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For Grosfoguel, (neo)colonialism is necessarily linked with a hierarchal understanding of knowledge production that is also fundamentally racialized. He writes: “This epistemic strategy has been crucial for Western global designs . . . European/Euro-American colonial expansion and domination was able to construct a hierarchy of super and inferior knowledge and, thus, of super and inferior people around the world. We went from . . . ’people without writing’ to . . . ’people without history’ to . . . ’people without development.”19

Intellectual property law, without attentiveness to modernity itself, is a mechanism for maintaining, not undoing, the racial and epistemic hierarchy that Grosfuguel identifies. Traditional knowledge remains largely outside the scope of protection of intellectual property law because epistemic domination is deeply embedded within legal theory and doctrine. Adherence to Enlightenment conceptions of authorship and inventorship continues to decenter the knowledge of people of color while advancing purportedly universal Western development agendas. Larger-than-life global brands reinforce the epistemic domination that authorship/inventorship produce by signifying quality in raced ways and exploiting labor in a global, self-destructing system of racial capitalism.

In conclusion, I wish to briefly reflect on what the above exegesis of local Melanesian intellectual property systems can offer for critical intellectual property discussion more broadly. There are two broad observations that emerge. The first is the value of plurality in this field that is currently so heavily dominated by standardisation and a quest for uniformity. The preceding discussion suggests that there are serious side effects of a uniform approach to intellectual property regulation, and that it can even undermine the conditions that are most likely to lead to innovation and creativity in all its wondrous diversity. In other words, although seeking to incentivise further creativity and innovation, the global intellectual property system is actually gradually homogenising the conditions in which creativity and innovation is produced. Ironically, and almost certainly, this is likely in the long run to lead to less creativity and innovation, or at least less radical and heterogeneous creativity and innovation. The examples from Melanesia illustrate that it is a mistake to try to separate the systems that regulate intellectual property from the resources themselves. Therefore, if as a matter of global policy we really do value innovation, in its real sense of offering true alternatives and new directions, we should also recognise and value alternative intellectual property mechanisms to the dominant global model. Although these systems are more apparent in places such as Melanesia where the global intellectual property system has not as yet established a strong hold, they exist throughout the world in areas such as the informal economy and elsewhere there are intangible resources not currently regulated by the global system. I suggest that rather than merely accepting as inevitable their ultimate domination by the global system, there is exploration of ways in which this can be resisted and a plural regulatory approach adopted. The ways in which this will occur will need to be worked out on a case-by-case basis depending upon the particular circumstances and opportunities, but can only occur if there is first of all a change of mindset towards an embracing of pluralism and an awareness of the undesirability of the global system’s current claims of universality.

The second observation emerging from the investigation of Melanesian intellectual property systems is that the current neoliberal or market-based focus of the global intellectual property system is a narrow one. Problematically, it largely renders invisible a whole range of factors that have powerful impacts upon both the creation of new intangible resources and their distribution. These include social relationships and cultural and cosmological understandings. A market-based focus can also obscure the fact that there may be values associated with particular intangible resources that are unable to be factored into a purely neoliberal economic framework—for example, values associated with particular aspects of cultural heritage or even genetic resources. One response is to seek to carve out certain areas as being explicitly inalienable and available to all, such as the Italian public cultural public domain (see articles 822.2, 826.2 and 3. of the Italian civil code). An alternative approach is to work towards gradually imbuing intellectual property mechanisms with more non-economic considerations, such as, for example including questions of culture as relevant (or even central) to intellectual property policy design.

That fundamental double bind of white supremacy is one that ties together (neo)colonialism and internal colonialism oppressions. As Quijano explains: “European or Western culture imposed its paradigmatic image and its principal cognitive elements as the norm of orientation on all cultural development, particularly the intellectual and the artistic. That relationship consequently became a constitutive part of the conditions of reproduction of those societies and cultures that were pushed into Europeanization of everything or in part.”40 The “Europeanization of everything” can be undone through decolonial refusals of white supremacy.

Here, I come full circle, back to Hasian’s notion of character within law. Rhetorical cultures, per his understanding of legal decision making, both enable and constrain legal and racial narratives. One important function that each moment of resistance performs is the creation of new character arcs for people of color in the overarching mythos of American creatorship. Characters build the rhetorical cultures and narrative roles that people of color can occupy, even with respect to knowledge production. While it is tempting to dismiss extralegal interventions as “mere rhetoric,” those rhetorical interventions make possible the policy ones through which people of color can become creators, citizens, and persons who can transform racial capitalism.

