“It’s a tricky book,” says Lil’ Internet on the New Models podcast of Marek Poliks and Roberto Trillo’s Exocapitalism—Economies with Absolutely No Limits. Tricky, it seems, because it is not content perpetuating the critique of capitalism, nor declaring its death. Instead, it inverts the mirror, envisioning capitalism as something that does not respond to the good-and-bad logic of humans, but that is old and wider. It is a logic not dependent on us; it is activated only by exchange, computation, or algorithm.
Listening to Poliks and Trillo speak—first with Carly Busta and Lil’ Internet for New Models, then with Mohammad Salemy for The New Centre for Research and Practice—one senses that Exocapitalism is less another theory of capital than a broader shift in temperature, a recalibration of how we think the economy when everything becomes economized. It convincingly positions capitalism not as a social relation, but as a planetary algorithmic germ. Labor, production, and debt are, therefore, all secondary symptoms of a deeper operation called arbitrage: the manipulation of value across time and space, the pure movement that extracts from difference itself.
If capital was once understood as the motor of history, Exocapitalism places it outside history altogether. Exogeneity names a logic without origin or belonging, the opposite of indigeneity, which is rooted and which remembers. Capitalism, the authors argue, is not sociogenic. It is not the child of colonial expansion or human greed, though these became its favored vectors. It is a viral logic, indifferent to the moral coordinates of cause and effect: self-replicating, parasitic, assembling itself out of anything.
If it is not human, then what is the genesis of capital? Exocapitalism suggests it is an ecology of data centers, logistics, and planetary-scale networks that metabolize our attention, time, and matter. This places Exocapitalism in stark opposition to the concept of “technofeudalism.” While Yanis Varoufakis, the leading figure in the ‘technofeudalist’ discourse, declares capitalism dead, replaced by data lords enclosing the commons, Poliks and Trillo see capital currently evaporating the last bond between value and labor.
This is both horrifying and liberating. It unsettles critique itself—if capital is not human, our ethics and ideologies are written in the wrong language. Yet capital has reopened thought to the nonhuman currents that exceed us.
Fig.1
The book forces us to confront the erasure of human responsibility for the planet, showing how the exocapital frame transforms exploitation into a self-perpetuating dynamic. Poliks and Trillo render the violence of capitalism as something that exceeds humanity itself, inviting us to leave behind moral immediacy, as uncomfortable as that might be, for analytic rigor: violence is no longer an exception to be condemned, but a structural condition to be traced. This is not merely a billionaire’s dream of living on Mars—it is already settled in our economic reality.
Poliks and Trillo are theorists and practitioners operating at the intersection of software, computation, and political economy. Both bring nontraditional backgrounds to economic theorization: neither are formally economists, yet their fluency in software, cybernetics, and systems thinking allows them to detect patterns invisible to conventional analysis, from the hidden architecture of delivery networks to the abstraction of capital itself.
Their vocabulary of lift and drag captures this vibrantly. Capital seeks lift—an endless ascent from the friction of bodies, infrastructures, and bureaucracies. Humanity, in turn, provides drag—the resistance that gives lift its form. We hold capital aloft by constantly reorganizing ourselves to sustain its detachment. Artists, institutions, and even economies of care become part of this choreography. Salemy notes that in the exocapital vision, every gesture of resistance becomes a new platform for extraction. The art world, obsessed with dematerialization, embodies lift—but hides its drag—resting on defunded, auto-precarized labor.
The book’s most haunting metaphor comes in the chapter “The Last Mile”. The term emerges from logistics. It names the final, most labor-intensive stretch of the delivery process, the point at which the algorithm meets the street, the body, the weather. New Models situates the Last Mile in Berlin’s delivery networks: South Asian students enrolled in dubious remote institutions, cycling through the city at night, ghosted by the platforms that hire them by means of layers of subcontractors and rented accounts. Each layer is designed so that the platform itself never touches the ground.
Fig.2
Capital is allergic to proximity, the authors insist, as its purpose is to never be the last one holding responsibility for a body. Poliks and Trillo describe this aversion as the essence of Exocapitalism. It is not a new system, nor a phase beyond capitalism. It is capital’s purest form: abstraction detached from its material consequences, sustained by invisible hands that remain within reach but out of sight.
Violence, in this framework, is not an exception but a function. It is not moral. It is not even intentional, simply the externality of lift. From cobalt mines to Gaza, the drag layer absorbs the weight of capital’s ascent. What makes Exocapitalism radical is that it refuses to psychologize this violence. And both podcasts remind us that we are still here, entangled in it. Dragging, breathing, cycling, feeding. The “last mile” is ours (i.e., workers’) to walk. It is the distance between production and consumption, but also between the world that lives and the world that counts. Between bodies and data. Between being and being abstracted.
Readers may recognize themselves in the book’s grounded account of an already disenchanted society shaped by humanist socialization: artists, theorists, and workers who sense that appeals to justice, care, or reform no longer reach the mechanisms that structure their lives. For those still invested in a subject to blame, a villain to confront, or a horizon of redemption, Exocapitalism may feel cold, unsettling, or prematurely resigned—less a call to action than a withdrawal of familiar consolations.
In this sense, Exocapitalism performs an exorcism of the system. It reveals how deeply our language of value has been possessed by abstraction, and how necessary it is to think from the residue, the drag, the friction of the real. Rarely is a theoretical book an invitation to think not of overcoming capitalism, but of learning to inhabit its lucid, poetic wake. The book’s illustrations, by Avocado Ibuprofen, render tangible the ghostly residue of a system that has fully melted into its own virtuality.
What Exocapitalism helps me see in 2026 is that capital no longer requires growth, ideology, or even legitimacy to operate. Automated logistics, AI-generated value, and endless proxy wars have replaced human needs as its primary coordinates. This clarifies how extraction persists without belief, how systems endure without consensus. Exocapitalism traces a shared reality in which justice itself has been abstracted away. It does not offer a program or a solution. Instead, it serves as a necessary companion for reading the present—one capable of meeting the year’s breaking news without illusion, opening up to what is coming toward us, for better or worse.
Buy the book: https://becomingpress.metalabel.com/exocapitalism
And listen to the podcasts:
The New Centre
New Models Podcast
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- All figures:
Collages by Avocado Ibuprofene from Exocapitalism: economies with absolutely no limits (2025) by Marek Poliks and Roberto Alonso Trillo
