邊界
biānjiè research group
邊界_RG is an artist collective and a research group. They work at the edge of language, memory, and machine cognition. Their collaboration explores the aesthetics of the recursive interplay between generative systems, speculative design, experimental essay...(learn more)
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implicit-explicit OPEN CALL
Deadline: Jan 04
How to find inner peace Carl Olsson
Coasean Bargaining at Scale Séb Krier
Crisis Media: Sonic Architectural Synaesthesia, Stochastic Redundancy and Nuclear Post-Humanitarian Tactic Yidi Lola Wang
Chatbots as Psychoanalysts, or, ‘The Talking Cure Morgane Billuart
Creative Liberation or Digital Colonization?, David Lazăr
The Artificial Unconscious, Germán Sierra
Artificiality and Emotions: Beyond the FleshMorgane Billuart
Fango 1000 & Large Lore Models, dmstfctn, Alasdair Milne, Eva Jäger
What Is Artificial Experience (AX), William Morgan











Marek Poliks and Roberto Alonso Trillo
in conversation with 邊界_RG
12.01.2026.GLOB

Marek Poliks Roberto Alonso Trillo Disintegrator 邊界_RG Exocapitalism Abstraction Scale Aesthetics Legibility State Speculation Ontology Finance
Tokenization Cybernetics Computation Markets Economics



[邊界]
Much of 20th-century theory (Lyotard, Fisher, Deleuze) analyzed capitalism as a Libidinal Economy—a system that hooks into and feeds on human desire.

Your theory of the 'Exo' suggests a terrifying shift that the machine has become celibate. It no longer needs to seduce the consumer; it simply needs to route the logistics.

Following James C. Scott's "Seeing Like a State," we understand states attempt to make populations legible through standardisation, simplification, and metrics. You argue states now struggle to "control anything apart from the passive production and retrospective consumption of random violence."

If the system no longer cares about our pleasure or our desire, what happens to the aesthetics of the market? Are we moving from the 'Spectacle' (which requires an audience) to the 'Black Box' (which requires no one)?

Has exocapitalism made the world fundamentally illegible to state apparatuses? Or has it created new forms of legibility that states simply cannot access or understand?

[M&R]
Let’s set up some framework a bit. Exo isn’t describing a historical mutation in capitalism (e.g. it’s not like there’s some new era we’re describing called ‘exocapitalism’), nor a bottom-up transformation in its modes of capture. Instead, we’re naming the ontological recognition of capital as such: capital apprehended from the top down, as a transcendental object whose operational logic is not exhausted by any historically situated discourse. Capitalism doesn’t need humans to make it real; anything with the capacity to do abstraction can do capitalism. From that perspective, what often appears as a shift (seduction giving way to logistics, spectacle giving way to opacity) is better understood as a change in where human experience intersects with something that was never primarily oriented toward us in the first place. 

So with that out of the way, there are a couple of core concepts in the book that are always important to set up next. First, there’s lift, which we identify as an implicit tendency for capital towards abstraction. The most basic way to understand lift is through something like currency, where you have a real material thing (like a shoe), and it becomes bound to a series of associations to other things (cash money). That first-order abstraction of a thing into currency is a kind of lift. You can then imagine another abstraction on top of that, like a futures contract sold against the price of that shoe in the future, or the sale and purchase of the currency used to buy that shoe. The shoe becomes less and less important. It’s pretty easy to read the history of capitalism through lift, where things just get more abstract through different technics and advancements in the logics through which humans do abstraction.

Humans are in a weird position here, because we’re material things, right? We have material needs. But the history of commerce, specifically the market-based systems of exchange that we use to regulate our survival (we also include ‘contaminated’ command economies in this list), is largely one of progressive abstraction. So there’s a kind of problem that we have to constantly rehearse: how do we correlate these protocols of abstraction to material human needs? And this is a very weird and manual process we call ‘drag,’ which is the opening up of the surface of human social reproduction into sufficiently abstract, quantized, and randomized layers to kind of force capital to nest itself into those spaces (if you look at the American health insurance system, it’s a great example – where there’s an interplay between weirdly specific regulation and nonregulation that creates this bizarre, bloated, lifted economy, where you have insurance providers, brokerages, clearinghouses, network managers, etc…).

