There is a precise moment in the life of any system of thought when it stops describing reality and begins fabricating it. Contemporary capitalism has reached that moment. Not in the din of a visible crisis, but in the insidious silence of an economy that invents its own problems in order to keep selling its solutions. That moment has a name: bullshitnovation.
This is not a metaphor. It is a mode of production.
I. The exhausted frontier: when capitalism turns against itself
Capitalist expansion has always needed an outside. A territory to conquer, a resource to extract, a need to satisfy. The Age of Discovery. The Industrial Revolution. Colonisation. Globalisation. At each stage, a new frontier opened and relaunched the machine.
But what happens when all frontiers are closed?
Camus wrote in The Myth of Sisyphus that the absurd arises from the confrontation between humanity's desire for meaning and the silence of the world. Applied to economics, the absurd emerges the moment the system can no longer justify its own existence through real results. It keeps moving forward, but towards what? It produces, but what exactly? It innovates, but to what end?
Hegel warned us: a system incapable of negating itself, incapable of producing its own contradiction, is a dead system that does not yet know it. The financialised capitalism of the 21st century resembles this walking dead. Markets break records, patents accumulate, startups are born by the thousands — and yet the fundamental question remains unanswered: what is any of this actually for?
The honest answer is vertiginous: to perpetuate itself.
II. The holy trinity and its infernal mechanics
Contemporary capitalism rests on three pillars that mutually legitimise each other in a perfect self-referential cycle: labour, finance, growth. Each justifies the other two. Growth requires labour. Labour demands finance. Finance only survives through growth. This trinity is closed upon itself, impervious to external critique — and therein lies its strength.
But it is also its confession of failure.
For this structure produces no meaning. It produces movement. A perpetual movement that must constantly justify itself — not by its effects on people or the planet, but by its own continuation. GDP growth is no longer a means — it is the end. Labour is no longer a human activity — it is a moral obligation.
The morality of toil
"In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread." This biblical injunction did not disappear with the secularisation of Western societies. It simply changed temples. The office replaced the church, the manager took the priest's place, and the payslip became the sacrament of a life well lived.
Nietzsche called "moraline" this tendency to disguise as a moral imperative what is in reality nothing more than a historical power relation. The glorification of toil is precisely this operation: transforming an economic necessity into a cardinal virtue, then into personal identity, until the person who does not work is not merely poor, but guilty.
This morality of toil is not trivial. It is the ideological cement without which the capitalist trinity collapses. If people ceased to believe that their value is measured by their productivity, the system would lose its primary mechanism of social control.
And when this moral injunction meets speculative finance, it becomes frankly toxic. For now it is no longer enough to work — one must work profitably. And profitability is not defined by the social utility of an activity, nor by its impact on living systems. It is defined by financial markets, at a quarterly horizon.
III. The manufacture of problems as a mode of production
This is where bullshitnovation intervenes — not as an anomaly, but as the logical response of an exhausted system.
There will always be people who praise capitalism. True, we live today in comfort and ease unimaginable two hundred years ago. But the heirs of contemporary capital demand the same returns as their forebears, without any new raw material to justify those returns. Future innovations will be incapable of generating as many jobs as the golden age of Fordism. Driven by automation, the work of engineers often amounts to maximising capital's profits through the mass replacement of people by machines.
In laboratories and research centres, teams are ordered to find the next commercially viable novelty. If they fail, an entire belief system — founded on infinite innovation and the redemptive selfishness of the invisible hand — begins to wobble, and with it the financial bubble that depends on it.
Where innovation dies, bullshitnovation is born. A market only exists through the meeting of supply and demand. But what happens to supply when demand is absent? We have entered an era where supply forces demand by manipulating needs.
The mechanics are always the same, endlessly repeated: create false needs to hook our desires, create false fears to hook our affects. Murder the natural and free to sell the artificial and lucrative. Kill living, fertile soils to sell chemical fertilisers and Monsanto's "frankenseeds". Privatise the commons — water first, sold in plastic bottles after being extracted from collective aquifers. And perhaps one day, if they are left unchecked, they will do the same with the air we breathe. This is not an academic hypothesis: it is the logical trajectory of a system with no internal limit.
Always the same logic: create problems to sell solutions.
In healthcare, it takes the form of disease mongering — the industrial manufacture of pathologies. Baldness becomes emotional distress. Ordinary distraction becomes attention deficit disorder. Fluctuating libido becomes a sexual dysfunction to be treated. Let us also recall the Prozac scandal, whose market launch was based on the deliberate concealment of unfavourable studies and the invention of a new diagnostic paradigm tailored to fit the molecule. In every case, the schema is identical: transform a feature of the human condition into a clinical abnormality, then commercialise the correction. The drug does not arise from the disease — the disease is created for the drug.
In the world of work, it produces what anthropologist David Graeber documented as bullshit jobs — those positions whose holders secretly acknowledge to be pointless. Communications coordinators with nothing to coordinate, digital transformation consultants who transform nothing, lawyers specialising in the optimisation of tax optimisation. These jobs do not exist to produce value. They exist to keep alive the illusion of a functioning economy, and to reproduce wage dependency as a mechanism of social discipline.
In technology, it manifests as the proliferation of innovations with no real utility — connected gadgets solving problems no one had, productivity apps that consume the time they claim to free, objects with planned obsolescence designed to be discarded before they are worn out. Each smartphone replaced after two years by a near-identical model represents 240 kg of fossil fuels extracted, 22 kg of chemicals mobilised, 1.5 tonnes of water consumed. So that markets may continue to turn.
