Understanding Exocapitalism 1/4 скачать в хорошем качестве

Understanding Exocapitalism 1/4

Join this channel Membership to get access to the entire video archives of past and present Seminars:    / @newcentre   Join this channel’s membership to gain access to the complete archives of past and present seminars. https://thenewcentre.org/membership/m... #TheNewCentre #Transdisciplinary #CertificatePrograms #tncabinet INSTRUCTORS: Marek Poliks & Roberto Alonso Trillo PROGRAM: History, Design and Worldmaking, Transdisciplinary Studies, Critical Philosophy CREDIT(S): 1 DATE: February 7, 14, 21, 28 TIME: 09:00-11:30 ET DESCRIPTION: Exocapitalism is the idea that capitalism does not belong to humans. The titular book (Becoming Press, 2025) and this accompanying Seminar spring from a dissatisfaction with the sameness of Marxian critical social theory. This theoretical lineage appears to be poisoned by a Marvel Cinematic Universe approach to storytelling when it comes to economics: capitalism is almost always a powerful, demonic, one-dimensional Big Bad against which the accumulated forces of dignified human laborers engage in heroic, planetary-scale battle. The Seminar Instructors (authors Marek Poliks and Roberto Alonso Trillo) push this tired metaphor to its breaking point. What if capitalism is so univocal as to be actually transcendental? What if it cohabits within its share of the Empyrean with things like computation or mathematics? What if capitalism can happen on anything, anywhere, without us? At the core of exocapitalism is the logical kernel of arbitrage, the burbling contingencies of price and value as buried exploits in simple temporal deferral. Poliks and Trillo collapse tens of thousands of years of human economic activity into this kernel, even labor, which in exocapitalism is strictly and simply the injection of manufactured volatility into a held asset. But labor itself, let alone the simple flows of commodity exchange, is insufficiently volatile for exocapitalism’s hyperfertile scalarity. It is too bound to fixed costs and predictable dependencies to sustain the attention of exocapitalist flows. Instead, exocapitalism treats the entire terrestrial condition as a hyperdimensional random number generator upon which to wage and hedge controlled bets. Yet even this is insufficient. More dimensions, more abstractions, and greater differentials appear with greater and greater velocity. The human is left to consider what happens when this entire process and its operational mechanics leave us behind entirely. Session 1, Retcon: If arbitrage is the processual unit of exocapitalism, we can build a lineage of authentic capitalisms far into the past (and far beyond Marx’s blind spots outside of Europe). We start with currency speculation in 5th-century BCE Persia, Jiaozi paper money schemes in 11th-century southwest China, the famous cowrie-shell economy in the Maldives and in Africa’s Gold Coast from the 10th through the 19th centuries, the radical hyperstition of the Black-Scholes financial model, the play-to-earn DeFi gaming economics currently wreaking havoc in the Philippines, and the jet fuel futures market that underpins almost all contemporary airline industry pricing. Each of these case studies will focus on relationships between price, value, underlying asset, and volatility (via time, labor, or alternative frictions). Accompanying readings from Elena Esposito and Suhail Malik ground these case studies in theory. IMAGE: Exocapitalism: Economies with absolutely no limits (bookcover), Becoming, 2025