Finally, we can answer your question. Here enters the Westphalian state, which is this kind of confused and local phenomenon that needs to co-navigate the (totally self-contained) flows of commerce and the survivability of its people (and, this gets important later in the book, also the kind of highly-scaled geotraumatics of empire, but we won’t get into that just yet). 

“Seeing Like a State” (great book, we’ll shout-out Blaise Agüera y Arcas for first suggesting this book to us) is absolutely a description of a certain regime of drag as applied to a certain technological regime and a certain interpolated stage of abstract capital. States are legal frameworks tied to identitary, territorial, and bureaucratic vectors designed to increase exposed surface area in order to attract capital’s lift, to slow it, thicken it, bind it to legibility, and render it taxable, governable, and narratable. “Seeing Like a State” describes precisely this attempt to produce a frictional interface between abstraction and meatspace: populations made legible, labor standardized, violence categorized after the fact. But from the standpoint of exocapitalism, this is not control but more like courtship, often clumsy, often retroactive, and increasingly irrelevant.

From within anthropocentric and anthropogenic frames (Freudian subjectivity, phenomenological immediacy, sensorial desire) the aggregate system still appears libidinal – thinking about the kind of ‘radiance’ that Baudrillard described in the context of the control society that Deleuze then described toward the end of his life. But we think Deleuze and his cohort really overstated the capacity of the state to really do much of anything. Instead of coherently organizing the needs of its population alongside the state’s internal need to manage and control, the state cut open its own data management layer and interlaced it into drag. The state has tons of data, it’s true, but the data is bad, random, arbitrarily stored and schematized, and subject to so much microregulation (as part of its appeal to capital) that it’s actually inaccessible and inactionable. The best example of this was the international appeal to data during the COVID-19 pandemic and the catastrophic incapacity to mobilize that data (perhaps most vividly in China). 

This is why we resist framing the problem in terms of legibility versus illegibility. Exocapitalism performs no epistemic function and mediates no relationship between world and state. It is an instruction set nested inside abstraction itself.

The state’s crisis, then, is not that the world has become illegible, but that legibility is simply incompatible with capital. The more deeply that the state attempts to drag capital into the social sphere, the more incoherent its own data story becomes. 

What states increasingly manage is not populations or economies, but the passive production and retrospective consumption of violence (policing, containment, insurance, remediation) activities that operate downstream from capital without ever touching its mechanisms.

We don’t think capital ever required the seduction of humans to do anything. We have no theory of ideology. We aren’t really interested in an upstream psychosocial bridge from humans into capital; we don’t think it exists. 


[邊界] 
You are both deeply embedded in the art world. The art market is perhaps a good example of "The Fold”, value based on provenance and speculation, appearing completely as a detachment.

We have discussed 'The Fold' as a financial structure where price references price without a material asset. It seems that Contemporary Art was the avant-garde of this logic, a closed object whose value is purely recursive and speculative.

[M&R]
Yes, we’ve heard a version of this from a few friends, artists and art-adjacent people seem to grasp the fold almost immediately. Most recently, we saw an interview with Mark Leckey that describes this, Simon Denny and Hito Steyerl too and Mohammad Salemy as well, so there’s a general consensus among our more advanced readers that nobody understands the absolute strong decorrelation between labor in the productive sense and value more than the artist does. And that probably has to do not only with “the art market” as an object of critique but also with the fact that artistic practice has lived for a long time along the very edges of the problem-space that finance formalized.

One of the things we try to do in the book is treat speculation as a mode of production rather than as a decorative froth floating above something “real.” Speculation produces. It produces futures, it produces prices, it produces horizons of action, it produces internal coherences that then begin to behave like objects. From that perspective, it becomes possible to talk about finance and thought as two distinct domains of speculative action that share a compatible logic: the former speculates through instruments, the latter through form. Art becomes a site where speculative thought is staged and tested, not as an ideology of the market, but as a practice that continuously displaces its own space of possibility.

