Lifted AF ⊗ Cyborgs, centaurs and cyberpunks

Lifted AF

In e-flux Journal, McKenzie Wark reviews Exocapitalism: Economies with Absolutely No Limits by Marek Poliks and Roberto Alonso Trillo. The authors start from the premise that the critical tradition gets capitalism wrong and needs a new vocabulary to describe it. Concepts wear out, and making sense of the current economy requires language that makes it look strange again. The book manages this in places, and Wark admires the writing, but finds its picture of capital one-sided. I, in turn, love her ideas but find her writing somewhat cryptic and hard to follow because of copious references to bodies of thinking that I haven’t read or haven’t memorised. If you have the same issue, hang in there for the first half, the second is worth the time.

The book’s central idea is “Lift.” Physical production comes with workers, fixed costs, and problems of scale, and companies would rather avoid all of it. A hotel company stops running hotels and becomes a brand, a financing arm, and a data business, and someone else hires the staff who change the sheets. Uber, Airbnb, and WeWork follow the same model. Profit comes from sitting between parties and taking a cut of each exchange, and software lets companies do this at any scale†. The authors push the idea further. Capital no longer needs people, as workers or as a society to keep alive. They call this exocapitalism, an economy that has moved its host body out of humans and into computers. States chase after it and let social support decay. In other words, megacorps elevate beyond society and countries, and become something other. See cyberpunk—”the klept in Gibson’s Jackpot trilogy and Altered Carbon come to mind—and various other fictions, see the broligarchy for a contemporary glimpse.

Wark’s main objection is that the book treats capital as the only force shaping history. A “fully lifted” economy is how the world looks from a penthouse on Billionaires’ Row, and theories of all-powerful capital tend to appear when popular movements are weak. Wark keeps Marx’s view that change comes out of conflict between classes: “Capital isn’t magic beans.” Several economic systems coexist and depend on each other, and the book blurs them when it calls a garment factory “feudal”—that factory is ordinary capitalism. Wealth still depends on the people who produce it, including the programmers who built the software behind lift. Wark already has a name for this new order, vectoralism, in which a class that controls information captures the value those workers create.

† Also see Stripe which gets a cut of a huge swath of global online payments and, just last month, bought OpenRouter, no doubt hoping to grab a similar cut of the “token economy.” (The service gives access to multiple LLMs and can “rout” your queries to them.)

What today’s dominant corporate form wants: “lift.” Each company wants “to move itself away from fixed costs, from the soil, the earth, the sphere of human affairs. You can think of lift as the negative definition of financialization” […]

“Middle class workers became contractors. Contractors became advertisers for their contract labor. Advertisers became consultants. Consultants became coaches. Coaches became meta-coaches who coach other coaches. And so on, and so on, and so on” […]

The next order of abstraction, dissociation: abstract labor abstracted into money-tokens, abstracted again into a lifted economy of tokens upon tokens. The “post-productive economy,” as P+T call it (73). Bringing with it “a permutation of labor, from the production of economic content to the execution of economic protocol” (79). […]

It’s beating a dead horse to lament the lack of escape from capital—exocapitalism is escaping from us. “The malaise of drag has far less to do with a non-possibility of escape, but rather the full and vivid awareness that said escape has already occurred without a replacement for the social infrastructure long-since subcontracted to exocapitalist insouciance”

After we stop grieving AI: cyborgs, centaurs and cyberpunks

Mike Walsh argues that, in something akin to “a compressed cycle of grief,” most of the AI debate is stuck at bargaining. Writers, artists, universities, and companies try to fence off parts of work as human while pulling AI deeper into that same work. Walsh proposes three archetypes for the relationships forming. The cyborg absorbs machine intelligence into the self: an AI that holds your memory and shapes your judgment becomes a kind of cognitive organ. The centaur keeps human and machine separate and draws its strength from how they coordinate, as when Kasparov saw amateurs with a better process beat grandmasters with stronger computers. The cyberpunk uses AI to contest power, with people running their own agents to inspect and appeal the systems that manage, screen, or assess them.

Each archetype maps to a question—identity for the cyborg, architecture for the centaur, power for the cyberpunk—and Walsh explains how they depend on each other. Cyborgs without cyberpunks become dependent on technology someone else owns, and centaurs without strong architecture turn human oversight into a rubber stamp. Walsh admits the cyberpunk’s position is fragile. The same AI that helps workers expose flawed decisions helps employers anticipate resistance, and institutions will often have better models, more data, and more power to act. He raises ownership for the cyborg’s AI but leaves it aside for the cyberpunk’s.

