[Launch] Exocapitalism, with Roberto Alonso Trillo and Marek Poliks

Join us for the launch of Exocapitalism – Economies with absolutely no limits (becoming press 2025), with authors Roberto Alonso Trillo and Marek Poliks. Exocapitalism is a rigorous account of the dynamics of capitalism today through an in-depth exposition of software, speculative finance, and the highest scales of arbitrage.

Schedule

19:00 - 20:30 Presentation and q&a

Find the book here: https://rile.space/books/exocapitalism-economies-with-absolutely-no-limits

About the publication

At the centre of Marek Poliks and Roberto Alonso Trillo's argument is the idea that capital does not belong to humans, it belongs to—and is governed by—itself. Traditional economic theory struggles to keep up with the rapid rate of acceleration, and this book steps in to address this:

"The critical orthodoxy is slowing; it's tired, it's not especially good at the internet, it's probably never manned a Starbucks counter or an anonymous cubicle. Its younger adepts—though digitally native—are chronically underemployed, unavailable, drowning in the student debt (or student opportunity cost) required for entry into the critical apparatus. Few have any patience for the numbing slop-speak of the LinkedIn economy, the libertarian enclave of forex and HFT and memecoins, the quarter-zip depravity of employment at the charnel houses of McKinsey or Deloitte or Accenture, the blazingly random mood-swings of venture capital that lubricate all of the above. This impatience is—in the parlance of the above—a blocker: it means that the critical apparatus underestimates the power of the software economy, struggles to articulate the morphological density of digitally-realized capitalism, comprehensively ignores the functional death of labor, and doesn't understand scale."

About the guests

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.