The Extraction

TAM-PER.03 · The Persistent · The Approximate Mind

My roommate has a poster of Che Guevara on the wall. Printed by a multinational, bought on Amazon, shipped in a van that runs on a supply chain spanning four continents. He is not stupid. Neither of us mentions the poster, because there is nothing to say about it that the poster does not already say.

I have a phone in my pocket that I know was assembled from minerals pulled out of the ground by people I will never meet, under conditions I have read about and chosen not to think too hard about. I use it to read articles about labor exploitation. The articles are good. The phone is still in my pocket.

This is not a confession. It is a description. The colonial era spoke of civilization while extracting labor and land. The industrial era spoke of progress while extracting the bodies of workers. The digital era speaks of connection while extracting attention and data. My generation speaks of equity with more precision than any generation before it, and lives inside extraction supply chains that wrap the planet.

Hypocrisy is the wrong word for it. Hypocrisy implies the justice language is a cover, a performance, something the speaker does not believe. But the justice language is sincere. People mean it. They organize around it, build institutions for it, raise their children inside it. The extraction is also real. Both run at full strength, in the same era, often in the same person.

The coexistence is the thing that requires explanation. Not the extraction alone, which a cynic can explain, and not the equity talk alone, which an optimist can explain. The fact that they persist together, neither canceling the other, is the pattern.

The justice impulse is not fake and it is not powerless. It moves the margins. It changes what can be said out loud, which changes what can be done. It abolished some things and named others that had no name. It does not, mostly, change the structure. The structure keeps extracting while the language keeps improving, and the improving language is itself a real achievement that does not touch the structure it describes.

AI is not outside this. It is the latest instance of it. The training data was extracted, scraped from the writing of people who were not asked. The minerals were extracted. The energy is extracted. The labor that labeled the data and tuned the outputs was extracted, often from people paid little, in places far from where the systems get celebrated. The tool that might help the species see its pattern was produced by the pattern.

It is neither damning nor exonerating. It is just consistent. The species built a mirror, and the mirror was built the way the species builds things.

There is a version of this essay that ends in despair and a version that ends in absolution, and both are too easy. The despair says nothing changes, so why try. But things do change, at the margins, and the margins are where actual people live. The absolution says the impulse is what counts, so the structure can be forgiven. But the structure is what determines who eats.

I think the honest position is harder to hold than either. The desire for equity is as persistent as the extraction. It never fully wins. It never fully disappears. The species carries both, in the same hand, in the same era, in the same person, and the carrying is not a stage on the way to resolution. It might just be the condition.

I put the phone down. Then I pick it up again. Not because I need it. Putting it down permanently was never the point, and performing the gesture of refusal would be its own kind of justice language, a way of speaking virtue while the structure continues unchanged. So I pick it up and use it and know what it cost to make.

Both things. At the same time.

I wonder whether the gap between what we know and what we do is a problem we could solve, or a tension we carry, the way a body carries its own weight, not as burden but as the condition of standing upright.

The poster is still on the wall. Neither of us has taken it down.

References

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Galeano, Eduardo. Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent. Monthly Review Press, 1973.

Moore, Jason W. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. Verso, 2015.

Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. PublicAffairs, 2019.

Crawford, Kate. Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence. Yale University Press, 2021.

Beckert, Sven. Empire of Cotton: A Global History. Alfred A. Knopf, 2014.

This is the third essay in The Persistent, a series by Yagn Adusumilli examining what AI cannot change about the species that built it. PER-04, The Builders, follows.