Marek Poliks and Roberto Alonso Trillo | The Datacenter Does Not Exist

Exocapitalism: economies with absolutely no limits (2025)
Marek Poliks & Roberto Trillo

Exocapitalism marks the next chapter in the story of two researchers who have grown tired with a self-replicating discourse that seems to spiral endlessly only to arrive back where it was. With all the relevant sensibilities and love, discourse on capitalism can feel a bit… Cage-y, dingy, cavernous but poorly lit and damp. Even progressive discourse produces a kind of circle-of-pain—a hamster wheel—which you pour your life into and nothing changes. The psychoanalytical jaguar runs rings rampantly around its walls, not unlike the show-girlies in the motorbike pits of New Mexico or Tong Setan, but it might be less confused if it could understand the concept of glass. It is not unlike the torlauf of a turntable stylus as it tracks its way along the vinyl cliff, only to suddenly clip a scratch and fly out of the groove; as the needle pops into the crevice, it is thrown back into the previous groove, where it will loop-untoward-death like an ox-bow lake. 

If this is the task which lies before authors Poliks & Trillo, then Exocapitalism is the first attempt to jog the wheel, or shift the needle, to break out of the loop. As a book it is not a totalizing philosophical work about capital, neither is it a deep excavation of some underlying, string-like particle buried deep within us—and it is absolutely not a fantastical exploration of mind-control aliens extracting our lifeblood. This book is a rigorous attempt to massage the discourse, or to smooth out some contradictions. This work is not theoretically estranged from Marx, Baudrillard or even Land, but it tracks a different path entirely, and attempts to build, from the ground up, new theories and concepts that account for the ever-more-nebulous and chaotic, economic, financial and social phenomena of our multiplicitous Vernetzte Welten. 

“Exocapitalism offers an alternative to Nick Land that is desperately needed—not because it is more sober (it isn’t), but because it is less horny. The sexy AI alien of technocapital is revealed to be nothing more than a Rule 34 drawing of slime mold, or perhaps a kind of yeast, that meek inheritor of the Earth leaving all of humanity behind.” — New Models

“This is not an argument for a new phase of capitalism, but rather a cosmological, retroactive take on the continuity of capital as an inhuman algorithm modelled on finance and software rather than factory and labor, manifesting in the contemporary topology of the spongy and blob-like digital business formations—this is bound to be controversial, but it is worth contending with. So love it or hate it, Exocapitalism is original, enlightening and infuriating: a book to be reckoned with.” — Tiziana Terranova

Marek Poliks is a researcher in the philosophy of technology, especially with respect to deep learning. He’s based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Marek and his primary research partner Roberto Alonso Trillo (HKBU) have been working to situate deep learning tools as endosymbiotic reproductive infrastructure (inorganic vehicles through which biological, epistemological, and social information is encoded, subject to contingent processes, and transmitted).

Roberto Alonso Trillo is a theorist and artist whose work spans cultural theory, media philosophy, and experimental sound. Based in Hong Kong, his research engages the aesthetic and political dimensions of machine learning, with particular attention to infrastructural critique and performativity. In ongoing collaboration with Marek Poliks, he investigates AI theory and speculative design as part of a broader inquiry into automation and cultural production. His interdisciplinary practice extends into sound art, post-instrumental music, and critical pedagogy.