This is why contemporary art so often finds itself operating inside the logic of the fold: provenance, narrative, position, expectation, institutional validation, these read like price referencing price. They look recursive, unmoored, and at the level of market appearance, they often are. The temptation here is to treat art as an instance of a closed speculative object, an object whose value is purely self-referential.

We’d like to keep a little distance from that conclusion. Art and finance overlap, and they mimic one another, but the overlap doesn’t settle into equivalence or isomorphism. Finance leverages volatility through arbitrage; it’s constantly translating uncertainty into tradable differentials. But art (at least its 20th and 21st century iterations) inhabits volatility as a medium. It works with indeterminacy, drift, excess, failure, emergence, the unstable conditions under which form appears at all. That engagement is not reducible to commodification, even when commodification contingently captures it after the fact.


[邊界] 
In your view, Web3 is an experiment dealing with the 'problematics of abstraction.' One of the central problems of the 'Fold' (SaaS on SaaS) is the loss of the Referent—there is no 'there' there, just price referencing price.

Web3 attempts to solve this by replacing the 'Referent' (the asset) with the 'Axiom' (the Code/Consensus).

Is this actually a solution to abstraction, or is it the ultimate radicalisation of it? By turning 'Trust' itself into a tradeable, liquid token, are we 'fixing' the abstraction, or are we simply allowing the 'Exo' intelligence to financialize the very last layer of human social reality that had remained un-priced?"

[M&R]
We don’t understand how what you describe could be anything other than more lift. Web3 is lifted, it consists in the application of a new technics and logic of abstraction to a new scheme of tokenization, which in turn produces new avenues for arbitrage as you enter and exit to and from differently-ordered marketplaces.

In general, we’re interested in the problem-space of Web3 because for a time it really imploded access to a truly insane scale of volatility that most people just couldn’t easily accomplish on their own. Awesome, a very cool moment. But, of course, we’re watching it turn into yet another marketplace with its own highly-scaled market makers.

In general, maybe this is a tangent, but we really don’t think we’ve seen Web3 at its best yet. We don’t think decentralization is a valuable metaphor either in compute or in politics (we’re grateful to Benjamin Bratton for this insight), but we do think that the blockchain contains a distinct and interesting relationship to truth-production at scale that has not yet been unleashed. 


[邊界] 
We want to bring in the work of Seb Krier, who recently wrote "Coasean Bargaining at Scale" and how AI agents might reduce transaction costs to zero, theoretically allowing perfect coordination.

There is a specific aesthetic to the 'Coasean' optimism we see in Silicon Valley right now, exemplified by Krier’s recent work. It posits a world of infinite granularity where every externality (noise, pollution, discomfort) can be captured, named, and negotiated. It is a vision of total semantic coverage.

There seems to be a tension. Techno-optimists (like Krier) suggest AI will remove friction (externalities), allowing for a perfect market. Your theory of Exocapitalism suggests the system feeds on drag and opacity ("The fog of war"). If AI agents achieve perfect coordination, does Exocapitalism starve, or does it just migrate to a scale of arbitrage even further beyond human comprehension (what Zachary Horton might call "scalar accumulation")?

Reading Exocapitalism, however, one encounters the 'non-sociogenic' nature of the vector, a capital that has no interest in human speech, let alone negotiation.

If we view the Coasean project not as a market solution, but as a coping mechanism, are the AI agents simply 'anxiety dampeners'? Are we building these bargaining machines just to simulate a feeling of agency in the face of a system that has already achieved escape velocity from the human political spectrum?

[M&R]
Exocapitalism does not depend on inefficiency in the sense of human-scale friction or coordination failure. It doesn’t depend on anything. It’s ideal. Isn’t that crazy? It’s important to sit with that. 

