A FINAL CAPITALISM AND THE MARKET AT THE END OF TIME

Capitalism has proven that it does not break under its own contradictions, nor does it create forces within its borders strong or coherent enough that are willing to use said contradictions to break it apart in its stead. For as long as they intellectually operate within its totalitarian ruleset – for as long as they do not consider the real possibility of creating an outside to capitalism, strongly and authentically – they cannot succeed.

For its own continued existence, it always needed to expand into new markets or find new things or interactions to commodify. From the moment capital became the driving force of market dynamics (the creation and proliferation of capital as its own product, simply investing money to make more of it), it had to be perpetuated. A fundamental shift had occured: something wasn’t valuable because it was useful – it was valuable because it could be sold for profit.

To be absolutely clear here: capitalism, as we know it, has no intrinsic interest in fulfilling any needs. It does not produce food, medicine, housing, or other essential goods because it is just or right or needed, but solely because someone is willing to pay for it, and therefore a profit can be extracted from doing it. That same capitalism – if it could construct such conditions – would not hesitate to let billions starve and go unhoused if it could find other avenues of profit and revenue, thereby ensuring its own continuation. People living lives of intense abstraction and globalization also have no intrinsic interest in providing said goods, only in receiving payment for their work. ¹ They assume someone will always produce food, medicine and housing and someone else will extract value from providing it to them. But there are no such assurances under capitalism.

The profit imperative made it impossible not to be constantly incentivized to reinvest and extract more capital. Capitalism’s only motif became finding new avenues to keep capital moving and expanding. Work and goods as such (from the second this was realized) became just a means to an end. The capitalist economy is primarily not one that concerns itself with the organization of the production and distribution of goods and services to fullfill human needs, but one that exploits humans, production and services to organize itself and its central motif: the creation and proliferation of capital – and therefore capitalism – ad infinitum.

To expand the markets that can create and absorb the central good of capitalism – capital – early capitalism expanded first through material markets until they were saturated (mercantilism, colonialism, and industrial production). What followed was a virtualization of markets (finance, crypto, digitalization, data, speculation, services, etc.). With it and the continuing globalization, the economy became increasingly abstract and removed from real material needs and production, and – most importantly – from the people working within it. It had become impossible for most to organize a life independent of capitalism and its needs.

With the abstractions of said structure (and the capture of the commons – mainly land and the ressources buried under it or grown on it – in the 16th and 17th century, and later again through postcolonial capitalist economic coercion to this date) came the decomposition of interpersonal relationships and personal bonds that were rooted in community, locality and the land, and with that, the degradation of knowable reality itself. Life as such had become abstract – or more precisely: capitalism and its abstraction had become daily life – and the people in it were either strangers, or much more commonly: competitors.

Strangers who had gone through intense generational trauma by becoming dispossessed, uprooted, and reduced to creators of surplus value through law-making and applied forms of violence. Uprooted not only in a physical sense, but in a spiritual one too. Their distrust in their own capabilities and in the interpersonal domain (which proved inadequate to reject and fend off the colonization of body and mind) became complete, alienating them not only from their work, but more importantly from each other and from themselves.

Said abstractions, the impossibility of organizing a life without capitalism, and the degradation of the interpersonal and communal realm led to a central confusion with capitalism characterization: since there was no realm capitalism didn’t touch, nothing that was not within its shrouded and abstract inner workings (no life outside of it), and since its projection of power seemed to be absolute, it became an ordering principle of reality, a natural state and law. The confusion lies in attributing to this state stability, where it merely is permanence.

Since the virtual markets will soon also be saturated, capitalism will have to break into new territories, and we are beginning to see this in the commodification of human attention, interactions, and engagement – as seen with social media and early human-AI interactions. Data and its application have become the central speculative tools that keep generating and moving capital around.

We find in this a second central property of capitalism: it is a corrupting innovator that clings to all processes of life like tar. It will never accept an end to its selfish expansionist drive or twisted inner logic; it will always try to fold everything it touches into itself and force it to comply with its eternal act of ruthless self-preservation. Where it cannot find ways to coerce or colonize new realms it will subject them to violence, to forced transformation or threaten them with exile – which now is exile from life itself.

Inherent to this Darwinian, self-preserving drive of continued expansion is also the impossibility of sustainability and balance. There is no logical end point or equilibrium that capitalism can strike. Grow or die becomes a mode of systemic coercion. Entangled in this economic feeding frenzy, all actors have to comply with the same rule. Those that do attempt the impossible – organizing life outside of capitalism with it still in place – eventually fail and are forced back into its realm, logic and hierarchies. ^{2 3}

Essential to the development of a theory of Ontological Capitalism will be what happens next – after its attempts to commodify human attention, interactions, and engagement have been completed. What will be left for capitalism to conquer, and what new absurdities will it subject onto those living in its dominion?

