The Capital Dialogues: Roberto Alonso Trillo & Marek Poliks in Conversation with Paul North
<h2><em>The Capital Dialogues</em> puts artists and thinkers into conversation with Paul North and Paul Reitter, who recently published their translation of Karl Marx’s <em>Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1</em> (Princeton Press, 2024). These wide-ranging discussions trace the resurgent wave of interest in Marx within the visual arts field, mapping how these ideas are concretized across contemporary practices.</h2> <p>In this conversation, Paul North sits down with Marek Poliks and Roberto Alonso Trillo, authors of the breakout treatise <em>Exocapitalism: economies with absolutely no limits</em>, which uses insights from the software economy to diagnose capitalism’s increasingly pronounced tendency to disentangle itself from material reality. <em>Exocapitalism</em> describes a contest between <em>lift</em>, capitalism’s migration path from real goods to abstract services, and <em>drag</em>, the weak counter-force of human infrastructures and social needs that keeps tugging it back to earth. North supplements these insights with the ancestrality of Marx’s own attempt to illuminate the sprawling excesses of the capitalism of his lifetime, touching on how both <em>Capital</em> and <em>Exocapitalism</em> are driven by a familiar, agonizing anger. Poliks and Trillo, artists and AI researchers by training, spoke with North while touring their lecture “The Data Center Does Not Exist”, on wild financial speculation within the AI economy, which is reproduced here after the conversation.</p>
Authors: Marek Poliks, Roberto Alonso Trillo, Paul North
Facilitator: Hugh Scott-Douglas
Designer: Chris Lee
Annotator: William Wiebe
Part of: The Capital Dialogues
ISBN: 979-8-9965164-0-7