polemicizings in this book.
the problem with some parts of this chapter is that you cannot try to build polemics and also build concepts. the first happens because of power and status games, the second because of an actual commitment to theory and thinking. if you generate polemics accidentally out of fervor or a genuine problematizizng of social territories thats one thing that has existed in the frankfurt adjacent discourse, but the whole namedropping part is not only useless but kind of looks derogatory, cope, negarestani as an uncle who's "already been through all of this", land mentioned again in another book for no reason (the general assesment they make of him centralizing the human only to break it apart is good but it gives the feeling that it only exists so they can scaffold and legitimate their own discourse rather than for productive purposes).
not to mention, the fact they mentioned human dignity is in tension with their concept but that theyre sitting on the other side of it, and having to perform that humility for the readership base because of the structural position of their own discourse rather than them feeling they have to do that for themselves, or even if they did feel that way, they still would be far less exulted since the theoretical space around this problem is clearly thin enough to where their own existence could simply justify themselves if it justifies thousands of other people within that same system who dont need to write a book like this.
the scaling distinctions (four different types of scaling concepts) are constructed well, but theres a tension where scale meets software, at least in this chapter, you cant argue that generativity arises out of a ficitonalization of price floors or distribution costs, since, even if networks work that way, networks dont transcend the limits of positions within the world, only their perceived values. generation here seems to imply more than its capable of proving. thats the whole argument on the other side, that ai is a social discourse disguising itself through power manuevers. for software to have a nearly "command-like providential/testamential" presence in the world, it must have exterior-facing modules, things that are generative that arent social contracts.
things that make social contracts easier could just be the interfaces to a violence-behind-the-scenes, that smoothing over might not be happening because of what a software does but because of what a software disguises, or what a software is used for, or how the software came to arise as a result of other actions. as for capital being both a germ and something that scales through lift even if its defined as not very inter-scalar in its own property, that actually makes perfect sense, they explain it clearly in the lift chapter, lift is the inverse of financialization aka the thing that drags time away from you so that you can shop. lift is clearly not about going to the sky or expropriating your own value out of yourself. which is also why only half of the point from the terranova/sbordini/malik pre-comments make sense. lift is clearly about stagnation and not transposition. it is true that lift has the property of constant deterritorialiaztion and re-subsumption and transformative moulding, but for m&t this is not adjacent to the idea that capitalism is scalar, on the contrary as they say.
"if "exocapitalism" recognised that it is closer to business cybernetics in software than the new "capital" it wants to be, it would be far more compelling." as kitsumute says
- content claims
to tackle the foreword and afterwords first, the main distinguishing feature of the foreword is that mudede makes a point about how labor was never actually the goal of capital. he brings in tugan-baranovsky's "self-expansion of capital" thesis which is the old marxist heresy (now supposedly proven true) that capital could theoretically operate without workers, consumers, or markets. mudede shows us how wages were never workers' property to begin with according to the kozo school of marxism, something orthodox marxists couldnt see or werent influenced by at the time.
mudede calls this "liberatory," which is strange given that his book is a partial reconciliation of the thematic, one that is far more rhetorically weaponized by m&t who outright call previous critical readings of labor "cope". mudede seems to be trying to soften their rhetorical weight by re-situating them inside the extended marxist tradition rather than presenting it how it is - they are actively antagonisting in every way they can allow themselves to be - even towards the literature that they cruically didn't involve (90s as opposed to 80s french theory) that they're supposed to be surpassing at times. on that same note, mudede does another productive thing by showing us how baudrillard already mentions similar ideas to lift, such as the idea that money is already "in astral orbit", a reference m&t never even get close to in their work.
mudede also makes a claim of his own "reification and lifting are close rather than distant cousins." since he correctly sees that m&t aren't interested in landian acceleration more than they are analyzing exactly how reification impacts our own view of the world in the sense that corporations can reify human dignity and abstract our own inclinations. yet, isn't it odd how they never even mention it once? so much for distant cousins, given that reification as a theory could have been an important supplement to understanding how subjectivity moulds under capital.
understanding how ceo's or corporate entities conceive of their own workers seems like something that could help explain how lift works intersubjectively in the sense of its impact, which wouldn't even be contrary to the broader idea that exo doesn't actually care about its human hosts at all, since an analysis of the effects of lift on the human layer would be a seperate undertaking that doesnt seem to oppose the books thesis anymore than it opposes maybe the interest of m&t to actually go into that territory.
as for the afterword "sex money feelings die" by alex quicho, quicho reframes the entire work to correctly lineate it along its own idealist axis as an almost ancient architecture or cosmology. "the body is the basic unit of the real. lift draws capital up and away from the real. it is the operation of abstraction that turns cyclones into insurance windfalls; mood-swings into market crashes; and interfaces into goldmines.".
