Roberto Alonso Trillo y Marek Poliks - Exocapitalism: Economies with Absolutely No Limits

Marek Poliks and Roberto Alonso Trillo's Exocapitalism: Economies with Absolutely No Limits has been praised as an "era-defining book, a book that carries an idea with the potential resonance of Bratton's The Stack or Hardt & Negri's Empire" (New Models). At the centre of their argument is the idea that capitalism does not belong to humans, it belongs to and is governed by itself. Traditional economic theory struggles to keep up with capitalism's rapid rate of acceleration, and this book steps in to address this. In this lecture Alonso Trillo and Poliks delve into one of the main pillars of this cosmofinancial framework, the notion of “Lift”: what happens when financial abstractions achieve escape velocity from terrestrial constraints? What happens when capitalism doesn't need us anymore?

Roberto Alonso Trillo is a theorist and artist whose work spans cultural theory, media philosophy, and experimental sound. A Spanish researcher based in Hong Kong, his work focuses on the aesthetic and political dimensions of machine learning, with particular attention to infrastructural critique and performativity. In ongoing collaboration with Marek Poliks, he explores AI theory and speculative design as part of a broader inquiry into automation and cultural production. His interdisciplinary practice extends to sound art, post-instrumental music, and critical pedagogy. Roberto and Marek won Google's 2024 Art + Machine Intelligence award. He coauthors the Disintegrator podcast with Marek Poliks.

Marek Poliks is a researcher in the philosophy of technology, with a focus on deep learning. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Together with his main research partner, Roberto Alonso Trillo (HKBU), Poliks has been working to position deep learning tools as endosymbiotic reproductive infrastructures—inorganic vehicles through which biological, epistemological, and social information is encoded, subjected to contingent processes, and transmitted. He coauthors the Disintegrator podcast with Roberto.

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