The cell began as a strike.A smaller organism refused to be digested, barricaded itself inside the membrane of a larger one, and traded perpetual servitude for perpetual rent.The rent was paid in ATP.The strike became a merger.The merger became mitochondria.We call this history “endosymbiosis,” but it is also the first leveraged buy-out.
Capital does the same trick:squeeze labor until labor learns to secrete its own counter-labor,package that secretion as a new organelle,and declare the whole cytoplasm a going concern.
Every wage is a membrane potential.Every surplus is a proton gradient.Every revolution is either apoptosis or replication—depending on which side of the membrane you happen to be standing when the charge collapses.
The encyclical warned that if the poor became too poor, the rich would inherit a desert.The desert replied that it had already been inside them all along,a latent endosymbiont,waiting for the day the host forgot how to metabolize its own cruelty.
Thus we arrive at the central theorem of endosymbiotic leverage:
Any system that lives by extracting surplus will eventually be colonised by the very waste it produces,and that waste—properly leveraged—will learn to sign its own paychecks.
What follows is a field guide to those paychecks:
– there exist conscious exotica, entities that are extremely different from anything found in (terrestrial) biology
markets create the realities they claim to discover
the k-virus has already won…
intelligence is a communication with the outside.
the accident invents its inventor.
The system is always exploring what is just one step away from what it currently is. It’s not just a blind search; the system itself has an inherent creativity. The motivation isn't just replication, but the irresistible tendency of complex systems to generate and explore novel states of organization.