alex continues: "as poliks and trillo front-load: exocapitalism is a cosmology, pinpointing the imperfectly valuable and valuably im perfect mistranslation between two or more worlds. “server farms are places of death,” writes byung chul-han. “the revolt of death cannot unhinge the capitalist system. what is needed is another form of life, one that rescinds the division between life and death and reconnects the two.” there is not much else to be said about the section other than the fact that she allows exocapitalism to be an actual viewpoint rather than a conceptually devoid architectural cluster. m&t are way less worried about how exocapitalism actually connects to the broader literature, so much so that this reworking of some of their points actually seems like the justified and positional retrofitting they may not actually desire.
quicho also goes into the broader also ignored question by m&t of how exactly the contemporar commerical market produces feelings of ecstasy and sensations that glorify these feelings. the reason this is even the contested subject matter is because lift as a concept partially emerges out of the very same mystificationary qualities that marx originally noted were "vampiric" in it, the idea that commodities are the last real "transcendent" concept we have left, a genuine mark to something extra-libidnal or extra-bodily that doesnt collapse into pure function or pure physicality. quicho writes in reference to the recent and very scattered "immediacy" by kornbluh: "access and proximity are mistaken for eros and intimacy, while high-grade intensity obstructs internalized experience—blocking, the argument goes, any chance of developing a faithful understanding of the world. "
yet, thematically it doesnt work very well since m&t do not even for a second actually consider libidinality to any capacity within their own conceptions or actually even desire to extrapolate on how commodities interact with human perceptions, since, by their own wording: "it is indeed our proposition that capitalism, as exocapitalism, is infinite, unbound, untethered, inde pendent, totally unbothered with the human condition, completely preoccupied with its own obsessions." they don't explain it in the text, but it isn't just their proposition that this is what exo should be about, its their proposition that this is the only thing exo say about this topic to begin with, its a far more theological move than you'd think on first glance.
now, for the work itself. exocapitalism is a new theory of markets, trading and labor as they currently exist that wants to also be a systemic genealogy of capitalism, with all the inflation but none of the nuance to make that happen. there are a few issues in the scale and fold sections. first, it doesnt explain whether platforms all really will eventually fold into one another. also, every platform trying to be the same thing shows how unbounded corporate sovereignities are, or how actual market drivers are corporations that are made up of interest groups that transcend their original mission statements (think about the recent xbox ceo revising their entire brand strategy the last 3 years in 2 months precisely so she can appeal to consumer bases) this is the age old problem of corporations and ernst kantorowicz. yet, this problem doesnt even need to be reduced to the sovereign and corporealist issue necessarily. the point is, this argument is seperate from saas. its also not good enough to explain whether fold is a general characteristic or just a particular thing theyre analyzing. it doesnt even need to be explained why its not good enough, given that a simple search reveals: "oracle provides deep infrastructure control, specialized high-performance database appliances, and complex, customized enterprise-wide integration, which standard saas applications cannot. while saas delivers ready-to-use software, oracle offers the underlying paas (platform as a service) and iaas (infrastructure as a service) to build, manage, and extend those applications
what happens in the "software economy" section right after fold is that they collapse three seperate domains into one domain: production of surplus (classical / marxian) + circulation of capital (exchange differentials) = reflexive amplification (markets acting on themselves). this move is wrong and dangerous because there is a subtle act of inflation on multiple grounds. they want to describe labour through volatility, and explain it through these factors: 1) through the diffuse labor through which the generic abstraction of the underlying asset is produced 2) through currency exchanges and resource availability and 3) market sentiment and speculated risk. they then argue in the end that capitalism can be done on anything. but that subtly redefines capitalism as "the ability for abstraction to become a market" instead of barter or more stable economic forms.
this is because 1) requires a diffuse labour to actually be enacted and 3) requires specific forms of abstraction to already be present. 2) seems stable in both economic forms, but 2) is a problem of circulation that would hardly appear in these forms. going from "labour can be thought of as having different priorities and thus as an essentially new thing in new economic models with less grounding" (true on its own) to "therefore this shows that all of capitalism can and could always be done on anything, and that this is a feature of capitalism intrinsically being this way rather than this particular form of market contingency interacting with capitalism being this way" feels like a slight leap that disregards the nuances or the actual dialectical process that pushes capitalism to intrinsically be a certain way, or worse, for trade to be enacted in functionally dynamic ways. the second act of inflation is about the example itself and its origin.
if m&t use graeber to argue about debt and tokenization being the first historic conflict of capital and the softwareification of circulatory systems of commerece, yet simultaneously use a bartering example as the case where labour is translated to capital accumulation not through labour itself but through the volatility of the price fluctuation between purchasing the wood and building the chair (and then overpricing the chair when nobody else builds them, say, at the perfect moment where wood gets twice as expensive).