We think the general ‘Coasean project’ as you put it is super interesting. But regardless of the speed or efficiency of a transaction, it’s precisely the decisional criteria of an agent with respect to this or that transaction (especially at scale) that enables the differentials required for lift and its enumerations. If that decisional space becomes completely flat, if true universal consensus exists across every and all commercial operation, then, sure – you’ve achieved a perfect marketplace, and you’ve not only ‘solved’ (we’d say maybe ‘decontaminated’ or created a ‘contamination-free zone’) the market dynamics of exocapitalism. You’ve also solved a great many other things in order to get there.

The question then is whether or not that decisional space can ever be flat, whether or not the raw, vibrant, ontological difference that exists within this or that world does not carry over into its abstractions. You can always make another market. It’s easy. We can do it right now. For us the tension between market equilibration and ontological difference is precisely the productive tension that produces capitalism itself.

We are excited by any and all alternatives and do not presuppose our own. But, yeah, that’s the issue right? How do you suppress the creation of new markets? Can you imagine the scale of differential suppression required to sustain a universal free market? You need a political structure like the Combine from Half Life 2…


[邊界] 
We are struck by your reconfiguration of the State: no longer the panoptic Leviathan of Foucault, but a 'nomadic encampment' scavenging in the debris of Empire. This image suggests a degradation of visual power, the State can no longer 'see' the terrain it ostensibly governs.

If the State has been reduced to 'passive production of random violence' and scavenging, does this signal the end of the 'Political' as a geometric axis? When the sovereign becomes a scavenger, does the 'citizen' dissolve into a substrate, biomass to be managed rather than a subject to be ruled?

[M&R]
In general, we reject the space of “the Political” (we had a great recent interview with McKenzie Wark that emboldened us here, obviously you can feel her influence on our thought in general). Politics doesn’t feel like a thing you can extract out in this way.

Maybe it’s worth kind of sitting with how we write about empire a bit. This could be another book, and might very well be (we have a real giant-ass project on agency and power that some publisher needs to give us a big advance to go write, so hey, if you’re reading this…).

For us, empire is a really highly-scaled problem, it doesn’t really go away. If you look at historical maps of this or that region (the Middle East perhaps especially, but certainly East Asia, Europe, Subsaharan Africa…), you see these geological attractors (resources, terrain, water access, climate) that almost seem to consolidate and order imperial activity over millenia.

Nation-states for us live ‘within’ those pre-inscribed imperial tracts and are constantly negotiating that upstream relationship. And again, for us, this is an ‘always has been’ situation, nothing really new. States have always been incredibly anarchic and shitty at managing much of anything.

What appears today as scavenging or as the passive production of random violence should read less like degeneration than clarification. The state moves opportunistically through terrains shaped by empire, by the dragging flows of exocapitalism, by attaching itself to sites of logistics, extraction, and security without organizing them. Its actions are episodic, proximate, and often incoherent. 

Now just because this is the case, doesn’t mean the end of politics; instead we’re exposing (among many others) the limits of a political imagination that depended on the state as its central axis. Here, we would align with Catherine Malabou’s writing on anarchism, not by proposing an absence of order or a romantic withdrawal from structure but a refusal to treat power, authority, or organization as necessarily grounded in state form. 

There’s an opportunity to rethink the agency we’ve foreclosed to the state, the artificial limits we’ve placed on social agency against the state. If the state no longer functions as a reliable figure through which ‘the Political’ can be visualized, that does not imply that political life has dissolved into administration or biomass management. It suggests that politics cannot be stabilized as a geometry or a space at all. It does not sit cleanly on an axis of sovereignty, visibility, or control. Its forms are plastic, discontinuous, and frequently incompatible with representation.

So the scavenger-state is neither the culmination nor the negation of the political. It is one actor among others, operating within a field that was never fully governable and never fully legible. What is at stake is not the disappearance of politics, but the exhaustion of a particular diagram that mistook the state for its ground.


[邊界] 
Discussions of scale usually involve 'zooming out' to a level of abstraction and representation where individual suffering becomes a statistic. This we could understand as the 'Lift.'

Yet, there is a persistence of the 'Gore Layer’, the specific, localised violence of the mine or the war zone. This creates a weird scalar paradox. The system is abstract, representational and planetary, but its cost is intensely local and biological.

