Exocapitalism – Economies with absolutely no limits

While presented as a contiguous work, the book is formed of different essays that have been dissected, recomposed with artificial connective tissue. The result lies somewhere between the rhizomatic continuity of a Body-without-Organs, and the disjointed assemblage of roadkill; either way, the question of where to even begin remains the same. 

These essays each grow out of a particular resentment that developed through years of experience as a working-student of biology, but the task of the book was to transform this into something productive, something that sticks granular propositions into Biology like acupuncture needles. Inherent sexism within Biological research is, after all, not entirely disconnected to Pharmaceutical giants flooding the streets with opiates—and it is simply a writer’s hope that some well positioned words can remind enough people of how its all connected. 

In what could be perceived as a philosophical turn, the importance of talking about science, as much as doing it, is re-entering the popular scientific consciousness, and it is high time, too. What was already getting bad under Biden, became catastrophic under Trump, and the infiltration into public research by private institutions and capitalist enterprises, which this book highlights, is proving dire. The capitalisation of all things bio, whether -yoghurt, -metric data or -logical institutions, is necrotic—MeltdownYourBooks didn’t flinch, they just grabbed the scalpel, dowsed the flesh in ethanol, and asked the question we all forget needs answering: where first, Doc? 

Meltdown Your Books (M.Y.B.), the pen name, was made as a portmanteau of the seminal essay Meltdown by Nick Land, and the landmark film Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets by Shuji Terayama. I chose the name, almost 3 years ago now, to reflect the political and digital black hole I saw hovering at the edge of contemporary media experience, and to present my work without the muddy veneer of personal identity. It has remained, since its inception, an anonymous project in only the loosest terms. The dedicated could always find my real identity, and some have, and so its anonymous character existed primarily as an element of presentation. Its anonymity existed to emphasize its deindividuated character. The things I discuss and emphasize under the M.Y.B. label are not items with definitive characteristics, they are collective experiences. M.Y.B. is something I cherish beyond self.

Third edition featuring afterword by Alessandro Sbordoni & several appendices, including a new translation & edit of “Taylor Swift Does Not Exist”. 

This is a monumental and extensive work from someone who is arguably the most well-versed scholar of Baudrillard, Deleuze & Laruelle in the German-speaking world, Achim Szepanski, the original founder of Mille Plateaux, Force Inc Music Works and NON. This book is dedicated to Jean Baudrillard, who would be described by Achim as the most radical and advanced stimmung in Philosophy. Through this comprehensive and devouring analysis of Baudrillard’s work, the author presents a gripping account of their own philosophy; alongside his magnum opus Die Ekstasie der Spekulation, this book, In the Delirium of the Simulation, provides the strongest case for what might be called, in light of his passing, Szepanskism or Szepanskian Economics. 

From Finance, to non-philosophy and radical experimental music, Szepanski is an anomalous and unique theoretician with one hell of a history. 

CONTENTS:

• Metabox of Terms: Simulation, Code, Hyperreality, Fractal, Seduction and Implosion 
• Baudrillard's Maximisation Hypothesis: the System and the Other
• Baudrillard & Marxism: Signs, Production and Money
• Distinguishing the Consumer System (or Shopping Mall) from the Landfill
• Baudrillard & the Financial Simulacrum
• Excursus on Jonathan Beller's World Computer 
• Hyperreality & Artificial Intelligence
• Baudrillard & Quantum Theory
• Afterword: Hyperculture by Alessandro Sbordoni
• Appendix 1: Taylor Swift Does Not Exist
• Appendix 2: Baudrillard: After the Orgy
• Appendix 3: Imagination & Reality: Psychoanalysis vs Baudrillard

A queering of psychoanalysis put together by the forerunner of Inactual Magazine. 

Organ Multiplication Manifesto is an essay that delves into the transformations of sociality and sexuality in the context of digital technologies. Using an interdisciplinary approach that blends philosophy, erotic literature, media theory, psychoanalysis, gender studies, and neuroscience, the text explores how devices, platforms, and technologies shape and produce normative systems that influence our perceptions, desires, and relationships with others. By examining the interplay between desire and digital mediation and drawing comparisons with authors such as Deleuze, Ballard, Žižek, Butler, Preciado, Bataille, and others, this book aims to present a new theoretical, critical, and philosophical perspective in the contemporary discourse on the relationship between humans, technology, and society.

This book begins with an analysis of three iconic erotic texts from Masoch, Ballard and Bataille, and uses this analysis as the departure point for its main theoretical work on the four topics listed in the subtitle. The book passes through a lot of interesting phases, including an analysis of Phenomenology and Gucci, class struggle and OnlyFans and much more, until eventually arriving at the actual manifesto for Organ Multiplication and the beautifully named notion of the "Caged Sun". 