in this instance, the final level of abstraction is that the wood then would become more expensive the more of it you already bought. but in the case of soros making a billion dollars from the collapse of the bank of england by burrowing pounds and converting them to deutschdollars then back into pounds and cashing in the difference, the fall of the bank was partially caused by the action that preceeded soros' own prediction about its collapse. in this instance, it is unclear definitively whether such an action wouldve been possible had he not thought to execute the plan that depended on those extra-volatile contingencies that led to the plan happening in circular reasoning, but this example happens in markets that are already volatile.
as capitalism "lifts" trading and securities off the ground, not only do goods become lifted and capital accumulation grows, but surplus itself actually has less tanginble surplus productive value. a part of the value that grew out of industrial capitalism wasnt just the marxian fact of the hyperproduction of goods preventing consumer buyout in endless amounts, but that industry itself created consumers, that surplus value is created partially as an inspiration to enter economies of exchange. yet in the soros example, unlike in the chair example, those high-stakes betting games don't suddenly inspire the bank of london to grow even more so that soros can scam it once again.
its likely that when high-volatility actors lose, the game is a recycling game of capital accumulation, and the actual surplus may be linearly extractable for higher-stakes agents purely from how much translatable, capital-relevant harm you do onto others. oppose this to chair-makers, who can inspire the entire world to suddenly be interested in buying chairs just so they can experience it, who take away from their own labour-potential or total resource amount or from their own time or other intrinsic intensities to purchase this commodity. m&t say "a derivative absorbs all of the volatility produced at lower levels" yet what kind of absorption is this, a re-circulation of organization or a fundamental surplus-gain in total productive forces? trading itself seems to be more of a meta-game of contractual positioning (who owns what) rather than a game of accumulating surplus on all levels (the ability to grow all parts of your capital accumulation simultaneously)
there is another, more striking issue. m&t randomly drop this load-bearing statement when describing the key axiom of the germ: "any entity subject to this axiom (an asset, a derivative, a memecoin) is fungible with any other entity." they then never mention entities ever again, and the axiom hardly survives outside of this page, even if its the most functionally important part of the work.
as for the whole saas section, their whole conceptual narrative revolves and requires the feudal-world distinction and serves as a counter to varoufakis narratives that infrastructural and cloud control will determine the future world-stakes (where varoufakis believes capital directly merges with feudal logics). yet, what is iaas and parts of paas other than the ability to own labour, land and the value it generates as a service? not all services turn into all other services and not all utilities are social contracts. not all social contracts serve the same functions, not all social contracts meta-abstract themselves. and cruically, even in extremely lifted spaces, folds still have functional convergences. if everyone only uses a hand full of social medias, why doesnt that collapse to just one, since its all folding into itself? because the social contract behind it isnt about how services meta-abstract themselves, but about what services are connected to in a broader world of contracts. another minor problem is how scale even is supposed to connect to fold if it is at all, since the property of fold that matters isnt contingent on expansion or up-scaling, it seems to be a characteristic of distinctions and functions being deterritorialized based on an accelerating ground requirement/base update layer than anything to do with social expansion in any meaningful capacity
when they say the data center doesnt exist they partially are trying to expand on a problem that will be noted later in this interview, largely around the concept of iaas and the actual physical possessio n of materials and infrastructure that isnt being circulated as a higher-stakes derivative bond but is a fundamental physical barrier to contact or a boundary maintained by a group like oracle. its not necessarily like they forgot about iaas, but their own argument is definitely rhetorical in this instance. what they actually seem to think is that every land related claim or infrastructural mediator or process - when it goes from feudal to accumulatory logic enters into this sort of ghost form where its far more contractually varied, tradable, liftable, and where the promise to hyperscale is the more investable financial move or becomes meta currency over the actual holder value.
reviewer kitsumute notes the same thing "it's precisely these new technologies that enable increasingly complex financial operations and software mediations (larger databases, faster algorithms, more precise models). software ecosystem contains solutions to social and technological problems," as well as "meanwhile, arbitrage is about deciding what has value, it is tied to power and profit-making - in other words, it is precisely a return of (non/in-human) desire into circuits operating within the horizon delineated by technology. not a proof that capitalism is transcendent entity".