Economists have long debated the concept of public goods, which broadly refers to those goods (or services) that are commonly available to everyone in society because they are considered essential to the smooth functioning of society. Examples commonly provided include national defence, education, security, infrastructure and environmental protection. They are required to be both non-rivalrous (that is, an individual’s consumption of the good does not diminish another’s ability to do so) and non-excludable (that is, it is not possible to exclude others from using it).9

These criteria would exclude medicines and other health technologies which are viewed as private commodities, partly because reigning bioethical models emphasise the individual aspects of healthcare (such as patient autonomy and private consumption of medicines), and also because the market targets consumers who can afford highly priced medicines to the exclusion of those unable to afford them. While medicines may not satisfy the criteria of non-rivalry and non-excludability, viewed from the perspective of welfare economics, they are – at least partially – public goods as they have significant implications for public health, are also global in their development and impact, and are prone to regulation in their development, manufacture, allocation and use.10 The public nature of medicines is well known, both from their role in public health vaccination measures, and in the treatment of epidemic and endemic diseases. The public dimension also extends to the public consequences of choices made in research and development of new medicines, and the profiteering around lifestyle drugs which draws resources away from research into so-called ‘neglected’ diseases. Public goods also have positive externalities, in that their accessibility and use benefit the public at large, not merely those who use them. This public benefit is most obvious in the case of vaccination, where herd immunity develops through widespread diffusion.11

Drawing on Quijano's planetary framework and analytic of coloniality, I argue that the coloniality of curriculum is also accompanied by the geopolitics of curriculum, which aligns itself to a spatial or geographic turn in the social sciences (e.g. shifting the geographies of reason). The latter constitutes a geopolitically implicated colonial cartography positioning those dwelling on the other side of the abyssal line or zone of non-being as philosophically insignificant, worthy only of manual labour. There is an intimate relationship between the zone of non-being, coloniality and cartography that unveils how those dwelling in the zone of non-being are conceived as inferior while those in the zone of being of humanity are representative of the white ethnoclass (Wynter, 2003). This imperial mode of reasoning entails negating the coevalness or contemporaneity (Fabian, 1983) of those who are systematically made non-existence—that is, those who dwell in colonised, dehumanised and racialised zones of non-being (Fanon, 1963). This modern/colonial cartography is not only sustained through a legal cartography of exclusion (national and international law). It is also fortified epistemologically through education systems, which are entangled with a (material) political economic and legal cartography (education policy), as well as a (symbolic) epistemological cartography or curriculum, both of which are constitutive of modern/colonial education institutions. When conceived in geopolitical terms, the dominant curriculum reveals how educational experiences within and beyond formal education institutions transcend the nation-state and are implicated in transnational modern/colonial projects and imperial designs.

The geopolitics of curriculum is also entangled with a pedagogy of cruelty that sustains the intersubjective relations regulating and constituting coloniality beyond the nation-state (Segato, 2018). It is undergirded by a powerful colonial rhetoric that simultaneously meets the demands of settler colonial projects and imperial neocolonial designs. The recruitment of students from the Global South who become instrumental in maintaining coloniality is a clear case in point. The Chicago Boys, for instance, nicely illustrate what the geopolitical implications are when neoliberal knowledge or theory is instrumentalised and weaponised as it is put into practice to maintain coloniality through coups and military dictatorships linked to domestic and foreign interests alike.

Trademark law, which existed at only a state level until the mid-1900s,139 both amplified and quelled national desires and anxieties associated with race, national identity, citizenship, and economic prosperity. Passed in 1946, the nation’s first federal trademark statute, the Lanham Act,140 played a central role in perpetuating and reinforcing the whiteness of U.S. citizenship as well as racial hierarchies from the Antebellum Era that Emancipation disrupted.141 Yet unlike copyright and patent law, trademark law did not explicitly exclude certain groups from protection. Instead, it produced a legal framework through which racial hierarchies could be normalized and managed visually, in consumer spaces.

Along with a precipitous rise in U.S. trademark registrations in the 1900s, “product consciousness had become so crucial a part of national history and popular self-identity that the public’s relation to business took on a patriotic value.”142 Rosemary Coombe, citing Michael Warner, notes that trademarks are “constitutive parts of a public sphere—constructing a common discourse to bind the subject to the nation and to its markets,”143 while Richard Schur comments that “[c]irculation of racial imagery is not simply an accidental effect of the current trademark system but a fundamental element of its logic.”144

