marek poliks and roberto trillo are really scared of capitalism, but really want to make it sound cool and to forgive it for what it’s 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, it’s 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-anthropocentric authors, metalabel, foreign objekt, bianjie systems and antikythera — m&t use theory to describe and implicitly legitimate the conditions of their own practice. this isn’t always a bad thing, on the contrary, their status doesn’t 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 genuinely 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 aren’t 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 scrupulously 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, sayak valencia’s recent title for semiotext(e). some more famous titles in the last ten years include zuboff, pistor, piketty, bregman, duflo, brill and giridharadas, not to even mention colquhoun 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 else’s, 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 circuits that the immanent 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 labor rather than to question the conditions of labor 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 centre 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 labor […] 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 preceded 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 labor 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 labor conditions, an extremely justified and underreported angle. in “the data center doesn’t exist”, m&t go further into this labor 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 that’s trying to figure out whether theory can still be considered labor 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 jünger, 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, poliks and trillo 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 labor 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 on the 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 heidegger’s “children” for the longest. he also wrote tracts directly against jünger during that time. the existential stakes in the lives of these thinkers often produced the conceptual pressure. in thinkers like ballard, wallace or delillo, the existential mundaneity produces a force in the concepts.

what all these thinkers have in common is that they’re 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 don’t directly match his rhetoric nor his positioning. yet, this is more of a curious case than a strict contradiction.

yet it’s also a tell. after an extremely unproductive comparison between deleuze and land (unproductive on its own right since it retroactively compares levels of deterritorialization 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 it’s proven time and time again — even with works on it like the recently released xenology — that it’s 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

what’s so funny about a line like this is that it’s 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 genuinely argue exocapitalism doesn’t 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, it’s 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 isn’t interested in normativity, it doesn’t 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 problematizing of social territories that’s 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 assessment 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 they’re 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 don’t need to write a book like this.

the scaling distinctions (four different types of scaling concepts) are constructed well, but there’s a tension where scale meets software. at least in this chapter, you can’t argue that generativity arises out of a fictionalization of price floors or distribution costs, since, even if networks work that way, networks don’t transcend the limits of positions within the world, only their perceived values. generation here seems to imply more than it’s capable of proving. that’s the whole argument on the other side, that ai is a social discourse disguising itself through power maneuvers. for software to have a nearly “command-like providential/testimonial” presence in the world, it must have exterior-facing modules, things that are generative that aren’t 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 it’s 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 deterritorialization 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.