McKenzie Wark opens her book Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse? (Verso, 2019) with an epigraph from Kathy Acker: “Post-capitalists’ general strategy right now is to render language (all that which signifies) abstract therefore easily manipulable.”¹ Acker goes on, in her book, Literal Madness,

In the case of language and of economy the signified and the actual objects have no value don’t exist or else have only whatever values those who control the signifiers assign them. Language is making me sick. Unless I destroy the relations between language and their signifieds that is their control.²

Wark argues that we’ve moved beyond capitalism to something worse, where the Marxist means of production and the housing of our bodies are no longer relevant. Information, which often manifests itself in language, is the currency in play.

Circling the same, in Exocapilatism: Economies With Absolutely No Limits (Becoming Press, 2025), Marek Poliks and Roberto Alonso Trillo turn what Nick Land calls “techno-capital” all the way up. Simultaneously echoing Wark, they write that exocapitalism exists as software: pure information. Information as such may want to be free, but it never is. As our friend Charles Mudede writes in his introduction, “Capitalism has never been and could never be a smooth criminal. It needs the hold, the friction, the instability to generate surplus value.”³ Poliks and Trillo start from the idea that there is not one, monolithic capitalism, but many capitalisms operating at many scales. Exocapitalism is smaller and more pervasive than diatoms or DNA, yet bigger and more expansive than Cassiopeia and the Capitalocene.⁴

So, is it a Mortonian hyperobject: a recently visible entity, always already too large for us to comprehend?⁵ Or is it as Dr. Alvin Z. Markov puts it in Land’s “Cyberrevolution,” like an organism, “but an organism that’s evolved much too fast to develop a reliable immune system…”6—like a selfish meme, a virus running roughshod through systems and scales with senseless abandon, an abject object with an excess of access?

“Nothing is more dangerous than a monster whose story is ignored.” — Annalee Newitz, Pretend We’re Dead

For Poliks and Trillo, it’s all of the above and beyond, beyond the anti-Oedipal schizoanalysis of Deleuze and Guattari, beyond Wark, Acker, and Land. Exocapitalism is monstrous, autonomous, invisible, inescapable, unpredictable. Mudede adds, “An efficient market hypothesis is nothing more than the chattering that zombies make with their teeth.”⁷

In his classic free-market, Marxist polemic, Capitalist Realism (Zer0 Books, 2009), Mark Fisher described capitalism as acting “very much like the Thing in John Carpenter’s film of the same name: a monstrous, infinitely plastic entity, capable of metabolizing and absorbing anything with which it comes into contact.”⁸ In their book Pretend We’re Dead (Duke University Press, 2006), Annalee Newitz writes, “capitalism creates monsters who want to kill you,”⁹ monsters lurking in the liminal, what Lacan called “the big Other.” As the big Other, exocapitalism is an invisible monster of which we only see traces, shadows, and stand-ins, ever-evident in its absence.

“I don’t trust the system, but I do trust the process,
Like I trust the water, but not the monster of Loch Ness.
Because what the system withholds, the process will tell you,
And what the water supplies, the monster will sell you.”
— WNGWLKR, “A Congregation of Jackals”

Acker wrote, “Since the only reality of phenomena is symbolic, the world’s most controllable by those who can best manipulate these symbolic relations. Semiotics is a useful model to the post-capitalists.”¹⁰ Fisher described late capitalism’s pace of “dreaming up and junking of social fictions is nearly as rapid as its production and disposal of commodities.” This monster eats everything… everything.¹¹

We can fix it though, as Fisher facetiously argued, “All we have to do is buy the right products.” If exocapitalism is only visible by its recent absence—by what it didn’t leave behind (<cough> middle class <cough>)—then we need to pay closer attention to its appetite(s) and be more careful about what we feed it.

It. Eats. Everything.

“Products are out of date. No one can afford to buy anyway.” — Kathy Acker, Hannibal Lector, My Father

One blurber calls Poliks and Trillo’s Excocapitalism “Nick Land for adults.”¹² The reason is evident, even if only in the following: Relegating the user to the used, Land (in)famously asked, “Can what is playing you make it to level 2?”¹³ If it’s going to have a chance, then Exocapitalism is its survival guide, chock full of cheat codes, tips, trips, token stacks, stock symbols, amalgams, algorithms, and antagonisms.

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Notes:

1 Quoted in McKenzie Wark, Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse? New York: Verso, 2019, 1.
2 Kathy Acker, Literal Madness: My Life, My Death by Pier Paolo Passolini; Kathy Goes to Haiti; Florida, New York: Grove Press, 1989, 301.
3 Charles Mudede, “Foreword: The Political Economy of Software,” in Marek Poliks and Roberto Alonso Trillo, Exocapitalsim: Economies With Absolutely No Limits, Berlin/Nicosia: Becoming Press, 2025, 2.
4 See Jason W. Moore (ed.), Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2016.
5 Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2013, passim.
6 Nick Land, Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings, 1987-2007, Urbanomic/Sequence Press, 2011, 377.
7 Mudede, 2025, 2-3.
8 Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? London: Zer0 Books, 2009, 6.
9 Annalee Newitz, Pretend We’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006, 3.
10 Acker, 1989, 293.
11 See, for instance, Nancy Fraser, Cannibal Capitalism, New York: Verso, 2023.
12 “A masterpiece… Nick Land for Adults!” — Onty
13 Nick Land, “Swarm 1: Meltdown,” ccru, 1994.

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