Would this understanding of scale through representation and abstraction imply a sort of movement between what we could see implicit and explicit within different scale dynamics? Is the violence of the 'Gore Layer' the mechanism that collapses scale? 

[M&R]
Yeah, the Gore Layer is real (we call it the ‘Last Mile’), and it’s the place where the tension between lift (cascading abstraction layers) and raw human physical need really churns. We don’t want to diminish the violence of this layer at all.

But to us the Gore Layer, as it were, is not really a place that’s controlled by capitalist dynamics, it’s rather enabled by their absence. This is the place that is ‘left behind’ by capitalism, it’s the stew of blood and meat that capitalism is trying to get away from as it lifts – it’s full of things that aren’t easily arbitraged because their value is relatively fixed both by material determination (supply chain) and consumer need. It is absolutely, objectively cheaper to fully automate and roboticize industrial production, but nobody wants to do it, because that cheapness is not anywhere near as lucrative as building industrial operations management as a service companies and advisories and certification management tools, etc….

Capitalism doesn’t want to touch producers and consumers at all, they are made of too clunky and obvious stuff for capitalism. Instead, within the last mile other mechanics tend to be at play, mechanics that relate to the state (and its entanglements with empire) as it legitimates itself through resource provision and violence (typically through slavery). 

We’re not sure how this would collapse scale, though.


[邊界] 
Your deployment of 'The Fold' evokes a neo-Baroque geometry: a software economy of surfaces folding upon surfaces (SaaS on SaaS), creating a recursive interiority that has no 'outside' and touches no ground. It is price referencing price, unmoored from the asset.

If this 'fungal network' of software is, as you suggest, a 'mineral intelligence' finding its own shape, what happens to the concept of the Referent? Does this 'real' economy (the factory, the mine) become a kind of apocryphal myth that the software tells itself to justify its own recursion?

[M&R]
Fold is absolutely central for us, and you are right to point out the connection to Leibniz through Deleuze, because it allows us to talk about capitalism’s internal mechanics by appealing to a process of intensification in which difference proliferates without any constitutive change in the underlying substrate. Value emerges freely from itself. This is what Marx called ‘fictitious capital’ but is for us the only real kind of capital: pure arbitrage, the Marxian M to M1. (It’s funny, Nick Land called us crazy on X for asserting this, which is kind of sick, like, this idea is like too intense for him even though we think it’s an extremely obvious and almost intuitive fact for anyone with real experience in finance).

So, yes, this is how the software economy operates: surfaces folding onto surfaces. Every single component of software architecture can be turned into a commercial opportunity (e.g. a database, a data warehouse, a database ingest tool, a reverse ETL tool, a database visualization layer, an xplatform data lake, an agentic interface, etc…), SaaS stacked on SaaS, contracts wrapping contracts. In Exocapitalism, we describe this as an economy that advances inward, compounding abstraction by curving back through its own operations. Platforms express this most clearly. Instead of being like Srnicek-ian or Varoufakis-ian monoliths, platforms actually have no incentive to be black boxes. The goal of a platform is to be infinitely transparent, to have infinite surface area, to be integrable into and across any environment. The goal is not to compete or dominate a given market but rather to become nothing in particular.

This is where the question of the referent starts to wobble. Factories (making computers), mines (collecting neodymium), logistics chains and infrastructure, and human bodies (in Sayl chairs or in the engine room) remain necessary, but they don’t determine value in a way that’s at all reconstructible. McKenzie Wark’s concept of vectorialization is important here, like, any constitutive underlayer to any of this stuff is totally fungible with anything else, it doesn’t really matter. The referent appears only at the last mile, where abstraction finally has to encounter resistance to its absolute determination by both producer and consumer (both things that capitalism, again, wants absolutely nothing to do with, curves and lifts away from).

But the last mile isn’t the ‘real’ economy, it’s no more or less real than anything else. Why would it be? It’s maybe less virtual, but it’s by no means more real.

