PANUTOPIANISM

  • AGENCY WITHOUT AWARENESS, IMPACT WITHOUT INTENTION

    A FORCE DRIVEN WORLD OF GHOSTS AND SPECTRES

    In our human lives, and within our perception, there is a hierarchy of awareness. There is the very personal – that is, the self. Within it lies a myriad of delicate and well-known nuances and issues that, in their interconnected totality, make up the self-image: the very concept upon which a world is built. It is the only thing most of us would call real – for it is directly accessible to us. More precisely its reality stems from it being the very substrate of our self. A self that is both at odds with the world it inhabits as well as deeply reliant on it.

    It is this direct access and its overwhelming reality that forces most of us into the strictly interpersonal, the tribal and the local. They are accessible extensions of what is real and they are therefore filled with meaning. For meaning is the web of interconnectedness of things, is the order that arises from contextualization – by giving things their place and their relation to each other (and most importantly: the self); a field that grows stronger with every added reference point. Our inner self is rife with meaning, everything within it is tightly connected, and has a history we can trace back to our own beginnings. This inner self is abuzz with an aura of authenticity and unique accessibility nothing else can rival in its totality.

    Within all of that the biological reality of our existence and millions of years of evolution that force themselves into every last aspect of our psyche. A complex biological machine guides our truths and realities which only knows one goal: “Bring order to my world to ensure survival.” A goal that is at odds with the abstractions of civilization and technology that do not directly relate to the nature of the biological machine that made them possible in the first place.

    This machine – and the psyche it creates, as both a result and a function of its biological complexity – fundamentally links its truths and realities (even the most abstract ones) back to the one persistent truth it has to operate on: its own inner actuality. An inner life that might very well live in stark contradiction to its physical origins in the material plane. Not of different substance but very much of overwhelmingly different quality. 1

    Unsurprisingly, such a mechanism will find it hard – perhaps even impossible – to incorporate the many abstractions of the ever-changing world into something with substantiveness or meaningful connection. Beyond the interpersonal and the tribal, there be dragons. The sub-global, the global, and the realm are distant and erratic – their reality rarely accessible, and even when uncovered and precisely defined, without the category of the real. All connections and all meaning is relational; centered around our inner truth.

    More and more distant connections had to be made, more and more abstractions to be incorporated, and the further we moved from that one singular kernel of accessible truth the further we ventured into the mist. For many these abstractions have become labyrinthine, hostile even; but most importantly very much irreal. So numerous and so complex have these abstractions become over time that we had to construct an inventory of them and allow them to live in the spaces between us: culture, society and history became their repository; the inconceivably abstract and complex needed something of similar type to accomodate it.

    Whilst these global systems of abstraction have become instrumental to our survival we do no longer know why or how – at least not in detail or in its entirety. We do not see them as entirely real, material or in a direct and measurable relation to us and our lives – they cannot be placed and integrated in our immediate and personal field of reference and meaning. With the existential horrors they contain, some choose to have no relation to them that brings them in palpable contact with their possible reality. We often times choose irreality for the abstract to shield ourselves from the reality of itself and the other that it contains. To shield us from the hunger, the war, the pain, the material onslaught of all the things contained within these grand abstractions.

    This is however not advocating for an expeditious retreat into the local and its incomplete, fragmented reality – nor a fervent call to abandon the complexities of civilization altogether; quite the opposite! For it is within this strict locality that a delusion of extreme – possibly fatal – severity is hatched. It is here where we assume total – even ultimate – control and therefore where we assume total reality. Yet the insular nature of locality, its property of direct access by the individual, makes it entirely virtual in nature. For as opposed to the great abstraction of the global and the grand narratives of Utopia (who become real and powerful precisely in the realms of holistic emergence and are therefore uniquely qualified to host actual pluralities that form a decidedly uniform actuality) the local is extrapolated from the individual self. Therefore every locality is not the sum of its constituent parts, not a neatly packaged slice of life, but a dissonance of individual realities competing with each other and denying each other in the process.

    Every locality is not a neatly demarcated wholeness of precise determination and finitude but the white noise of uncountable personal truths that only ever see themselves as the central measuring point for factuality. Factuality made real by being in direct relation to an inner self. In stark contrast to the commonly held believe that the local is the more defined space and the abstract is fundamentally inaccessible, it is this local space that misleads in its perceived ascertainability.

