Poliks and Trillo’s Exocapitalism describes capitalism as a tug-of-war between “lift” and “drag.” The former is capital’s attempt to sublime into limitless abstraction. The latter is the gooey reality of embodied, material existence that pulls it back down to concrete forms.

Think of the triad of capital, labour and technology: exocapitalism is capital and technology tearing away from labour. Its engine is arbitrage: squeezing profit from gaps between price and value, especially the ones that open up when things are deferred in time. Rather than making and selling, the system treats the world as a vast random number generator to bet on and hedge against, and mines volatility as its raw material.

Following the furore of Venkatesh Rao’s Cognitive Mercantilism essay, where the world that reads such texts divided itself into Anti-Sloppers and Appreciative Public, I think it’s safe to claim that we’re at the start of exointellectualism.

Lift is the growing ability of the would-be public intellectual to launch potent ideas with less effort and more reach. Drag is the production labour and status game that, traditionally, kept public intellectual-ing anchored in the human realm. The first is accelerating and the second is shrinking. The open question is whether, on net, we get more light than heat. My bet is light, but the first wave is all heat.

Then again, exocapitalism runs on volatility. Maybe the heat isn’t a phase to get through but the thing that powers the light? This isn’t engagement farming, where the heat is the point, or audience capture, where the frothing slowly reshapes the author. Here the heat works on the ideas rather than the people who make them. The furore acts like a forge: it burns off what doesn’t matter and leaves a hardened core of what does.