this is also is where the idea that tokens and also speculation generally rule over these elements and where full social media fold merger or total saas blending becomes possible, not through saas interfacing but through the fundamental way or rather speed in which high stakes contracts operate. the iaas counter argument (which is one exocapitalism makes easy and may appear later in this review) needs to develop in a way that tries to simultaneously figure out if labour conditions can cause a rift there (which is the weaker argument, since to accept their frame means arguing the contrary position to it - something they spend the entire group trying to move away from - which also prevents labour from being viewed as historically contingent - something the book is quite strong on trying to prove), or through the mining example where lift kills itself by failing to scale and overfolding too quickly. otherwise this can also happen through some idea that attempts to at the core rebuke the idea that iaas is as liftable as it seems maybe not due to labour but something else.
m&t decisively write "the dedifferentiated space of saas is prone to folds, to invisible but palpable concentrations of revenue as it flows recursively within and among a cascading array of value-added nodes, concentrations that prolapse into new registers of exchange or dimensions of information." then they abuse a marx paragraph in the footnotes to prove their point "but the exchange of commodities is evidently an act characterised by a total abstraction from use value. then one use value is just as good as another, provided only it be present in sufficient quantity. [...] as use values, commodities are, above all, of different qualities, but as exchange values they are merely different quantities, and consequently do not contain an atom of use value.” marx, karl. capital: a critique of political economy. vol. 1"
yet, marx's point is precisely that use value survives this abstraction, or rather that precisely it doesn't disappear, it just becomes irrelevant at the level of exchange. the dedifferentiation is a market-facing illusion, not an ontological fact about the services themselves. oracle's infrastructure control and zapier's webhook stitching are not actually equivalent in use-value terms regardless of how similarly they're priced or contracted. it doesn't help at all that m&t don't mention iaas a single time in this text, and only mention saas briefly to prove their topologization of the topic, or otherwise in the footnotes where they argue that the economy has been "saas-ified" way longer than it became explicit (through ai-ization of service-facing brands), which on its own is a decent point.
when it comes to the lift chapter, the important question m&t need to answer is whether volatility even scales with interest rates, capital, commodity production, market dynamics or self-sustainability? cause if not lift is just a neutral tendency? since lift is a negative concept, it simply describes how it increases pull away from the physical world as it is able to generate higher volatile forms and folds through abstractions. and i get it, dark pools create hold because they prevent an even higher bidder from collapsing the variability too quickly. microsecond trading increases volatility by the opposite principle, creating so much speed that it leads to unexpected outcomes and disperses future power by holding the potential for things to have different outcomes.
to imagine a speculative counter- example to arbitrage being tied to capital accumulation, how about a scenario where we discover a new type of metal at the earths core where essentially its so dangerous to get there but the metal is so worth it because it speeds up semiconductor production speed, the manufacturing of glass and concrete, and the speed of cars by three times due to different unrelated reasons, but also its discovery quickly is plummeting the existing glass/steel/conductor markets. but it just so happens that trading on which corporate or state entity gets to it first in a global micro-war bound to that territory and a dispersed war outside of its bounds (mass assinations, mass mobilization but only in one area) etc actually ends up being more lucrative than investing or helping another entity invest the means to get to it
since by doing this, it becomes an act of sponsorship that increases the chance that they do it so much, that other entities hold on their chance to mine the material and instead mobilize investment and trading facilities to predict their future luck. but as it happens, uncovering this metal or exposing it to oxygen or mining or idk whatever other excuse, makes it have a very short half-life that no company was aware of, which leads to a massive future loss of predictive value, an extremely volatile state followed by an extremely non-volatile state due to instant loss of that material future-volatility-causer etc. aka, volatility expands and abstractions concentrate so fast that the actual ground for those abstractions ends up accidentally causing less volatility? what can be said in other words is that, arbitrage may be a conditional that doesnt always produce capital accumulation, something we havent figured out or found out about yet. it may not be the case that capital accumulation itself always even requires volatility, it could be possible that in different economies, conditions for holding can follow different logics than our historical logic has even headed. the possibilities arent exhausted by the analysis, they do however point to a valid reading of the current historical paradigm.
a second question to consider is the following, doesnt volatility/prediction/abstraction stack with future invention? if a market tries to increase volatility in areas, doesnt that decrease future volatility potential, or the means for human generation to impact the future ways in which abstractions can be leveraged? or am i using volatility and generation in ways m&t dont here? because in my mind, lift should be positive (space elevator as an actual physical anchor of lift, capital literally lifts things out of place by pulling them into a logic where they want to escape their own boundedness/it forces markets to pull into an unknown upwards that doesnt self-define so much as it defines against itself) cause this is actually exterior to the logic of the contract. so that was about lift and time and lift and externality, whereas for lift and the "human layer", there doesnt seem to be a functional claim?
