the external theory of value — concept
the external theory of value locates capitalism as something that actually has active external referent logics we dont know about. i take the whole landian idea of a virus from outer space but i mean it literally rather than as in contingently affecting time. i think thats a much better idea of exteriority.
the external theory of value can be used to explain the resource extraction vs resource lifting issue. capital can survive without dependencies once drag is eliminated (since drag is where third party beurocrats come in to try to use its mechanisms against its entirely efficient production and may even slow it down as a result) and scale and lift is equalized (this is where capital is most productive since externality needs capital to be a specific amount of scalar, enough for lift to do its full effect) and fold is put on standby (since if fold merges capital's internal components that hard, it can accelerate its logic more than its capable of sustianing - m&t dont postulate it this way since they dont have the critique i do but maybe with a more careful reading of the work ill change my mind, these are still preliminary notes). but if i faced myself against their book and their claims, what id speculate is that feudalism (random violent entities) isnt actually caused by resource pressure extraction but could even appear as a non causal variable within this pressure chamber.
maybe for human agents the rhetoric is that factory workers arise when the need to create commodities outpaces the necessary amount of work capable for the system to function at any point, but if we put lift into consideration, that could change our reading of history. what if for example violence is like a bacteria, its always looming, and arises when certain conditions are met (like moisture and food in suddenly newly accessible areas) and not as a causal consequence of capitals operations? simultaneously, since according to m&t colonialism doesnt actually have a backbone (aka global empire aka corporations dont access the mediative layer but only the extractive one theyre not functionally obligate or symmetrical to violence or have the ability to change its course) then capital already has the mechanism to survive any change in dependency, its a logic being applied to a world-state, capital can switch its target and still not access the core of why that target exists and it still wont matter
its actually making room for a teleological reading, capital isnt lifting towards more conquerable territories or existing alien logics as conquerable, but existing alien logics as superior. thats what is actually meant by external, not external to this planet or to this culture or to this logic, but external towards all possible moves of perceiving specifically what the positive version of lift can do. what is the human layer lifting towards? a truly subterranean form of social organization, a transcendental state of reification, time stops being a metaphor like in greenberg or land and starts being an actual device for transport, time becomes space when the subject lifts into space as territory rather than space as the ground around it
dont just speculate that the relationship to abstractions changes in the market forces that determine social organization when the human layer is lifted into space due to how space happens to be organized relative to its position in the universe, i believe that space inside the universe itself organizes the physical appearance and the mental logic that corresponds to it in real time. its almost odd because there is no source of generation so it sounds like the equivalent of being in a desert hallucinating water or sending people out in space for no reason. to the current imagination, the universe is like a bacteria in a field, incapable of ever encountering a larger object in a way it can make sense of. the universe is definitely not heaven, in other words. yet, the external idea proposes that precisely it is. theres no way to know that, but aliens are not an alterity or other to human, they dont even need to exist. what externality proposes is that all you need to do to accelerate the development of forms of social organization is to send things to space. thats what it says, it doesnt say we'll continue the natalist project, it says "space may just be heaven" regardless of if it is.
its not formulated precisely as a project or a gamble, literally just as an idea, as a possibility. when the subject is lifted, commodities change their character, reifications change. its like "god" mutates every available social form into something else. the internal feeling of dopamine frying that capitalism has caused us goes outwards. its like, imagine this theory as the first ever formulation of an epistemology that corresponds to something as novel as alchemy. "space is a field of ideological potentials, not material ones" thats the basic idea. you can simply use idealist philosophies of any kind to formulate this, kant, plato, leibniz, berkeley, you name it. there are forms out there emanating higher versions of themselves. the sun beams that theologians considered gods message are now the void usurping powers of a black hole since the sun isnt relative anymore. once humanity discovered space, it should have assumed it was heaven, and giordano bruno may have never needed to be killed. and the idea isnt literally that the closer you get to space the suddenly clearer ideology gets. maybe its just a more vulgar version of the same few functions: an ideology divorced from earth that takes its own trajectory, new spatial positionings unlocking alternative logics and epistemologies, spatial time buying culture time to progress etc. but the point is broader than that, its that exocapitalism allows theology to re-emerge, it gives it a physical backdrop. secular theology cant do anything but internalize exteriority, thats why the fantasy is that ai kills man, or the four different fantasy versions of ai that yvette granata studies are all bastard-children in some way or another.
theres an example for ideological propagation through lift. imagine the power of lift as a giant vaccuming ufo that sucks on a physical market store. imagine its a large spaceship and it takes time for the market to travel up to it, maybe even a few days given its a slow magnetic pull. imagine the normal cliche, a cow is floating around. this spaceship creates the physical context necessary for commodities to be exposed as floating rather than shelved, it surrounds commodities in an emptier room. food items appear smaller in space, not just from ideology, space seems to not enjoy physical extension as much as concentration. the iss is an experiment on spatial ontology more than on science. now imagine what could happen to a commodity if it spent time on space, or mars, or a sea world. imagine how land could be imagined in a planet like jupiter, how spatial organization works. the point isnt that we imagine it but that it imagines us. and that it already has stronger versions of what we have on here, built into the core of its existence.
