University Seminar on the Theory and History of Media
The term extractivism denotes a welcome return to questions of materiality, nature, infrastructure, and human labour in the study of capitalism. It suggests a shift in focus from seemingly immaterial or fictive forms of capital in studies of financialization, digital feudalism, and data capitalism. But this refocusing carries the risk of forgetting what we can learn from narrow terms such as finance and data about the source of what is captured through extraction. Whether through the earth, the body, or the cloud, modes of extraction continually reinvent a common and long-standing practice: extraction from the future.
Timothy Mitchell is the William B. Ransford Professor of Middle Eastern Studies in the MESAAS Department at Columbia University. He is a political theorist specializing in the history of colonialism, the politics of energy, and the political economy of capitalism. His books include Colonising Egypt, Rule of Experts, and Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. A new book will be published next year by Verso, under the title The Alibi of Capital: How we Broke the Earth to Steal the Future on the Promise of a Better Tomorrow.