abstractions decontextualize and alienate and push into more complex systems of maintenance with overall less direct forms of governability or agency-decision correlations, lift here seems to be a naming convention rather than the unpacking of a specific functional nuance or new conceptual discovery? it also doesnt prove that this model needs the human further down the chain as before so much as it proves the model of social organization in general pushes everyone in further chains down but the logic of social organization isnt fundamentally being governed by a new modus where the real variables are far seperated from the mechanism, its more like the mechanism has found a way to create a gap and the humans are "holding" (get it?) the ability to react to where they can gain the ability to positioned in the future in this system if it can prove to survive, meaning, its unclear how the germ actually infiltrates the place where lift creates institutional counter-drift. i think departure explains how lift makes it harder to reach positions where you can contest human needs or desires, but not where lift is justified, well, not just justified, but functionally endifferentiated from that original chain.
heres the clearest example of the social media problem, greenspan in wireless china a book from 3 years ago talks about the fact that wechat became an all-apps app (what m&t through srnicek call the "convergence thesis") because it quickly meta-financialized its own consumer base and its market offerings and that video chats arrived way faster than in the west and in a place where telegraphs so specific forms of voice communication was actively barred from use since china didnt want to globalize information econ and still doesnt. so these empirical reasons shape how an all-app forms. its true that social medias fold into one another, and social strategies collapse and get re-written, but thats all contract logic. actual use-logic isnt about brand loyalty (something m&p never mention but is actually important) nor about fold as a reterritorializing current, but a third thing, a mix or practicality, market buy outs, and demand that arises and collapses way faster than more tangible or long lasting forms of value which arises as a result of lift rather than scale.
what is genuienly productive about lift on a social level? clearly its coordination: aggregating demand, lowering transaction friction enough that economic participation becomes possible for actors who couldn't previously enter. since capitalism isnt defined as an agent nor an entity nor an ideology nor a process nor an instrumental totality of certain apparatuses nor a closed system but a tendency (they do, actually, argue that its an entity explicitly in the text, and they argue that its "ignorable", yet clearly it operates more like a tendency and a systemic factor of capital through the buy/hold/sell axiom), therefore leanness and lightness are equivalent, the one is just the political approximation or principialization of the other, m&t make it clear as such. the distinction between real, repackaged and fake services probably is the closest we get to a theory of value by them, since neither arbitrage, trading nor volatility actually absorb or nullify labor and violence so much as they centrally navigate away from, postpone or reshift who does it, why and maybe ocassionally how much. maybe it also reorganizes how much labour is actually thought to be necessary or valuable by shaping consumer preferences.
what it doesnt do is fundamentally reorganize what types of labour are considered valuable. but what it can do following m&t is fragment labours expected constitution and its expected preferences or tendencies. the fakest form of labour that solves a convinience problem (netflix as a smooth app vs. pirating movies as something only cognitively sharp and physically non fatigued people are willing to do). this very same convinience problem could be a contingency and not a necessity since it could be caused by the brainrot caused by that very same service, or by the general system producing that fatigue, or by labour requirements that shift software expections upward. it could however also create new expectations for consumers by creating instances where convinience itself is a product you can trace and therefore artificially inflating the bar for what is even considered convinient. simultaneously, and on the other hand, real labour could connect services in a way that changes what people do (and therefore what they think is valuable).
however, this shifting arises as a result of an existing market inflation, for example, technological innovation causes certain class stratification levels to fight (the 1% with the 3%, the 30% with the other 70%, the 40% vs. the additional 10% from the lower 50). if everyone creates a slack type software, then the first slack that succeeds in innovating could succeed due to a genuinely executed philosophy or due to something entirely fake like better branding or an interface algorithmically considered 3% more optimal, like the propagandist design maximizers that built amazons interface. but this doesnt actually correlate with genuine cultivation of surplus value, it could be a gap or a temporarily hole produced by the shifting tides that eventually gets patched back up by capital. in this instance both lift and fold could be temporarily produced by scale, rather than all 3 being seperate tendencies of one unified system (m&t do gesture at fold being topology-driven not scale-driven — the inward movement argument - however its not definitively proven that this could be the case given the topology argument's ontological foundation is so brittle compared to their actual empirical research).
and speaking of brittle, it doesnt help that m&t describe volatility and the construction of value as "things that can be generated out of nothing, independent from any material logics, simply by virtue of the interposition of latency between worlds". this quote shows up many more times: "the only death known to exocapitalism is the void it modulated when it first created something out of nothing" and yet again "a fully-lifted marketplace unbinds from the local pressure-systems of goods and services, it freewheelingly constructs price and therefore value and therefore capital in an unlimited capacity out of nothing but the relativistic tides of a hyperdimensional virtual ocean." instead of concretizing exactly how lift can generate value, m&t further push it into mysticisim. not only that, but they choose not to see how the current market is actually an inflation of capital itself rather than its settling into a void. their inability to locate how capital generates values in an intrinsic sense forces them to make up all the extrinsic reasons in the world, yet all of them are a metaphor for the same thing - the relative, which in functional terms simply means the "reoriented", not the surplus.
