Absolutely No Limits

Exocapitalism is all about lift - abstraction, dematerialization, deterritorialization. Capital, above all things, wants to move away from the land, from the soil, from physical dependencies, from hardware, from low-margin production, from deterministic flows, from people, from meat, from the present moment altogether.

In this lecture, authors Roberto Alonso Trillo and Marek Poliks explore the limits of the software economy, looking specifically at the short- and medium-term impacts of agentic AI on human lives and livelihoods. They dive into what they call 'superdark' production - autonomous swarms that pursue their own ends - and their implications - synthetic demand, agent-run economies, trophic governance, and the bizarre contortions of capitalism that appear when it is stripped down to first principles.

Speakers:
Marek Poliks is a theoretical researcher in deep learning and AI, primarily concerned with the autonomy and self-organizing character of technical infrastructure. He is Head of AI at LaunchDarkly and the technical co-founder of Disintegrator.

Roberto Alonso Trillo is a theorist and artist whose research addresses the aesthetic and political dimensions of machine learning, with attention to infrastructural critique and automation. With Marek Poliks he wrote Exocapitalism and their ongoing work situates deep learning tools as endosymbiotic reproductive infrastructure. He is a co-founder of Disintegrator and is based in Hong Kong.

Disintegratoris an independent research lab focused on the frontiers of cybernetics, game theory, and human-machine interfaces. We build and design the tools that future humans will use to navigate a world populated by fully autonomous recursively self-improving systems. We work from the recognition of a gap between technology and its theorization: production and development are significantly outpacing the techniques through which humans understand what it is exactly that they have built.

Agentic AI is resolved from a series of constraints related to compute, market dynamics, and geopolitics, emerging from predictable path-dependencies with controllability and governability nowhere among its design criteria. The task has less to do with reengineering the agentic turn from first principles than with building tools for control and governance resilient to any likely outcome. We pursue this through research objects (e.g., Choreomata, Exocapitalism, and now The Superdark Factory), alongside the Disintegrator podcast. In 2024, we received Google's Art + Machine Intelligence award.

This lecture is hosted by CSM MA Narrative Environments, a course about the design of spacetime and social technologies located in the Spatial Practices Programme.