Do we live in an economy of theft?

Extractivism identifies a political economy premised on the withdrawal of value without corresponding deposit: resources are removed from the Earth, profits from labor, and commodifiable data from plants, bodies, and information systems. Returned to their place is waste, toxicity, disease, exhaustion, and death. Comprising a fundamental logic of advanced global capitalism that is now evident worldwide, extractivism has long been recognized as a fundamental form of colonialism as well: “[E]xtracting is stealing—it is taking without consent, without thought, care or even knowledge of the impacts that extraction has on the other living things in that environment,” notes Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. “That’s always been a part of colonialism and conquest. Colonialism has always extracted the indigenous.” […] Extraction increasingly includes digital appropriation, relating to social media and surveillance-based data mining, IT processing, and algorithmic capture, expanding the extractive zone to the techno- and info-spheres.