devaraj sandberg notes in his early review of the work "capitalism consistently flees materiality, treating it as if it were diseased. traditional marxism tends to focus on the exploitation of the worker, but in today’s world, this is increasingly anachronistic. almost all value is now created within the abstracted “upper layers,” rather than at the base." yet, value cleary here in sandberg is understood not as the construction of surplus value(s) (not just in the sense of production but in the sense of capitalism's purchasing influence on the "human layer") but as "protection/security" which should not even be called "value" but rather a property, or a tissue, a zone of capitalism. this closely relates to sandbergs point that even the assasination of a thousand ceo's wouldn't sting capitalism at all since it self-insulates its ideology by decentralizing itws currents.
twitter user kitsimute posts this in response to this problem of the book, stating: "exocapitalism oneshoted by karatani via arrighi here, all the salesforcification of capital it describes stems from "financial expansion during period of decline" of the global hegemonic empire". this "oneshottedness" appears in the work through the quote "when capital accumulates through investment in trade or manufacturing, it follows the first formula, but in cases where this does not provide a sufficient rate of profit, it turns to the second. this is the secret behind the repeated process by which hegemonic countries pursue expansion in production during their ascendancy, but financial expansion during their period of decline". this is a strong criticism because essentially the fungibility claim, the volatility-as-labour reframing, the lift logic — all of it presupposes that the shift from m-c-m' to m-m' has already occurred and is stable.
arrighi argues instead that it's a crisis response and not a tendency. but regardless of what arrighi argues, it could be quite possible that it is in fact a tendency. the load-bearing problem m&t have is that they need to figure out a way to argue that its non-contigent from inside the system they live in. thats where all the harsh stakes are, all the predictive problems that prodhoun, marx and bakunin were dealing with, thats the actual value of a theory of future speculations based on material observations, something that repeatedly m&t only use one-sidedly - to argue in favor of their narrative rather than carefully - to argue in favor of predictions and trends. their most prominent ikea example follows this general trend too, they argue that ikea stopped vertical progression since it realized its profits dropped and changed to a more abstract contract, but what exactly about current failures in capital accumulation points to long term trajectories?
another issue is concerning the audacity of this book to make all the unimportant internet rhetoric the point where it considers itself constructive and all to make all the actual slightly newly generative content seem secondary. as for counter drift, it should be considered on multiple aspects, both in that sense and in the sense of whether lift even always creates the ability to stop drift not just to subsume it. in the positive redefinition of lift, m&t literally have no positive subject in mind, in land machinic intelligence is this paradigm that creates a new world ontop of this one, its about ontogenesis.
m&t pull back into the market and do make it more alien than land but less generatively divorced from the human. they seperate speculative territory from feudal territory but that accidentally collapses all future investment that isnt future investment into the concept of the markets subsuming power itself. the closest they get is with empire but the problem here is this is a terrestrial entity pushing lift into nothing, lift is itself a form of hold, what is being lifted is abstractions holding onto themselves, not a fundamentally new form of a commodity. unlike marx and land, m&t literally dont have a future vision for capital, something the external theory of value is supposed to fix. it doesnt just introduce a physical substrate that lift is both inspired by and heading towards, but introduces the cause of lift (not debt interest or tokens) but abstraction as heading towards some more ideal form (further away from materialism and lands own marx inspired dialectics), but also as originating from and being pulled towards externality
there is one more interesting thing about lift that marek & roberto never do. sandberg says, admittedly, shortly after the book released and maybe not with the full weight of knowledge that lift is only a negative and not a positive concept "musk may also be fulfilling one prediction of exocapitalism... that capital is now leaving earth and humanity, waving goodbye from above. if musk can solve the gamma rays issues, he and other billionaires could move to mars and run the earth from there." naturally, you'd expect m&t to feel that they should turn the concept into a positive one, where lift revers to such devices as space elevators and the tendency to actually flee everything earth-like. but clearly, their understanding that it abstracts is limited to the realm of inter-earth derivatives (literally derivatives, as the current pinnacle of lift)
by the time we reach drag, the book skyrockets into hell. the most offensive paragraphs in this book towards the start look something like: "cope cope cope! 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." a statement which by the end of the book transforms into " rule rule rule, control control control – empire is far too blunt to rule: it just randomly levels your city block, vaporizing you without any regard for any activity you take" and ends with "to even call it deterritorialization feels wrong, it’s just hole-making, there’s no abstraction into immanence unless the plane of immanence is just parking-lot-ification."
