The phenomenon of excess is fueled by capitalism and over-information which permeates all facets of life leading to a state of perpetual overload, where the relentless accumulation of data, capital, and waste ultimately neutralizes meaning and historical sense, creating a world in constant, chaotic flux.

In their Panic Encyclopedia from 1989, the authors Kroker, Kroker, and Cook interpret the phenomenon of the excess as a sign of ecstasy, saturation, and exhaustion. They list: “overfished, overrated, overcommunicated, overloaded with brands, over-aestheticized, over-medicated, surveilled, over-virtualized, over-medialized.” (Kroker et al., 1999: 13) Today, it is particularly the speculative capitalization, which—inseparably linked with the rise of networked computers1—as a result of ecstatic escalation excesses has led to the excess “over”: Too much capital, but also too many images and too many signs, which neutralize any historical sense and exercise a white censorship through excess. This kind of simulation through excessive reality overload, which in turn can lead to reality denial,2 triggers a new escalation of obesity (Baudrillard), which eventually becomes visible in all kinds of waste: nuclear waste, chemical waste, and industrial waste, but also the excess of opinions, laws, and texts, which drift like cadavers in the stream of decay and the pernicious. When Marx wrote, that capital is dead labor, whose function in the continuous and vampiric absorption of living labor exists, and that it as a vampire lives all the better, the more living labor it absorbs, then Marx had only a very faint idea of how capital with its expansion over two hundred years could generate a monstrous auto-cannibalism, in the course of which it wants to absorb everything forever, until it eventually inflates itself to death (and destroys the earth). We live today in a state of prolonged wakefulness and the ubiquitous and multiple work without a time limit. We enjoy the ever-accelerating excesses of over-information and delight in the voracity of electronic links, accept the obesity of the social body and the abundance of the derivative, drift deliriously through the high-speed economy and are mutants of satellite communication—we are caught and trapped in a hysteria of attention, where all aspects of acceleration, which indicate that at least a part of the world's population in the Global North is in permanent transit and mobile, meet decelerated scenarios, in which the surplus population in the Global South remains trapped in immobility. However, instantaneously, people are almost everywhere on the globe connected in 24/7 mode, seamlessly integrated into the ever denser networks of communication, information, and media representation, and they are fascinated by the scenario of media banality, which today underpins the real pornography, the real obscenity of triviality, indifference, and flatness, when we immerse ourselves in the delusional exhibitionism that characterizes social media, where quantity prevails over quality. All the over-information, which materializes in images, videos, and texts, becomes a tradable commodity, which tech capital extracts and capitalizes as data. All data are credit data. All differences (of content) are considered equivalent, or, to put it another way, any specific meaning dissolves in the ecstatic and infinite data stream. Difference equals indifference, so is nowadays the magic formula. This kind of rigid formatting goes back to an accumulation regime of financial capital, which in its short-term nature trades the excess of numbers, practices the ecstasy of speculation and at the same time must promise successful management of constantly present risk possibilities, no matter on which underlying values the insurances now refer. There is now a 24/7 non-stop operation of global production and circulation processes to report—the globe mutates into a networked and continuously open financial, trade, shopping and production center, with an excess of derivatives, products, things and information (and garbage) (Crary, 2013: 23). In the last instance it is speculative capital that cannibalizes even the number, to spit it out undigested as over-more, and it is in its peculiar emptiness the zero, which multiplies the fiction of always more (10, 100, 1000 etc.). Speculative capital finally short-circuits the structures developed in mathematics as socio-economic logic—its form of movement is, as will be shown, that of the empty over-more. Daniela Gabor has pointed out that contrary to expectations after the financial crisis of 2008, the hegemony of the global financial system has further solidified has, leading to what is aptly called the Wall Street consensus, which has revised and revived the neoliberal Washington consensus (Gabor, 2021). To anticipate one thing here: Capital also suffers sui generis from a lack, namely the lack of surplus value or the more that determines the lack. There is also a lack of money, insofar as there is always a lack of purchasing power for outstanding goods and services. Thus the annual GDP as the total money value of all goods and services produced in the economy shows a surplus over the total wage and salary payments. These payments including the purchasing power of companies are always too low to absorb all goods. The gap between the purchasing power of households and companies and the outstanding market prices can be partly closed by households, companies, and governments receiving low-interest loans from commercial banks. The lending of commercial banks is the main way in which new money enters the economy.3 This means that most money is provided by private banks through credit creation and not by the central banks. If no one were to go into debt in this way anymore, capitalism would immediately collapse. If it has become impossible to turn all the circulating money into to dissolve real goods or services, then money must always generate more money and credit must always generate more new credit. Debt repayment is then the infinite postponement of the redemption of payment promises, which always requires further loans. The postponement thus manifests itself in chains, multiplications, and proliferations, with no one knowing in the end who owes whom what (Röttgers, 2022: 146). It is not money itself, but alongside industrial capital, it is fictitious and above all speculative capital, which creates the problem of the excess of debt. However, it is also necessary to limit this again. In 2019, approximately 17 trillion US dollars were in circulation in government and private bonds with terms of up to ten years and negative nominal returns (the lenders pay the borrowers money so that they take out loans). Thus, today we are also dealing with an abundance of money that is circulating faster and faster, especially on the financial markets. Rapid progress, which in reality is Virilio's rapid standstill, is a figure of endlessly accelerating movement that has no goal because there is no end, and no end because the goal is missing. The “end of history”, which Alexandre Kojève sometimes identifies with Napoleon, sometimes with the French Revolution, sometimes with communism, coincides with the capitalist modernity itself, whose “progressive thought” still perceives itself as infinite, as an uninterrupted final sprint of the seemingly new, leading to nothing or everything, depending on how you look at it. Precisely because there is no end in this sense anymore, we enter an endless crisis, into the infinite exhaustion of processes that nevertheless continue (Baudrillard, 2002: 50) (Kojève's mistake was mainly in the assumption that the post-historical man would live in harmony with nature, without suspecting that he could trigger a catastrophe of cosmic dimensions).