Following its own monstrous inner logic, we can identify its distinct drive towards a final holistic totality, where we find the possibilities of: (1) complete spatial and temporal control reaching out beyond Earth, (2) with it, access to managed stability and citizenship in walled-off habitats and privilege through compliance, (3) the creation and management of post- and transhumanist realities, and finally (4) the total psychopolitical capture of the human experience.

Even today, capitalism has already become a distinct hyperobject ⁴ or some sort of self generating entity. ⁵ It is a golem and an economy built on extraction and death, kept alive through reanimated debt and labor. It is animated by belief, strengthened by participation, but unable to distinguish creator from victim. A Homunculus of our own creation that stumbles forward through time with no one at the helm. While this system may feel alive, at times even scaled to human needs, its historical and global consequences are agency without awareness, impact without intention.

(1) Repetition and reproduction are essential tools for a system that is hellbent on propagating itself infinitely. It’s no wonder that such a system will revisit tried methods as soon as opportunity arises. Now that the physical colonization of Earth is almost total, corporations and capitalists look towards the sky to find new spaces to exploit and conquer. Off-world colonies, the extraction of raw materials in our solar system and the construction of infrastructure in space will be lived realities by the end of this century. Terraforming and colonies will be used as a tool to sell a right to live on habitable worlds as Earth itself becomes increasingly unlivable. In the same vein these spaces will create a new feudal structure, where instead of just geographic wealth inequality, access to space-based habitats or digital realities could become the new stratification under total corporate and capitalistic control.

(2) More than ever under this new regime, access to habitable space, rights, stability, and security themselves become commodities – bound to service and compliance – and are inaccessible or actively withheld from those deemed incapable or unworthy of fitting into this system. Corporate or subscription-based citizenships replace the state as yet another system gets fully folded into the capitalist metric – one that offered one last and increasingly waning avenue of influence to those who oppose capitalism and its realities. These highly controlled spaces, in a society in turmoil and active decline, are offerings of what little stability and security (which is actually permanence, as we pointed out) remains – and they won’t come cheap.

(3) (4) Throughout the centuries the incredible perseverance of capitalism was rooted in its ability to quickly adapt even those tools and systems that could potentially be used for liberation and resistance.

Counterculture’s aesthetic was captured: rebellion was made marketable—and therefore profitable. Radical language and cultural signifiers were appropriated and turned into branding. Labour movements have been intergrated into the inner workings of capitalism, bargaining within the system. The digital commons of the early internet, with its central idea of free-flowing information and a connected humanity, have been transformed into one of capitalism’s most effective tools for prediction, surveillance, and the monetization of human behavior at scale. Disinformation propagated through its many channels is fragmenting any potential for organized dissent and brainwashing entire generations. Liberation has been turned into sponsorships and awareness months exploited by global brands to signal allyship – reducing it to empty symbolism. Empowerment has been individualized, and collective action and systemic thinking have been reframed as issues of personal choice and access. Liberation became an issue of consumption, rather than freedom from it.

Turning systemic issues into lifestyle choices led to an individualization of struggle. Commodification sold those struggles and their potential resolutions right back to us and in the process redefined success in capitalist terms.

This also instilled a deeply ingrained sense of betrayal and caution – one that now causes many who seek liberation and authentic struggle to approach new technologies and cultural developments with suspicion and doubt long before cooptation even occurs. In anticipating their eventual capture, they begin to obey in advance and disarm themselves in the process, whilst doing capitalism’s dirty work for it – a preemptive surrender to its corrupting influence, seen as inevitable. We fear being naive, so we choose impotence over betrayal. We fear cooptation, so we abandon innovation.

Now confronted with the possibility of seeing AI take over most processes of work and administration we reflexively fear AI instead of the corrupting influence of the markets, corporations and their billionaire ruling-class. Confronted with widespread adoption of automation we are consumed by the fear of being made obsolete and thrusted into precarity. We can clearly see the totality of all bio-engineering and medical research coopted to not only profit from humans but engineering new forms of laboring biological entities. We can envision AI entities not as sovereign minds, but as monetizable digital citizens with wages, debts, and consumer habits. Neural interfaces and biotech integration turn bodily functions and thoughts into commodities. Here, mental states, dreams, and subconscious processes could become data mines, where unconscious thought patterns are harvested and monetized. AI-generated influencers, artificial friendships, and even commodified emotional support (even empathy and intimacy become a service commodity) foster a personalized AI-driven existence, where every thought and behavior is predicted, shaped and controlled by monetized systems.