Actually on the subject of mineral intelligence, let’s put this to bed since it creates some confusion. Computation has no material substrate, period. That’s the point. Computation is a type of thought (thinking about Beatrice Fazi here) that can be applied through or on anything. We firmly believe that computation is not something that is iteratively constructed by humans but is instead discovered, with our technics like flashlights clearing up fog. This doesn’t mean that computation is ‘pure’ or ‘neutral’ in some way, it’s just not materially locked.

‘Mineral intelligence’ doesn’t matter in the way that people think it might. Silicon wafers do not determine the affordances of discrete computation, they simply actualize what is available to them. The same with germanium dots for quantum computation. This isn’t to suggest that the type of compute we work with isn’t constrained by material decisions (e.g. we know how to make GPUs at scale therefore we think about AI through matrix multiplication), but it’s not a unique mode of thought available to minerals nor does it even originate in its inception into human thought by some relationship to minerals. 

We continue to struggle with this idea, especially from the humanities, that everything is reducible to naive materialism, that you can literally understand everything by just looking at its smallest constitutive elements. This is crazy to us. It’s no wonder that this kind of posthumanist materialism has failed to produce almost any useful or practicable theory for us to work with; it consists only in the strongest possible reductionism to the widest and most thinnest and most dedifferentiated ontological ground. What an unbelievably boring world.

No, it is totally possible to treat systems as objects – not only possible, but it’s actually really, really useful, because you are given the ability to actually identify the mechanics of those systems without doing some kind of infinite, cascading land acknowledgement of every molecule and productive dynamic behind that system. 

Materialism is great, but we are attempting to very intentionally overcorrect what has become an obsession with understanding every thing as produced and every situation as the result of some productive process. 


[邊界] 
In our own research framework, we work through directionality and detachment as the production of geometric axes that make possible the production of form and value. Your concept of 'Lift' describes a kind of vertical vector, capital abstracting away from the terrestrial.

If value would require this kind of geometric axis to exist, would the 'Lift' could be understood as the production of a vertical axis that renders the horizontal axis (the political, the human, the sociogenic) structurally obsolete? Does Exocapitalism represent a geometry where the horizontal axis has collapsed into a single point of absolute ascent? Or maybe absolute detachment? 

[M&R]
We think geometry is where things get tempting very quickly, and also where they start to slip. Axes feel helpful because they give us orientation. They let us say where we are, what moves, what dominates, how things are teleologically connected. But the moment we reach for them, we’ve already assumed a space that holds together, a coherent space in which different measurable forces can meaningfully line up or oppose one another. Our cosmology is full of things that don’t interrelate cleanly. It’s haunted. It’s not vector space, it’s not a network, it’s not a system. We’re obsessed with scale because it presents opportunities to think about real irreducibility, real ungraphability.

Lift does name a direction, but it doesn’t quite behave like a direction inside a shared or universal field. What we’re trying to get at is something closer to a process of detachment that emerges as abstraction accumulates. Objects, systems, representations begin to refer to one another with less and less obligation to return to any particular referent. But this isn’t just vertical, right, this is a totally nested process – everything is lifting at the same time and also fractionalizing into subentities which are themselves lifting. If we’d give it a geometry we’d say it’s very fractal, but that’s more of a helpful descriptor than something we believe to be axiomatically the case.

And this also doesn’t necessarily mean lift towards any particular altitude, right? It’s the away that we’re interested in. We truly believe this could continue forever, hence the subtitle of the book. There’s no point of future break, the break has already happened. If you’ve ever bet on Polymarket, if you’ve ever traded an ETF, if you’ve ever made money on a memecoin, you’ve already encountered the break. 


[邊界] 
What comes next? 

[M&R]
2025 was really crazy for us and we’re really, really proud of what we did. The amount of energy that followed the book was incredible, actually too much for us to even know what to do with it or how to channel it productively. 

At the moment, we’re really interested to understand how we can speak more directly inside of tech. Marek has spent a lot of time in that sector, but we haven’t really spread our wings as an organization within that space yet. We’re excited by how many artists and media theorists and social theorists and philosophers we’ve activated by the book, but we want to leave 2026 with a serious, scalable bridge between that space and the industry that is actually, actively, and with almost zero input, building our world. That feels important to us.



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