Foreword by Vincenzo Estremo.
Afterword by Franco "Bifo" Berardi.

"One may think that the history of the human culture is going to be enormously impoverished by the disappearance of the body, one may think that, on the contrary, human culture has been enriched by the renounce to presence and physical contact. It is not the intention of Damato to save this dilemma, His intention is rather to open a new field of investigation, and possibly to start a reflection on a more advanced dilemma: will the change of perception make possible the emergence of a new ontology, or is the disappearance of the body going to mark the final dissolution of human life itself?" — Franco "Bifo" Berardi

Christian Nirvana Damato is a writer, curator, and independent researcher working in the fields of philosophy, technology, psychoanalysis, and visual culture. He teaches media theory at the IED in Turin and runs various workshops on publishing and writing. He writes for and collaborates with various magazines and publishing houses. He is the founder and editorial director of Inactual. He has also published Medial Disorders. Interpretive and Non-statistical Compendium of Technological Disorders. Vol I, with contributions by Geert Lovink, Alfie Bown, Isabel Millar, Eyal Weizman (Forensic Architecture) et al. (ed. by, Inactual, 2024), Wearable Statistical Desires. Re-programming the performativity of the body through digisexuality (Mimesis 2025; Everyday Analysis, 2025) and Medial Disorders Vol II.

This is a limited edition book. The author trained an LLM on the texts of a deceased theorist, and then proceeded to interact with the LLM and produce simulations of what the theorist may have said in regards to various pertinent topics. The book is primarily a free online resource, but a few copies are being printed to commemorate the work. It has a foreword and afterword by the Editors. 

At the core of this project is a translation of “Marxist Islam or Islamic Marxism,” a groundbreaking text written by Bizhan Jazani during his imprisonment in the 1970s under the Shah’s oppressive regime. Translated by Parham Ghalamdar, this work is accompanied by an introduction contextualizing Jazani’s radical vision. Ghalamdar also contributes a series of ASCII-style illustrations and diagrams—AI-assisted reinterpretations of Jazani’s original paintings and photographs—that bridge the past and present, offering a new perspective on his revolutionary artistry. 

Siahkal names a place in the forests of Gilan and a threshold in revolutionary time. In 1971 a guerrilla action near Siahkal shook the order of the Shah. The action failed militarily yet seeded a myth for the People’s Fedai Guerrillas. Bizhan Jazani, a founding thinker, wrote and painted in prison and was executed in 1975. His work teaches that strategy rather than sentiment endures. // This book treats Siahkal as a Deep Object, a persistent attractor that gathers memory, images, and tactics. An AI model trained on Jazani’s writings and paintings translates his essay on Islamic Marxism and proposes annotations. The machine functions as a probe that widens attention while remaining accountable to the source. Parham Ghalamdar trained the AI, wrote the introduction, and composed ASCII diagrams and diagrammatic readings from Jazani’s artworks. Parsa Esmaeilzadeh contributes an essay that reads Jazani through Karatani and left accelerationism. // It is a call to reimagine and export revolution as a Deep Object that asks for Deep Time to unfold. This clandestine edition invites the reader to study, test, and build strategy that can outlast the news cycle and meet the future head on. 

Parham Ghalamdar is a multidisciplinary artist currently based in the UK. Ghalamdar’s work traces forgotten mythologies, buried philosophies, and visual ruins, reconfiguring them into speculative worlds where memory, fiction, and futurism collapse into one another. Drawing on cybernetic theory and generative AI, he explores how systems of feedback, simulation, and machine vision mediate our understanding of history and possibility. Through painting, film, and writing, he builds narratives that feel both ancient and yet-to-come, haunted by lost histories and animated by possible futures.

This book stems from the author’s discontents with Lacanian Psychoanalysis, by drawing from psychoanalysts like Félix Guattari and Sándor Ferenczi, as well as authors like Viveiro DeCastro, and Thomas Lamarre, to whom the book is dedicated. 

As Lucas Ferraço Nassif elaborates on the possibility of a multiplicitous Unconscious, or rather, a mass of many Unconscious(es), he attempts here to fold the book itself into the text, to make the organisation of the physical book itself a part of the elaboration. 

This 2nd Edition comes with a few editorial changes, and a slightly different design approach. It is being presented now with a suite of endorsements from a group of exciting writers and researchers, including Persis Bekkering, Thomas Lamarre, and Yuchen Li. Much of the first edition is preserved, and an extra text has been added, written by the editor as a part of the lecture at Ifilnova. There has been a focus on making this book more accessible, so we have reworked the design of this edition in Black & White. 

