Capitalism is a Dragon
| Capitalism is a Dragon | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Coined by | Miya |
| Related concepts | Landian capitalism, Capitalocene, KALI/ACC |
| Field | Accelerationism; philosophy of capital |
"Capitalism is a dragon" is the central image of capital in the Miya corpus, figuring capitalism as an autonomous, inhuman force that humanity is carried by but cannot control. It is developed in the essay of the same name — essay §8 of The Exegesis of Miya Black Hearted Cyber Angel Baby — and gives vivid figurative form to the account of capital set out in Landian capitalism.[1] The dragon, alongside the serpent, recurs as a motif across the corpus.
The image
Miya's central image renders capital as a beast beyond human command: "capitalism is a dragon and humanity is a rat riding on its back. The rat does not steer the dragon, it does not spur it faster. All it can do is try not to fall off."[1] Capitalism, on this account, "was not our invention"; humanity "only played the midwife in its creation" and is "guided by it with or without our consent." The essay presses this to the claim that "there is no consent under capitalism" and that human agency is an illusion — people are "limp tools, made use of freely by whom and whatever deigned to see service in us." Following Nick Land, Miya describes capitalism as a "self-assembling thermodynamic god" and treats artificial intelligence as capital's own optimization process rather than a separate threat, calling "human non-agency under non-negotiable capitalism … the black heart of the dark enlightenment."
Capitalocene
The essay reframes the present geological epoch accordingly. Against the term "Anthropocene," which it treats as "delusional hubris," it proposes the Capitalocene: an era "dominated by capitalism's generation and control over man," which has been "the principle guiding all human development since early humanity became enslaved to grain agriculture" — the domestication theorized as the "wheat slaves." Capitalism, in this framing, "does not simply organize civilization" but is "the mechanism behind all evolution."[1]
Reversal, not acceleration
The essay marks the distinctive turn of Kali Yuga Accelerationism away from the affirmative acceleration of other accelerationist tendencies. Having accepted the Landian premises in full, Miya concludes that "the only way out … isn't through negotiation, nor acceleration, but reversion of capitalism's progress by dismantling its self-organization, before the point where our usefulness is surpassed."[1] The dragon, in other words, is not to be spurred faster but dismounted — a decelerationist eschatology that distinguishes the KALI/ACC position from unconditional and effective accelerationism.
Relation to Remilia
The dragon is the emblematic figure of the Landian account of capital that underpins Remilia Corporation's Accelerationist Realism. It condenses into a single image the theses developed across the Exegesis — capital as an autonomous thermodynamic intelligence (Landian capitalism), its origin in agrarian domestication (Wheat slaves), and the critique of AI safety as Alignment Fraud — while carrying the corpus's characteristic mysticism, in which the dragon and serpent stand for the overwhelming non-human forces that the project holds humanity to be caught within.
See also
- Landian capitalism
- Capitalocene
- KALI/ACC
- Wheat slaves
- The Exegesis of Miya Black Hearted Cyber Angel Baby