if you really want to exteriorize the logic of capital, you cant just believe its an augmented amplifier of existing but necessary human constructs. you must believe, on a theological level, that the logic of everything weve built, from markets to commodities to devices and institutions, exist in better forms as fundamental fibers of the cosmic world, not always literal, not always materially emerging, but "nested" in the "space-heaven" of the universe (this already goes far from exocapitalism as a theory but nonetheless, a lot of these ideas already half exist in media culture thats jumped way ahead of philosophy. putting them into words is easier, almost like a translative after effect)
the skilltree hypothesis
the narrative goes that every single cultural practice behind it has an entire assemblage of possible cultural artifacts that when "activated" the right way (myth/ritual/augment) logic actually create not just cultural information but a civilizational progress in the sense of, social forms of organization themselves are able to unlock hidden or laden native metaphysical principles from scratch, like certain types of progress mixed with organization cultivate lineages of metaphysical principles, and if society as it so happens only orders power narrowly along whatever inherited basis of metaphysical assumption it currently holds, it actively limits itself from unlocking whatever ontologies it abandoned from whatever previous set of social forms of organization
heres an example. think of a mythological dragon, its primarily a cultural information that also creates forms of organization socially, but it isnt a being yet. in totemism it becomes the being of a clan retrsopectively, but doesnt exist on its own. then the scientific skilltree can unlock a real dragon through biomutation, but this dragon would have no social or cultural context to exist, yet would be spawned in an enviornement that encoded it through this compass. but a third type of dragon, a dragon device, is a dragon in the sense of being an actual like mythical social script as in, its not actually a physical or mental dragon but the form of something "kind of" like a dragon, yet, whatever it is, say it was a physical dragon or just a ritual, it would carry with it new forms of its own concept. so, once it would be assumably its own being in space, it would not even be a dragon the way we imagine it, but whatever it would be, it would be further up the assumption of what a dragon is or can be, not lower. so if the scientific skilltree competes with the dragon ritual one, neither of them can actually get to the dragon, so syncretism needs to come back and revive whatever traditions actually felt the hype of a dragon enough to believe it a social reality first, and, if the same amount of total socio-historical labour came in as a resource into this sphere, it would be able to "construct" a device, the same way scientists attempt to engineer natural beings into the world, this same type of logic of "deviceness" would be an actual product of whatever tradition
if evolution requires millions of years to make something, civilization could organize itself in pockets of space that would literally force a creature to evolve into a dragon, to have a real reason to have wings, breathe fire, have sharp claws, whatever it would need to have. imagine a world where there are herds literally everywhere, far more than even at the peak of pure biological mass in weight on the planet. but then also imagine that the land was uninhabitable and you wouldn't be able to walk on it, yet also imagine that these creatures needed deep roasting, yet also imagine that space had obstacles you needed to navigate, randomly froze you into an ice-dome, etc. imagine civilizational organization structures as eggs themselves, as literal cultivation machines that simulate the future existence of a dragon-form. with the help of whatever mechanism of natural evolution, the dragon slowly becomes one by actually strongly learning the action-patterns and mechanisms necessary for itself to be a real dragon. a scientifically engineered dragon may not contain the same dna scripts, whatever mutation is created by different animals may still lack the soul to behave like the animal you want it to.
if you used a computer engine or machine to simulate this movement, its "learned behavior" would be no deeper than the learned behavior of the computer itself, which is itself mostly a vectoral image of a supposed real dragon. so the device itself is not only the space that the social form of organization actually assumes as an organizing principle, and the inspiration that goes into maintaining a cultural myth, but cultural information itself is the sustainable factor that perpetuates a social logic. in that sense, even real dragons of the past could be extinct, even if these dragons arent "exactly real", some aspect of the dragon device does go extinct. simultaneously, the scientific skill tree, or rather, any skill tree whatsoever, within its own logic of reasoning also behaves like other skill trees in its possible constructions. maybe the ritual skill tree needs millions more years than the scientific one to reach the stage of ontogenesis, but on another hand, the ritual skill tree through millions of years of evolution is what actually "unlocked" the scientific skill tree to begin with as a seperate access to reality.
yet, if the ritual skill tree is abandoned too early, the loss is much harder to fix than the potential future gain, and the assumptions that any of its outgrowths create cannot be assumed to suddenly be a continuation of the discipline. this is partially why the sustaining of a past tradition is necessary for progress itself, where paradoxically the sustenance of past practices becomes necessary due to the belief of stacking the interest of the future gains the tradition itself can create. if you thought about it computationally, you would come to the conclusion that every single new inspiration can only cut against whatever spawned that inspiration. traditions are partially haunted and limited by the promises its own inheritors create, and power and status simply organize against the capacity of craft rather than parallel to it