There is a touch of destiny with this one. We have really pushed it as far as we can, and as we stay up all night trying to put the final touches on everything, the reverberations are starting to return. It’s been called, provocative, emancipatory, cutting-edge, and even, in some places, a bit caustic. Perhaps it is provocative because it begins to depart from Marxism as-we-know-it, and, with all the relevant necessary reverences applied, it attempts, dare I say, to step forward from the discourse of labour & production—not that what follows is somehow simpler, because it’s not. Yet as the authors contend, the world has already moved on, and capital, that same old capital, continues to do what it has always done, at myriad different scales, and in myriad worlds. Capital may well have already broken free of us, and so where exactly does that leave you, homocapitalus?
It would be in-keeping with the style of Charles Mudede to raise the question of whether we are on the cusp of a second ejection from Eden, and that means that whether we are ready or not, we have to step through the looking glass into a new conversation. That is what the authors wish to do here, to push the conversation to a new position, a position which understands DoorDash drivers, MMORPG gold farmers, and remote workers, accounts for AWS architecture, for memecoins and blockchain, for BlackRock, for the Internet (but for reals this time), for High-Frequency Trading and the LinkedIn economy, for Scale, for Airplane Miles and Club card points, and for ADHD & Adderall.
This book is provocative because it is the proverbial elephant in the system, but it is nonetheless rigorous, and written in good spirit—this isn’t a downer, this is cleaning up after a bender, after a 500-year drug-accelerated romance with a creature that counts its age in millennia. So what is left in this wasteland? Well, Arbitrage for one; other monumental processes like Lifting, Holding, Dragging and Folding roam around above our heads.
These two researchers have an enormous insight into contemporary economics, technology and finance, and yet they write as musicians, as the poetic theorists of antiquity, which, for us, makes this text epic. With Charles Mudede and Alex Quicho holding Exocapitalism down, it looks as though Marek Poliks & Roberto Alonso Trillo are here to stay.
