Exocapitalism

More about the book

Capitalism does not belong to humans. Despite an apparent addiction to our sweat and blood, capitalism wants nothing to do with us-it has even spent the last 10,000 years attempting to break away entirely. This book provides a massively-scaled reading of the history of capitalism through the present, a reading which dispels any illusions of our contemporary moment as anything but a blip in a long, autonomous trajectory. As Charles Mudede suggests in the foreword, we haven't really seen a theory of capitalism like this yet. You can find some roots in a distant reading of Jean Baudrillard, or in the emancipatory projects of Silvia Federici and Frantz Fanon, or in the writings of Suhail Malik and Elena Esposito - but it remains a theory-mutant phrogging inside an AWS data center, a troglodyte who assembled its peculiar understanding of the world through Salesforce play-to-earn gaming, and high-frequency trading. Throughout the book, the authors develop three major concepts-fold, lift, and drag - which together offer a kind of emergency tool-kit with which a reader might better navigate our ever-enstrangening world. This first edition includes a foreword by Charles Mudede, an afterword by Alex Quicho, and a series of illustrations by Avocado Ibuprofen.