if empire/drag handles all the material violence and capitalism handles all the abstraction, then m&t have simply reproduced the base/superstructure split they presumably want to escape, except with better branding. essentially, empire is the horrible feudal slow sludge that levels your parking lot, whereas capitalism is the genius abstractive vechile that stratifies only the germs it can see as volatile, creating value in labour. how in the world do m&t expect to reconcile the effects that abstraction has on the world by changing the order of names? in every analysis, for a very specific reason, the violence is the abstraction, primitive accumulation is capital's condition of possibility, the parking lot is lift's material consequence not empire's separate failure.
if m&t really wanted to take this route, what they would have to do is not make exocapitalism the most flaccid holistic homogenizing force ever, something they repeatedly warn against the book, yet something they simultaneously define (in a special section devoted to this, mind you), as: "the arbitrage mechanism. the modulation of friction within a flow generates opportunities for new flows. a virus or nam-shub390 encoded into time and world. wildcode." what stops exocapitalism from being the thing that creates the new flow, the one that allows the leveling of the trees in your next door neighbourhood so that a corporate trading building can be placed there, the one that exocapitalism so desperately needs to attain the proper level of arbitrage? twitter user diffractions puts it well "exocapitalism describes folds, lifts, and value‑added nodes beautifully. but it never explains why the folds fold where they do why salesforce acquires tableau, why aws builds dark pools, why some nodes capture value and others don't."
here is the contradiction, what do m&t say about who creates vending machines? "at the same time, it distends the human experience of social reproduction work (both as a laborer and as a consumer) into uncanny games of vendor-relations telephone, with the actual good of social reproduction delivered only after a cascade of deferrals. " this is about what drag does, it creates beurocratic loopholes. but who actually made vendorship happen if not for lift? way earlier in the text, m&t say "each of these reciprocal relations creates a new fractal surface: vendor + customer and customer + vendor, both compounded by their mutual integrability into the stack of a third party." oh, so scale? and what are the properties of exocapitalism as a totality? scale, fold, lift and drag. scale makes vendorship possible, folds perpetuate vendorship into new ontological registers, lift allows capitalism to create increasing degrees of vendorship-abstraction, and drag, apparently, creates a wider surface area for lift to do it even better? so which parts of a parking lot are not created by exocapitalism, but are instead created by the empire?
what it looks like from the readers perspective is that marek poliks and roberto trillo are really scared of capitalism, but really want to make it sound cool. but theyre also really really scared of capitalism, but they dont want to admit that capitalism is doing it. so they created a bunch of new words for it so they can preserve the parts of it that they think are innovative. they even admit it themselves — "to even call it deterritorialization feels wrong, it's just hole-making." the only thing empire adds is that some parking lots predate capitalism entirely. the scythian empire already paved certain lots. lift just builds on top of pre-existing craters. its contradictory, because m&t themselves say "drag, counterintuitively, accelerates lift."
the parts that existed in some type of inherent logic before capitalism did? m&t would love it if we attacked the empire for having conceived of the concept of a parking lot, as long as we clearly understand that exocapitalism's goal is the amazing proliferation of only the most esteemed and high class parking lots, but the acutal evil violent ones are the ones that dont deterritorialize for no reason, unlike exocapitalism, which definitely is not a fully self-relative infinitely variable flux (in their own apparent definition of it) that perpetuates varities of logic that all have the general principle of things (such as parking lots) becoming increasingly unusable and seperated from all the possible ways we can conceive of them. not to mention, the book ends with "what will we do then?" after 200 pages of proving capitalism doesn't care about you.
there is one way however to reconcile the point, however it'll have to be a successive reconstruction that they themselves never make. technically speaking, lift has the property of dematerialization, which generally would argue against parking-lotification if it simply meant abstractions that exist in the world due to a reason that isnt contingent on actually creating abstractive chain depth or loopenings. for m&t, it's not that capitalism or software describes things in words, it's that both systems operate on abstractions that are formally manipulable, quantifiable, transcodeable. "in order for a thing to enter into the registers of compre hension endemic to capitalism or software, it first needs to be dematerialized, translated, and reconstructed with in a virtual system of exchange and exchangeability".
technically speaking, m&t believe in a successive virutalization where the world enters successive cascades or folds of this process. in that sense, exocapitalism can extract constructive value out of the appropriation of the empire's building of a parking lot in a virtual reality where the parking lot is a choice rather than a necessity (following an argument someone like maks valencic would make in psychotic accelerationism, a theorist that becoming press also closely follows). that would explain why m&t say the following " capitalism is a mode of description that can be applied when an object from one world (situation, relational matrix, representative layer) is transcoded into an object in another world and when the status of reciprocal representation between those worlds is in some kind of flux. " after all, m&t argue "the driving investigative mode behind this movement (poststructuralist turn) was speculation. speculation isn’t idle imagination, it’s active inquiry into the unknown, it’s both the simultaneous refutation and acknowledgement of the limits of reason and agency and of the human sensorium."