    Within that factuality every other individual encountered is subordinated to the personal reality. Every other person must exists in the realm of the local; a realm always centered on and related to the hyperindividualistic nature of the experience. Through this process every locality contains a multitude of people but only ever one of them is ascribed personhood and actual reality. Locality is a stage on which a life centered on the self is played out by actors that are only real in relation to themselves. The overpowering reality of the individual experience makes everything it touches an extension of itself. its reality (what is felt of it) is an colonizing force that demands the local for itself and everything in it exists as a matrix of purely referential circumstance. Every living being to an extent becomes in itself an object that is to be interacted with to achieve one’s own goals and to structure reality to one’s own needs.

    This colonized and seemingly controllable space of locality creates an excessive need. It must be ordered, understood and aligned to ones needs for it is an extension of the self – of its reality – and therefore must attend to it. 8 billion localities that move about the face of the earth, that are neither local nor finite. 8 billion truths that in their interconnectedness create hyper-localities that are structured in so far as they produce emergent realities that can be named and experienced but their order is not only temporary but very much not even present. They shift under the gaze of every individual embroiled in them, they are realigned with every conscious action, every need, every desire. Every reshaping of the locality is experienced as an intrusion and a violation and so the locality is not the stage for agency but of billions of injuries and the fragile and fragmented self that is confronted with its powerlessness within the most sacred of places that borders the self. The local is not the site of our realization and maturation, but in actuality a maelstrom of selfish, shortsighted and direct needs; where the actual reality of the sum of all needs of others always outweighs those of the individual self.

    But let us come back to our need for order, for it is here where we find the wellspring of our specters and forces. The same will to order that creates much of the scafolding of localities – aethereal as they may be – also expresses itself in a primal way: everything has to subject to it. In a world of abstractions, natural forces, a physical reality (whose ends we cannot spot) and within global societies this ordering impulse is confronted with more and more imperfections and gaps that prevent it from connecting our inner realities beyond the local and into a real web of meaning. It has to improvise, assume and manifest its realities if it wants to grow its web of meaningful connections beyond the immediate and its inner actuality.

    This meaning creating process of expanded inner realities is what brought us culture and the systemic structures of our society and civilization. As we already alluded to, these abstraction needed repositories and spatiotemporal representations to be able to accomodate living historical processes in their totality. It is here where we cross a threshold into a realm of cultural and societal forces. Forces that remain however endowed with “life” (irreal as it may be) so they can remain within the tightly knit web of meaning and the categories of the mind. It is here where we construct living abstraction to represent human and collective will. It is here were we project hopes and desires onto ideas, systems and the occasional extraordinary individual as a vessel. Within history, systems and great abstractions our biological imperative for order constructs from the maelstrom a coherent reality after the fact.

    A worldly mythology arises that orders the broader realm of our alienated global existence 2 according to standards extrapolated from individual experience and it is here were we create rules and laws to apply order to that which cannot be capture by simple extensions of the individual reality. It’s the attempt to order the interlocality, the sub-global, the global and the realm of existence by norms extracted from the local and tribal expression of individualistic representation. Its an attempted expansion of the colonization of the local into the world of abstractions and their subjugation under the rule of lived experiences that evolved independently of the social and civilizational realities and the realm of natural existence that stretched beyond the measurable. Its an act to safeguard us against the progress of time, of systems and our own worst collective impulses. Laws and rules are there to domesticate the roiling sea of uncertainty just enough so survival against the powers beyond what can be ruled by individual might or the tribal local is assured. The rules based order is to protect us against the raw energies of power politics 3 and to capture the irreality of abstractions in the directly accessible storage of language that evokes emotions and understanding.

    Systems, nations, corporations, organisations and history itself, (to a mind that needs order for survival) need personhood and with it intent; for it is those categories that move them from irreality into reality and into the meaningful tribal. They also need to become interpersonal or at least relate to its demands. The great abstractions need anima, a sliver of the living world 4 that is represented in them by extension, for them to become of the same matter or quality; for them to be not both alienated and alienating. Its then our arrogance that binds them and our unwillingness to evolve towards incorporating them that reduces their grandeur and their qualities down to the individual and tribal again.