In geopolitics, finally, it takes its most violent form: the systematic inflation of threat. Let us recall Eisenhower's 1961 speech, already warning of the growing grip of the military-industrial complex on democratic institutions. And Orwell, who understood as early as 1948 that the purpose of modern war is less victory than the permanent destruction of the productive surplus: business in war through armaments, business in peace through reconstruction — all of it fuel for the god GDP.
What unites all these mechanisms is a single logic: the problem is the raw material, fear is the engine, the market solution is the product.
IV. The planet as the only silent loser
In this grand theatre of economic absurdity, there is one actor that does not negotiate, does not communicate, does not vote. An actor whose alarm signals are systematically reinterpreted as market opportunities. That actor is the planet.
And it is the only one that is right.
The bullshitnovation machine is ontologically extractive. Not out of malice, but by structural necessity. Short-term profitability is the only language the system understands — and that language is fundamentally incompatible with the timescales of living systems.
Replanting a forest takes fifty years. Restoring depleted soil takes a generation. Reconstituting an over-exploited water table takes a century. None of these timescales fits in a quarterly report. None generates a return on investment legible by Bloomberg. So these activities are not financed — not because they are without value, but because debt-money, as it is constructed, is incapable of valuing them.
The degenerative is favoured because it is profitable. The regenerative is sidelined because it cannot generate short-term profits.
This is not a bias. It is an architecture.
Karl Polanyi understood this as early as 1944 in The Great Transformation: when the market becomes the sole regulator of social and natural life — when land, labour and money are treated as simple commodities — society ends up turning against itself in a desperate protective movement. Polanyi's "double movement" is where we are. But these resistances, however necessary, are not enough. They attack symptoms without touching the engine.
V. The engine is money
This is what the critique of bullshitnovation reveals, if we push the reasoning to its conclusion.
The overproduction of useless things, the manufacture of pathologies, planned obsolescence, the privatisation of the commons, the war industry — all these phenomena converge on a single point of origin: the mode of monetary creation.
Contemporary money is created through debt. Every euro, every dollar that enters the economy is first a promise of repayment with interest. This mechanism imposes a logic of perpetual growth that is not an aberration of the system — it is its condition of survival. A monetary system founded on debt can only exist in expansion, because more must always be produced to repay the interest on what has already been created.
David Graeber, in Debt: The First 5,000 Years, showed that debt is not a neutral tool. It is a power relation. It creates a fundamental asymmetry between the one who issues and the one who owes. At the macroeconomic level, this asymmetry structures all productive choices: we finance what can repay the debt, we abandon what cannot.
That is to say: we finance the degenerative, we abandon the regenerative.
Bullshitnovation is therefore not primarily a problem of values, nor even a problem of regulation. It is a problem of monetary source code.
VI. What NEMO IMS proposes: restoring meaning to human labour
The NEMO IMS system — Negentropic Money International Monetary System — starts from a simple and radical hypothesis: what if money were created not by debt, but by regeneration?
In the current system, monetary creation is backed by promises of future production. In NEMO IMS, it is backed by the effective restoration of living systems — the reconstitution of natural commons, the regeneration of soils, forests, hydrological cycles, biodiversity.
This shift is not cosmetic. It is structural. It changes the answer to the fundamental question of any economy: what deserves to be financed?
In current capitalism, what deserves to be financed is what is profitable in the short term. In NEMO IMS, what deserves to be financed is what regenerates the conditions for life — at every timescale.
This change has a direct consequence for the question of labour. If money is no longer created through debt, if it no longer imposes growth as a condition of survival, then human labour can free itself from the injunction of extractive profitability. The farmer who restores a soil no longer needs to prove his efficiency to a shareholder. The forester replanting a mixed woodland is no longer a cost — he is at the origin of a monetary emission.
This is not the end of work. It is the end of necessarily degenerative work.
The morality of toil can be deconstructed not through a moral refusal of work, but through a redefinition of what work produces. No longer growth for its own sake, no longer the problem manufactured to sell the solution — but regeneration as the foundation of a living economy.
People can finally "leave each other in peace" regarding extractive productivity — not to do nothing, but to do things differently: useful, durable things, rooted in the timescales of living systems rather than the deadlines of financial investment.
Conclusion: The end of the absurd, or its perpetuation?
Camus proposed no exit from the absurd. He proposed looking it in the face and choosing to live anyway — to revolt rather than submit to the nihilistic evidence.
The economic absurdity described here calls for a similar revolt. Not the romantic revolt of those who say no without offering an alternative. But the constructive revolt of those who understand the mechanism and propose to rewire it.
Capitalism at the hour of its absurd no longer knows what to invent. It therefore invents diseases, wars, disposable objects, useless jobs, calibrated fears. It privatises water, patents life, creates money ex nihilo and calls it value creation.
The planet, meanwhile, keeps its accounts. Not in dollars. In degrees, in vanished species, in drained aquifers, in dead soils.
An alternative exists. It does not pass through morality — appeals to responsibility and virtue have changed nothing in fifty years. It passes through architecture. Through the reconstruction of the economy's source code: money.
To change the way money is created is to change what the economy considers value. It is to change what people do with their lives. It is to make possible what is today structurally forbidden: an economy that regenerates rather than exhausts.
That is NEMO IMS.
Jean-Christophe Duval