I quite like his archetypes, and every piece does not need to address every issue, but two perspectives would have been useful. One, are there credible options for cyborgs and cyberpunks to own the power instead of renting it from corporations? Two, and perhaps more importantly, when he writes that “if you are going to negotiate with the future, better to do so augmented, modded and armed to the hilt,” it seems like Walsh is proposing modes of resistance or adaptation that take the current AI mythology for granted, instead of questioning it’s very purpose and direction.

Meaningful work was never a single, indivisible act. Writing, programming and discovery all involve chains of framing, searching, generating, testing, interpreting, selecting and taking responsibility. […]

Haraway argued that such categories often help make existing hierarchies appear inevitable. The cyborg offered a different kind of identity, assembled from partial connections, contradictions and chosen affiliations, with no pure human origin waiting to be restored. […]

There is an exhilarating promise here. Machine intelligence offers a new form of self-overcoming: the ability to remember more, perceive patterns across greater scales, explore unfamiliar perspectives and create beyond the limits of a single mind. Yet greater capability does not automatically produce greater freedom. Everything depends on who controls the systems through which the self is being extended. […]

The real prize is agency: the ability to understand the machinery acting on you, refuse its defaults and negotiate from a stronger position.

More → In The importance of reading (and teaching) cyberpunk in the Age of AI, Joanna Nelius-Free, a former tech journalist who now teaches high school literature, reads cyberpunk stories with her students and finds their bleak futures uncomfortably close to the present. Her idea of being punk is closer to refusal than to Walsh’s augmentation: “dumb” tech, inconvenient questions, pushback against the idea that machines handle critical and creative thinking better than people, and a refusal to accept “that one kind of future is inevitable.”

Futures, Fictions & Fabulations

• Anticipatory literacy coaching. “One senior executive, after mapping the pushes of the present and the weight of inherited assumptions, paused and said: ‘I’ve been running from the tide instead of learning its rhythm.’ That sentence stayed with me. It suggests that anticipatory capacity is not only a matter of better forecasting. It is also a matter of how people narrate what is coming, what they fear, what they hope, and what they think remains possible.”
• The tool that works, but nobody teaches. “Their diagnosis is precise: scenario planning fails not because the method is flawed, but because organisations treat it as an event rather than a capability. A workshop, not a way of thinking. A deliverable, not a discipline.”
• Acclaimed Apple TV series Murderbot at Texas A&M. “Panel Discussion, Q&A … with ‘Murderbot’ author Martha Wells … joined by Chris Weitz and Andrew Miano, producers of the Apple TV show.”

Algorithms, Automations & Augmentations

• AI’s next ethical dilemma: should humans talk to animals? “As rapid advances in AI promise to transform industries from healthcare to education and to shake up the world of work, researchers see the potential for humanity’s relationship with animals to change radically too. The technology could transform our understanding of other species — and put them at greater risk than ever before.” (archive.ph)
• Introducing Solaris. Being able to click in an image doesn’t make it a “generated live interface,” imho. “First, Solaris is entirely visual. When an image becomes the application itself, there is no need for a second implementation step hidden beneath the visuals that a user sees. Imagine browsing a virtual clothing store where the showroom itself is the interface.”
• Atlas: a World Model for spatial intelligence. “World models generate, reconstruct, and simulate any possible world. They understand how worlds appear, behave, and evolve so that we can render imagined worlds for creative users, simulate the real world in high fidelity, and help robots plan actions. At World Labs, we build these general purpose world models in pursuit of spatial intelligence.”

Built, Biosphere & Breakthroughs

• Solar desert power: Inside China’s mega farm (video). “Beijing is also driving the world's most ambitious renewables rollout, at breakneck speed. China is now home to nearly a third of the world's total installed solar and wind capacity.”
• Climate TRACE data show marginal increase in global emissions in the first half of 2026. “Global greenhouse gas emissions increased marginally in the first half of 2026, rising 0.2% compared with the first half of 2025. The largest growth in emissions came from transportation, specifically road transportation. Declines in emissions from power, manufacturing, and shipping helped limit the global increase in GHGs.”
• Mushroom leather may finally be ready for mass production. “Plastic-free, ethical leather alternatives that perform like the real thing are hard to make. Researchers may have cracked the code to produce such materials on large scale.”

Asides

• Are crows really our friends?. “Like Bergstrom and my sister, many people form sustained personal connections with their local crows. Those who do often consider the attention of these charismatic corvids a privilege and a source of joy. Some even call the animals their friends. What’s harder to determine, though, is whether the crows return the feeling.”
• Diminutive seahorses top the 2026 ocean photographer of the year contest. “… aims to highlight some of the most beloved, impressive, and little-seen aspects of our planet’s most expansive waters.”
• Industry Standard Tools. “Every trade has a small number of items so entrenched that they’ve become the de facto tool that nearly everyone in that trade uses. Mitutoyo calipers. An SM57. A Cambro. This is a list of industry standards. Entries are written, contested, and voted on by the people who use them.”