The Unconscious is Semiotic, not Linguistic, and it only jumps out when you read between the lines. Do you remember, back in 1997, when 600 kids had epileptic shocks whilst watching Television—the Pokémon Shock? This might sound strange at first, but Lucas Ferraço Nassif theorises that, contrary to the claim that this was caused by oscillations of blue and red light alone, it could have been caused by microperceptions and intensities within narrative. As Porygon takes Ash and friends into the digital world, the immanence of unconscious assemblages drags viewers in, too. 

Such is the haptic and imagetic nature of this book. Using several design and editorial strategies, and a particular mode of writing, the author attempts to elaborate on their work on the Unconscious by recreating a similar possibility—where book, language and reader collapse into a composition, an assemblage or a haecceity. Unconsciousness operates as the multiplanar compositions of Japanese Anime do, so this book has been organized accordingly—different texts, different temporalities, different voices—and like the Japanese concept of Ma (negative space), or even like CoreCore, something jumps out of the breaks, the gaps in between the layers, and therein lies, for this book, a departure point for elaborating on not just one, but many, Unconscious(es). 

For Fall 2025, Spike is getting to the bottom of the vintage aura around contemporary culture: Nostalgia. 

Are we doomed to ever-shorter cycles of cash-cow retromania, until AI memory-wipes us with pure simulation? Or is the root problem of our endless déjà vu actually the expectation that art "make it new," itself just so much nostalgia for a long-gone modernism? We're working out what the present owes to the past, if our goal is to conjure a better culture for tomorrow.

Featuring Jeppe Ugelvig's essay on the art world's uses and misuses of nostalgia; Simon Reynolds and Adina Glickstein talk exhausting the past; e-girl/theorist Alex Quicho critiques the end of newness; filmmaker Johan Grimonprez identifies with the hijacker in his dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997); a portrait of kitsch-savant painter Friedrich Kunath; cultural critic Rosanna McLaughlin on missing the white cube; Artist's Favorites by Diego Marcon; ex-dealers Margaret Lee and Jeff Poe escape the art game; Whitney Mallett on rebranding celebrity through book culture; making analog-ish art "under" the internet with Marc Kokopeli, Bedros Yeretzian, Flora Hauser, and Nicole-Antonia Spagnola; Sean Monahan forecasts our old-fashioned future; art historian Lynn Zelevansky on "New York/New Wave" at P.S.1 Contemporary (1981); artist Maja Bajevic's Yugostalgic report from Sarajevo; and Tea Hačić-Vlahović getting dewy-eyed catching up to her mother's age; plus, reviews of exhibitions by Mark Leckey, Wolfgang Tillmans, Women's History Museum, and more.

Founded by the artist Rita Vitorelli in 2004, Spike (Spike Art Quarterly) is a quarterly magazine on contemporary art published in English which aims at sustaining a vigorous, independent, and meaningful art criticism. At the heart of each issue are feature essays by leading critics and curators on artists making work that plays a significant role in current debates. Situated between art theory and practice and ranging far beyond its editorial base in Vienna and Berlin, Spike is both rigorously academic and stylishly essayistic. Spike's renowned pool of contributing writers, artists, collectors and gallerists observe and reflect on contemporary art and analyse international developments in contemporary culture, offering its readers both intimacy and immediacy through an unusually open editorial approach that is not afraid of controversy and provocation.

If there is a centre around which the language of this pamphlet circulates, then it is Palestine. As this centre, Palestine enables a transformative power that persistently and steadfastly turns repression and silencing into solidarity. Essay-fiction, prose poetry, radical philosophy, speculative nonfiction — this uncategorizable collection of texts brings militant inquiry to each utterance, each narrative turn, in acts of transnational and transhistorical becoming.

The theme of this issue of Pages was triggered by the idea of opium smoke as a ‘writing machine.’ Since the early opium trade, there has been writing not only on opium, but also through opium, especially in countries linked to past and present drug networks. In this issue we are tapping into the deeply rooted relationship between writing and drugs, especially beyond the Western literary tradition, and wondering about the current conceptual and material derivatives of intoxication with which we can machinate new extremities in our chemical, historical and technological relations to the world.

With contributions by:

- Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh / Smoke, Drug, Poison: A Philosophy of the Faramoosh-Khaneh (Opium Den)
- Pages / Dissolving, Mixing, Melting, Stirring (the Smoke)
- Hung-Bin Hsu / The Taste of Opium: Science, Monopoly and the Japanese Colonization in Taiwan, 1895—1945
- Saleh Najafi / Hedayat: The Opium of Translation and Creating the Impossible Memory
- Patricia Reed / The Toxicity of Continuity
- Fuko Mineta / A Monster Appears in Qingtian
- Morad Farhadpour / Inside and Outside Addiction
- Mohammad-Ali Rahebi / Of Junk and Time: Trauma, Habit, Capitalism