Unlocked | Exocapitalism, the Book - Marek Poliks & Roberto Alonso Trillo (NM90) 2025

Oct 1, 2025

Guest

Roberto Alonso Trillo

Guest

Marek Poliks

Marek Poliks and Roberto Alonso Trillo, artists and theorists working in AI, delve into their provocative new book, Exocapitalism. They explore capitalism's indifference to human scale, presenting it as a meta-process that undermines traditional leftist frameworks. Topics include the illusion of interaction with AI, labor's diminishing role in financialized economies, and the concept of drag as a state counteraction. They also discuss tokenization's impact on perception, financialization in everyday examples like Starbucks, and the evolving nature of value.

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INSIGHT

Lift: Abstraction Replaces Service

Lift describes companies moving up abstraction layers from physical goods to financialized services detached from human consumers.
That produces a sensation of being left behind as firms optimize for capital generation, not human needs.

INSIGHT

Capitalism As A Trans-Scalar Process

Exocapitalism frames capitalism as a trans-scalar, quasi-autonomous process indifferent to humans.
That limits traditional political agency because the system operates on scales beyond direct human control.

INSIGHT

AI Interaction Is Mostly Illusionary

Interacting with deployed AI models is usually contacting frozen checkpoints orchestrated by vast infrastructures.
Personal prompts rarely change models; human feedback is asynchronous and aggregated into later updates.

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