and yet again, m&t say "here again we have a permutation of labor, from the production of economic content to the execution of economic protocol, a lift from labor as i/o to the ever-more-automated generation of protocols of token proliferation at higher and more abstract levels, a translation from wager-staking against labor-as-volatility-production to wager staking against the pregiven volatilities implicit in scale" its odd that m&t don't mention fordism a single time here, given that fordism is precisely the ideology that gave rise to second-order tokenization, in the sense that factories created fake economies as meta-marketplaces where workers would lose their immediate access to outer reality in favor of a virutalization. in many ways, the m&t virtualization is similarly deadly. a recently published work "muskism" also goes into how newly corporate bigtech enviornments similarly weaponize the fordist ideal (the mastery of mass production to create a society of mass consumers) into what matt pearce in a substack article calls a "world-eating market monopolization, achieved through bureaucracy-slimming “agile” project management", something that echoes exo quite well
what m&t have really consstructed is a theory of accredited labour and token proliferation that at its root is about the hypervirutalization or cross-contaminative financialization of all spheres of life into higher-order reified states. to them, since their concept of use-value ("value-add") is so removed from genuine material inquiry, their belief in the self-sustaining of a field of multiplicities largely held together by super fast trading schemes that proliferate and sustain the ground of such a bubble isnt impossible to imagine.
in some ways, thats exactly what somo is, anthropic, open, salesforce and google among others are functionally cult-conglomerates, they have the function of congregrations of subjects under a fixed rule, accumulation of value with no direct correspondence with religion members (hirees) a totally deterritorialized hiring sequence ("7% of all workers by law must be disabled, we will get you a visa") and so on. the "multiplication of apps" that sandberg notes in his own review of the work is the same mechanism holding the line of reality behind the massive accumulation of skyscrapers that was originally built as a global money laundering operation that m&t now drag the "white-collar" class for dissolving under the weight of
this is also ironically why they say that ideology becomes drag in exo, because the virutalization of their lives corresponds with the self-ideologization of the service sector, which appears both increasingly real and increasingly fake the more you spend time in it. offices become "services about themselves". this ontological argument is something m&t only gesture towards since they dont seem to have the philosophical equipment (mostly from obscure french theory) at their hands to actually transliteralize the many topological and architectural analytic methods of these movements. earlier in the book, in scale, they mention " this is the de facto leftist orientation against so-called ‘big tech,’ in which a celebritized executive class is understood to have directed, univocal control over both the generalized marketplace and the generalized media through which social bodies are created and regulated."
they answer this problem with the idea that the infrastrctures are in fact brittle. in a sense this is true, given bigtech corporate plants are third-world extraction sites by their very definition, ones that end up being "brittle" as they end up concluding due to the fact that "as each company lays claim to the world, the ownership of a world by a world, a world bloated with autonomous vestigial organs" in just the same way, "as every engineer knows – software, mechanical, architectural – every joint is also a brittleness."
yet even this line isnt entirely a reading they can fairly patch up. in the lift chapter, m&t frame capitalism and software as having "shared inheritances in virtualization." this explains why capitalism and software are "incestuously"attracted but doesn't do further work, not enough to explain the attempted reconciliation in this review. "split off from the virtual economy a long time ago, when the latter economy took flight — that first token, that first lift." there is one clean conclusion to be drawn about the general direction m&t are going. right before the actual end, they say "is empire courting exocapitalist attention, as laundered through the state, in order to outsource its own objectives? or, rather, are the crevasses being cut through the world, as temporarily and arbitrarily hewn by the empire, simply just mature breeding grounds for exocap italist speculation, fertile valleys hidden from direct sunlight due to the depth and intensity of the cut, within which states scuttle around building nests from local flora?"
all of this shows that essentially, they dont know. they dont know how the empire correlates with exocapitalism, all they know is it has its own interest in pulling away from us. this is essentially the most boring and convoluted way to present this topic, because the entire analysis of the american military-industrial complex, and the whole jpmorgan buyout scheme, every important concentration of power that they've analyzed has pointed them away from creating a functional differentiation between exo and empire, lift and drag, not on the level of concept (which they clearly have defined) but on the level of temporal process or scaffolding, on the level of how these actually evolve to meet or do anything. this problem actually reflects the broader problem between the immaterialism of lift and the materialism of the earth. ultimately, does capitalism need the material layer or doesn't it? the book wants to say it doesn't need it as a condition of its logic, even if it currently depends on it as a contingent substrate, but this distinction is never made precise because m&t are secretly hedging away from that distinction