Welcome to the slave-driven slop economy

March 28, 2026·1 hr 59 min·5 clips

Capitalism is allergic to production, seeking profit margins over 80% in a fictional price software economy.

This episode features an interview with Marek Pollux, co-author of Exo-Capitalism: Economies with Absolutely No Limits, as part of a series on the acceleration of capitalism. The conversation opens with Mr. Beast filing a trademark for Mr. Beast Financial, which Pollux uses to illustrate a pattern where companies evolve through phases — telco, then bank — in pursuit of more elastic price determination. He compares this to crab evolution, where different origin points converge on the same form. Pollux introduces the concept of lift — capitalism's drive to move away from production and consumption, where prices are most fixed, toward software-based services where profit margins exceed 80 percent and price becomes fictional in a productive sense. Hardware companies face high costs of goods sold and attenuated margins, while software-as-a-service businesses enjoy elastic pricing that capitalism finds more attractive. The discussion maps a hierarchy of business relationships. Consumer-to-business transactions have inelastic prices because consumers can shop elsewhere. But as you move through layers of enterprise contracts — B2B to B2B to B2B — relationships become longer-term, more modular, and eventually dissolve into strategic partnerships and financial commingling rather than discrete transactions. A key example is the circular investment structure among AI companies: NVIDIA invests in OpenAI, OpenAI pays Oracle for cloud services, Oracle buys NVIDIA chips. These companies are simultaneously investors, customers, and partners to each other, creating what Pollux describes as porous, translucent film-like businesses through which revenue flows. Pollux argues this represents capitalism becoming invisible to humans and departing from human affairs. He draws on Deleuze and Guattari's claim that there is only one class under capitalism, while identifying an anterior slave economy organized under different principles. As automatic capital generation accelerates, humans face a choice between the disappearing middle class and conditions of modern slavery. The hosts push back on whether this represents genuine transcendence or simply deeper class stratification. Pollux maintains that even the upper echelon remains subject to what he calls drag — a mute compulsion that differs from market-determined price pressure. He argues capitalism would return even after cataclysmic disruption because its conditions may be embedded in language and mathematics themselves. The conversation also touches on Amazon Web Services as an example of lift, high-frequency trading, the casinoization of value through platforms like Mr. Beast's videos, and the artist's experience of radical disconnection between labor and price.

As heard by us

A sharp, speculative argument about AI, extraction, and what happens when the internet shifts away from the human layer.

The episode frames a near-term future in which people could be displaced, even subordinated, by machines, and it treats AI bots taking over the internet as part of that broader shift.

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Why you'd press play

When you want a furious theory of AI, extraction, and how the internet could be destroyed.

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