And it is at this point, where we follow this line of thinking to its logical conclusions, ⁶ that we glimpse the dreadful possibility of a capitalism truly devoid of any and all meaning that can be measured against a human experience. A final state of capitalism terryfing in its simplicity and consequentiality. A form of capitalism that has gained control over identity, thought, and reality itself and in the process truly became ontological in nature. No longer a system people live under but the very condition of existence itself. A fully enclosed system, that has at its end gathered together all tools to manipulate, predict and commodify every relevant aspect of life and attempts to dissolve all vital energy into itself.

There then is no remaining frontier – neither physical, spiritual nor conceptual – that has not been commodified or subsumed into the markets. Markets that no longer respond to human desires; they predict and shape them in advance through algorithmic control, AI modeling, and social engineering. Preemptive debt, predictive policing, and AI-managed behavioral economies ensure that subjects conform without the need for overt coercion. Dissent and revolutionary potential are not repressed but anticipated and commodified before they can take form.

Capitalism no longer presents itself as a system among others – it redefines reality itself in economic terms. Meaning, truth, and existence are no longer outside economic logic – ethics and philosophy become market-driven constructs. Subjectivity is no longer autonomous but an extension of market processes.

It is here were capitalism becomes Ontological Capitalism. The division between consumer and producer collapses; existence itself becomes a form of production and capitalism its sole possible configuration. The very idea of alternative futures is systematically erased – not just practically, but conceptually. Utopian thought is rendered unthinkable because every imagined alternative is absorbed into the market before it can take form. The final capture of capitalism is not just economic – it is imaginative: a world where people cannot even conceive of a world without it, for they have been rendered incapable of autonomy, the mental faculties to conceive and their lives are closely monitored effigies.

And yet, somehow, within capitalism’s own logic, we can find a realm even more devoid, even more absurd – even more lifeless. For even this ontological capitalism has yet to integrate chance, cosmic events, its own absurdity and the very concept of crisis into itself. This form of capitalism has to deal with the distinct reality of cannibalizing itself. A capitalism that absorbed all meaning, might attempt to sell its own continued existence back to itself. It could attempt to sell versions of itself, competing against itself in layers of abstraction. ⁷ Such a Machiavellian system might in time find ways to even integrate widespread disaster and every crisis into its calculations. ⁸ Crises and their potential for profit(even possibly their deliberate creation) become well integrated normalities. Within these cold calculations the commodification of mass extinction and widescale destruction and eventually the obsolescence of life itself. ⁹ Capitalism could persist long after human life has become irrelevant to it. A capitalism trading, transacting, investing in a world that no longer exists except in digital abstractions.

And once that form of capitalism truly dissolves the very concept of meaning we are left with a system that continues transacting long after all of its external purpose has disappeared, purely for the sake of its own motion. A market that doesn’t need people or goods, only inputs and outputs – economic activity itself has become a cosmic principle. A creeping infestation of existence itself that propagates itself along until the last stars burn out and until entropy becomes final. A fully commodified reality, autonomous and indifferent to meaning. A cosmic machinery, running not for anyone or anything, but just because it can. A market at the end of time where there will be no light.

1. This is the very nature of alienation from work, from self and from others. ↩︎
2. A quick interjection, though: although it is our purpose to lay bare capitalism’s central contradictions and imperatives, it is not our goal to perpetuate a fatalistic sense of apathy and subjection. When we talk about there being no outside of capitalism, we do this with the express purpose of showing that with the capitalist logic in place, there can be no outside of it. We, however, specifically advocate for its [the outside] construction precisely because of that. This is the task of any revolutionary movement and utopian thought. ↩︎
3. It also has to be pointed out that this life in the cracks and blind spots of capitalism is not a life of freedom or independence from capitalism’s logic. It exists in defiance of it and is therefore defined by the existence of capitalism. Yet again, there is no outside of capitalism if its centrality is not questioned. Life that attempts to go outside of it is defined through being outside of capitalism, not as a thing in itself. ↩︎
4. cf. Timothy Morton ↩︎
5. cf. Autopoiesis, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela  ↩︎
6. logical by the rules, standards and imperatives of capitalism ↩︎
7. We already see this to some extend in hyperfinancialized markets (with derivatives, financial instruments, speculation on speculation) but an ontological capitalism would turn even its own operating systems and framework into a commodity ↩︎
8. we see glimpses of it today where climate collapse is sold back to us as Green Capitalism (carbon credits, eco-luxury goods, gated eco communities, electro mobility). We see it in media traffic and engagement created by disasters. We see it in financial markets speculating with instability or even collapse (short selling, hedging, prepping industry). The idea to turn crises and disasters into yet another commodity and revenue stream is alive today. ↩︎
9. for it might be easier for this capitalism to calculate its inner workings and goals without life and consciousness ↩︎