This will be the final installment in my little trilogy on the course of modern society. Part one, on “novelty,” is here. Part two, on “worlds,” is here. To keep pushing the thesis that our perception of reality is, by and large, steered by external agents, it’s time to talk about the elephant in the room: capitalism. Everyone’s favorite Friday-night topic! Pour yourself a drink, you’re gonna need it.

Last year Becoming Press published the excellent book Exocapitalism: Economies With Absolutely No Limits by Marek Poliks and Roberto Alonso Trillo. It engagingly describes something I’ve been trying to articulate to myself for a long time. Here goes.

Exocapitalism is a term for a form of capitalism that no longer depends on people, labor, or physical goods. Instead it is driven by algorithms, software, and financial abstractions. The word abstraction is crucial, because it is the natural force propelling this process.

Imagine traditional capitalism in its simplest form: the exchange of goods for money. Exocapitalism is what happens when the system performs successive jumps, or “lifts,” as the authors call them. Each lift moves the system one step further away from physical products — up into the sky, away from the world below. Companies abandon factories, employees, and consumers to focus on software, subscriptions, and financial services. Value and assets become ever more abstract.

The book offers a few clarifying examples:

Airline loyalty points: Most airlines make more money selling points to credit-card companies than they do flying passengers. The actual flight is often unprofitable, the profit comes from time and speculation in the points market. Bonus points are the main product of these companies.

Amazon Web Services (AWS): AWS rents out cloud services—storage, AI, etc. It is by far the largest player in the world, and a frighteningly large share of the internet runs on AWS. Instead of buying your own server, you pay to borrow computing power by the hour. The longer you wait, the more you pay. It’s a subscription economy. AWS earns the most when customers simply let things sit: old databases, backup copies etc. The more stuff merely exists, the larger the monthly fee. Because millions of companies use AWS, every extra minute of waiting is very profitable. AWS doesn’t need to sell anything new, it makes profit from time and storage.

Content moderation for Meta: Some people in places like Kenya and the Philippines look at violent and disturbing images to train AIs that will moderate such material from Facebook and Instagram feeds. Meta earns billions in ad revenue from the feeds these humans clean. Yet they are not Meta employees. They are hired through subcontractors, letting Meta flee from the responsibility for what this “job” does to them. Meta doesn’t need a perfect solution, the feed only needs to be clean enough for advertisers to stay. The longer a real fix can be postponed, the more money rolls in. Thank you, Mark!

In none of these examples does anyone sell an actual product. All make money from time, subscriptions, price differentials, and relationships. This is capitalism that has left reality it’s inhabitants behind. The system has no goal, only a perpetual movemenet toward greater abstraction.

The book’s most radical idea may be the claim that capitalism is not a “system” at all, but rather an “entity.” Imagine that capitalism was not invented by humans, but is more like a virus or program that has always existed, waiting for the right moment to awaken. To “wake up” it needs only three basic conditions in its environment:

• Two “worlds” (Like an object and a price)

• Time difference (By now, sell later)

• Value difference (Buy cheap, sell expensive)

Whenever these three are present, capital manifests. It makes no difference whether it’s coffee, bitcoin, or stocks. Capitalism works on anything that can be bought, held, and sold. Humans are merely temporary hosts for this virus. Now it is moving into computers and algorithms in our stead, and soon we will no longer be needed for the system to function.

All of this is, of course, very dark. But it makes sense. Why, for example, the climate crisis has gone so far. Shouldn’t the human survival instinct, our will to live, have by now stopped the worst parts of the climate crisis? Perhaps it is not human agency at all that steers the direction of the world as of late. It is the virus of capital, following the cancer cell’s philosophy: endless growth until the host dies.

OK, by now you may want to shoot yourself in the head. But please don’t. I believe it is vital to look uncomfortable truths straight in the eye. Only then can we decide what needs to be done. Upcoming newsletters will focus on exactly that.

Bless,
CM