Lift & Drag: Exocapitalism Reading Group

What happens when financial abstractions achieve escape velocity from terrestrial constraints? When markets begin to orbit beyond the gravitational pull of human economies?
Join the reading group for a two-session exploration of Exocapitalism (Becoming Press, 2025), where they’ll trace the aerodynamics of capital as it encounters the twin forces of lift — the speculative ascent that carries financial flows beyond earthbound reference points — and drag — not so much resistance to lift but rather the symptoms of a system where humans perform increasingly hollow versions of classical economic relations.
The cosmofinancial framework developed by Poliks and Trillo shows how economic abstractions don’t simply extract value from terrestrial conditions but actively participate in worlding practices, generating, or folding, as the authors define it, new planes of speculation and relation. The book performs, in the words of Tiziana Terranova, a “cosmological, retroactive take on the continuity of capital as an inhuman algorithm modeled on finance and software”.
Sessions
16 October: Lift (pp. 1-87)
18:00–19:30 (UTC+1)
To join via Zoom, use this link.
23 October: Drag (pp. 88 até ao fim)
18:00–19:30 (UTC+1)
To join via Zoom, use this link.
Format
No preparation required beyond reading — the organisers will prepare a collective summary document. Those who are interested can suggest 5-minute interventions around particular aspects, passages, or provocations from the text that have captured their attention.
Whether you’re drawn to the book’s rethinking of financial derivatives as cosmic infrastructure, its approach to speculation as a mode of planetary sensing, or its implications for design practices that work with rather than against economic turbulence, the organisers welcome your participation in this experiment in collective reading.
Hosted by IFILNOVA / Lisbon NOVA University and the Cosmo-financial Study Group @ weirdeconomies.com
Organised by Erik Bordeleau (IFILNOVA) & Laura Lotti
Contact: erikbordeleau@fcsh.unl.pt