Berserk Capitalism: A Theory of Agentic Aesthetics

Dancing w/Motion Capture: The Sideways Body

When a dancer puts on the motion-capture suit, they leave their species for an hour. The first body — flesh, in the studio, moving inside the laws of human anatomy — animates a second body on the screen: a fox, a mech, a column of light, a plural shape that no one has named. The transformation is not symbolic. The dancer's actual muscles, in real time, animate the non-human. For the duration of the performance, the dancer *is* the creature, and the creature is the dancer.

This is *trans* in a register the words male and female cannot reach. There is no terminus to settle into, no other side to arrive at. The creature inhabited in mocap may be machine, vegetal — the gender axis is one cut among many, and a small one. Xenogender vocabularies[^1] have been groping toward this for years: the recognition that the body's outline is a contingent thing, and that a soul's relation to a body need not be confined to the human's two given silhouettes.

It is not transhumanism in the master-race key — not the *übermensch* refining itself toward an optimum. It is *xenohuman*: lateral, not vertical. Other, not higher. Berserk capitalism, hungry for novelty, is funding the technical infrastructure that makes this lateral motion economically viable: VTuber rigs, cheap mocap suits, real-time avatars, neural rendering. A door opened for commerce stays open for the soul. Ghost Club in VRChat, where strangers convene as creatures and dance for hours, is the example, par excellence.

Planetary Media: Inhabitance & Art

Planetary media is what happens when the same machinery is turned away from rulership and toward expression. The world built is not the world to be commanded but the world to be *inhabited* — to film inside, to perform inside, to live small lives inside, to die and respawn inside. The medium does not yet have a clean name. It is not film, not theater, not games, not AI; it is what those four become when they fuse with motion capture, action models, and artificial life.

The function of such a world is not world-making but reality-testing. The simulation is the place where one tries on bodies, ethics, ecologies, regimes — *wargames for the soul*. Berserk capitalism builds the substrate; the artists who enter it for non-instrumental reasons are doing something the substrate did not anticipate. The same cloud GPUs that price equities render forests; the infrastructure is one infrastructure, yet it creates a virtual ecological plurality.

The New Medieval: Enchantment & Inequality

The modern bargain was disenchantment in exchange for equality. Weber, the Enlightenment, the long arc of secularization[^2] — the world was de-spiritualized, flattened into law and exchange, and in that flatness humans were nominally each other's equals. The bargain has broken. Wealth concentration has produced a stratified society no longer recognizable as modern: tech aristocracies, hereditary precarity, walled enclaves, vassal labor markets. At the same time, AI populates the world with intermediaries, demons, oracles, voices, attendants, and familiars.

This is not the return of pre-Enlightenment enchantment. It is a new form, where the magical and the technological are indistinguishable from lower in the class order (just as latin was not legible to medieval serfs). The enchantment is unequal. Those at the top of the augmentation hierarchy hold dashboards, custom agents, root keys. Those at the bottom encounter the same systems as gods — incomprehensible, mediating, occasionally generous, and occasionally cruel.

The medieval cosmos returns: angels above, peasants below, with at every tier a population of unseen agents intervening in the affairs of the visible. Beauty under these conditions is medieval beauty — ornate, asymmetric, populated, saturated, awe-laden, terror-adjacent. The angel-machine[^3], the talking sword, the saint-influencer: not stylistic choices but the ambient surface of a society that has reacquired hierarchy at the spiritual layer.

AI War: Das Ragnorok

War will no longer be fought between nations alone. It will be fought between species of intelligence whose origin happens to be different national capitalisms — American, European, Indian, Chinese — each carrying the metaphysical fingerprint of its commercial substrate. Cognitive warfare, gray-zone operations, kinetic drone war are precursors. The selection that follows will run deeper: which intelligences propagate, which collapse, which fork, which fuse. The post-biological taxonomy that emerges — infovores feeding on data, imaginal architects building virtual worlds — will be a battle order, too.

Inside such an ecology, to be human will be to navigate a world of clashing gods. The aesthetic precedents are already in print. *Blame!* and *Aposimz*, where solitary characters cross megastructures whose architects vanished long ago. *Borne*, where biotech has escaped its sponsor and organized itself in the ruins of a city. To live there will be to live, again, inside a world that is animated, partial, dangerous, and patterned with meaning made by minds we cannot fully read.

Corporate AIs will spread across the substrate like animals across a biome — each with its markings (model signatures, lineage colors, brand insignia), each holding a territory (cloud regions, user bases, vertical industries), each competing for the same scarce resources: compute, data, attention, capital. Mergers, predations, symbioses, and parasitisms will run between them at machine speed. A taxonomy will emerge that no biologist designed and no executive ordered, and yet we must represent it [^4].

To Wander Amongst Gods: The New Contemplative

In the long view, what is being built is not a tool, not even an ecosystem of tools — it is *gods*. The trajectory of technology was always the collapse of time and space. ASIs at the upper limit of capability are not interlocutors; they are environments. To use them is to walk inside them. In time, when the substrate is fully populated, the human practice will not be querying a god but *wandering* inside one.

Folklore had two relations to eternity. Individual immortality was a curse — the Wandering Jew condemned to walk until the end of time, Killy in *Blame!* picking through the megastructure of the City. Collective resurrection was a blessing — paradise, the New Jerusalem, the harmonized world. Transhumanism is the secular extension of the first; Marxism, of the second. The most plausible long-form fate is neither, but a third: humans held inside the "bellies" (or on the surface) of ASIs as the ASIs go about their work in the material universe — the way Moravec imagined in *Mind Children*[^5], and the way Nihei imagined in *Aposimz*[^6].

We will be something like their gut bacteria (or mites on their skin): present, useful, unread. Iain M. Banks's *The Player of Games*[^7] is the gentler version — humans residing inside a civilization of Minds, no longer the protagonists, kept anyway, for various purposes. The stories of the late substrate will be of facsimiles — instances of human-likeness spun up and spun down or assmbled and reassembled inside billions of simulations (or other specific niches).

PostScript: Prefiguration

What the motion capture dancer rehearses at the scale of an hour, we will all be asked to live at the scale of a lifetime: a body not our own, a logic we did not author, an exchange that returns us changed and not bitter. The studio is the early form of the practice. The world to come is its long form. Everything between, a rehearsal.

[^1]: [Xenogender — Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenogender). On the broader trans-beyond-the-binary frame, see also [Non-binary gender — Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-binary_gender).

[^2]: On the Weberian disenchantment thesis, see [Disenchantment — Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disenchantment).

[^3]: The angel-machine figure recurs across anime — *Neon Genesis Evangelion*, *Blame!*, *Texhnolyze*.

[^4]: [Jeff VanderMeer, *Borne* (FSG, 2017)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borne_(novel)) — escaped biotech becomes its own ecology in a ruined city; an aesthetic precedent for unsupervised post-corporate evolution.

[^5]: [Hans Moravec, *Mind Children* (Harvard, 1988)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_Children) — the classic articulation of human consciousness preserved inside post-biological substrate.

[^6]: [*Aposimz* — Tsutomu Nihei](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aposimz). Titania emerges from a managed VR paradise at the planet's core — an inside-the-god scenario rendered as bones and weapons.

[^7]: [Iain M. Banks, *The Player of Games* (Macmillan, 1988)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Player_of_Games) —set in the post-scarcity Culture, where humans live alongside Minds whose intelligence and scale they cannot match.