    Within these anthropomorphized representations of abstractions we then find the narrative structures that make abstractions accessible and real to us. They now act according to our rules and realities – that is the guiding impulse that drives this pretense. Where meaning cannot be found through the instrumentarium of the mind it is ordained and immediately emancipated in the same instant. What have been purely mental recreations now – in their reality – becomes hyperreal. The abstractions that just a moment ago where inaccessible, alien and impossible to apprehend have changed their nature. Now they are constructions and extensions to the living world of humanity. Forces still and very much not explicitely corporeal they have now entered the realm of both natural elements and intent; have been transformed into something that adheres to the inner logic of the collective construction derived from individual experience that needs order and relation to create meaning.

    History now has meaning, within it we find actors and agents that are supposedly rational, that act with intent and that produce abstractions through meaningful interactions with their world. We find institutions, movements, nations and powerful elites that shape those abstractions, that create history and that give corporeal form to the forces; temporary as it may be. .

    But in actuality it remains that amongst the institutions, the nations, the elites and the systems we do not find order and natural law. Allthough we are in a desperate need for it even within these abstractions. The only truth we find here is a world in equilibrium, a world of inertia and one that remains controled by forces of which we see no points of origin. We find a world of algorithms, of interchangeability, of institutions whose identity persists through total replacement. We find corporations bound by national and international law, that break every last one of them and never face considerable repercussions. We find waring nations that murder millions and yet are allowed to persist. We find economic systems that solely work towards their own proliferation allthough every last action and initiation within them is done by humans. We see within these abstractions uncaring elites that are engaging in the most vulgar power politics. They create chaos and an equilibrium of power simply for the fact that chaos is easier to manage than an organized dystopian project of control and an equilibrium prevents dominance of other powers they are not a part of. This historical drift becomes both arbitrary in its derivation from abstractions that span millenia and in modern times shaped by the intention to reach control by denying others to get there first.

    We are quickly confronted with the harsh truth that these abstractions are not beholden to the local and the individual reality that refuses to evolve. Where we wish for a world of ordered meaningfullness, agency and intention by means of anthropomorphisation we only find one realization: the world is drifting through time and history. No one is at the helm and no powers control it in any meaningful way. All its abstractions remain fundamentally inaccessible to colonization by means of extendeding the inner realities of locality and indivdual experience.

    Our institutions have become self-referential, our political movements exist in relation to realities fabricated after the fact and systems without intention, and our society is an historic entity without self-awareness that does not care for its own intentional evolution. What we see realized in our world is what happens if a society evolves without intent and agency at its most basic levels and where social and mental evolution do not keep up with its emergent abstractions. What survives is the performance of intention, the simulation of command (in a world governed by emergent dynamics of uncertain and multiform origin) or the defeatist retreat into the practical realm of the local that forever captures the mind and the people. We are bound in civilizational drift towards nothing in particular. We are captured by undercurrents. No shadow governments, no deep states that are in control, no scheming elites that would bring us at least a dystopian stable order and no extraordinary people that illuminate a path through time towards utopia or cataclysm. The promise of civilization fully unrealized: to make meaning and to free us from nature’s indifference towards us. Replaced by the indifference of people towards themselves and by systems that involve them but do not cater to them. The true horror is not malevolence but absence.

    Politicial movements then, that speak of practical politics within the confines of such a world, must only ever find their own irreality. Movements that define themselves in relation to that which is fundamentally formless and directionless must in turn become formless and directionless themselves. A political movement speaking of coordinated practice in a world that is defined by an inheritance of accumulated accidents, stitched together myths, and the inertia of machines and systems with no memory, will find itself lost and chained to these illusions and in turn become part of them.

    To wrestle with ghosts is to become spectral. To act against a world without subject, authorship or intentions is to act against nothing. It’s a performative ritual played out in front of an absent witness.5 A politcal movement defined by its practical relation to this world will find itself in motion yet never move.

    1. We will discuss the mind-body problem in greater detail in the future. For now we remain within the empirical domain of our lived experience. ↩︎
    2. alienating not as an inherit property of the global but as a result of our inability to evolve past the local and tribal ↩︎
    3. And is failing spectacularly at doing so, as our present shows. For the rules based order is satirical in its nature. As with satire: those that understand it dont need it. The rules based order cannot shield us from our own worst impulses and the world where people live that are educated and socially evolved enough to understand the benefits of the rules based order is one where it instantly becomes redundant. ↩︎
    4. not necessarily in a Jungian sense, but in a more primordial sense of “force of life” ↩︎
    5. or against a singular witness – the person acting, which in turn makes the action selfish and hollow ↩︎

  • ONTOLOGICAL CAPITALISM

    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 ↩︎