Whilst there is a good deal of variation in the approaches of these different regulatory regimes, most of them focus on drafting new legislation, centralising the state as the regulator of traditional knowledge and creating exclusive property rights in traditional knowledge that are vested in communities or groups (see Forsyth 2011, 2012, 2013a). In general, the international treaties and legislation actually in force or in development deal with traditional knowledge by conceptualising it as another subject-matter for the global intellectual property regime to regulate. This is entirely consistent with the dominant, economics based, Anglo-American approach to intellectual property that views intellectual property rights essentially as commodities, in which their fundamental value is to produce revenue. Thus, although these approaches are often referred to as sui generis, in many respects they are simply extending the global intellectual property system, rather than trying to regulate traditional knowledge in a truly original way. This can be seen by the way in which the IGC has divided traditional knowledge up into separate categories of traditional knowledge associated with genetic resources, traditional knowledge and traditional cultural expression, thus following western intellectual property categories and undermining indigenous understandings of the three areas as intrinsically linked. Traditional knowledge is seen as being able to be abstracted from the social context in which it has been developed, and turned into a form in which it can be traded in the global market. This economic focus is reinforced in the area of genetic resources and their associated traditional knowledge by an emphasis on benefit-sharing agreements (see Kariyawasam 2008:84; WIPO 2013). As pointed out by an increasing number of scholars, however, this is problematic because the focus on compensation and justice has led to the sidelining of the need for nurturing traditional and local knowledge and innovation (Robinson 2008), and has also led to numerous cases of community conflict (see, for example, Peteru 2008; Vermeylen 2013).

Whilst these new developments are certainly preferable to ignoring the intellectual property issues surrounding the global North’s recent appreciation of the value of traditional knowledge, it is an extremely limited approach. It fails to take into account the ontological and epistemological context from which the knowledge and innovation arise; instead embedding them within global normative frameworks that operate according to a very different register of value. This follows the same fallacies that were tried, and failed, with regard to transforming customary land and marine tenure into exclusionary and restrictive Western legal categories (Vierros et al. 2010). Bragdon makes similar observations in the context of discussions about genetic resources and local knowledge:

Like copyright law, patent law is more than simply a legal construct. It is instead a rhetorical and cultural formation through which national identity and citizenship were and are constituted. The relationship of inventing to the developing nation’s very idea of itself and the American Dream points to the importance of patenting in mediating culture. As Dan Burk and Jessica Reyman contend, “patents play an important social role in industrialized societies.”30 Patents are certainly artifacts of technological society. They are also—as Fouché and Vostral, among others—demonstrate, artifacts of a racialized society. Brian Frye’s recent essay “Invention of a Slave” notes how decisions to patent or not to patent the inventions of enslaved persons implicated larger conversations about slavery, abolition, and territoriality in the nation.31 For instance, protecting the inventions of enslaved persons could be read as an endorsement of abolition, upsetting the balance between slave states and free states in the young nation.

That patents were explicit and implicit mediators of national conversations about citizenship, personhood, and slavery should not be surprising, particularly given America’s desire to articulate its identity around work ethic, ingenuity, discovery, and progress. The concept of “discovery,” as used here, has both material and immaterial implications. With respect to the latter, the nation’s quest for knowledge was part of a larger investment in Enlightenment narratives of linear progress. With respect to the former, the nation’s commitment to inventiveness was driven by and contributed to territorial expansion. Manifest Destiny relied on invention, specifically technologies that could make it possible to traverse the new nation. As such, “the idealism of Manifest Destiny would become entwined with America’s growing obsession with technological progress . . . whenever progress was invoked, technology was its basis.”32 In these respects, patents are sociolegal constructions with significant racial implications. Not only were many people of color denied the right to protect their inventions, they were viewed as obstacles to the nation’s inherent mission of advancing progress and civilizing the uncivilized.

Understanding the racial scripts embedded in intellectual property law requires treating the legal regime as both a collection of individual bodies of law and a mass noun. While Richard Stallman is correct that intellectual property is a “seductive mirage”44 through which policy differences between copyrights, trademarks, and patents are obscured, the term “intellectual property” has rhetorical properties that when used in public culture require study, especially with respect to race. Discursive deployments of intellectual property as a single concept facilitate the creation of a homogeneous and racialized category of creatorship as well as the mobilization of public feelings about knowledge production. Moving between intellectual property law as a mass noun and as a collection of bodies of law is useful in teasing out the structural and rhetorical implications of the racialized practices through which racial hierarchy is sustained.

With the exception of a few works, such as Madhavi Sunder’s From Goods to a Good Life: Intellectual Property and Global Justice, scholarship on intellectual property and race tends to address case studies within individual bodies of law. This approach is important and valuable, as it investigates in depth the racial implications of particular intellectual property policies. However, as Silbey argues, “[t]he origin stories that circulate about intellectual property protection span all three forms. The repetition of these stories of consent through the case law, the litigation that becomes case law, and the statutory and constitutional history behind the law, serves to further reinforce the message of consent.”45

Karla Mari McKanders uses the phrase “tiered personhood”16 to describe the system in which the rights afforded to all individuals, regardless of citizenship status, are “bypassed . . . by defining certain groups as nonpersons based on differences between dominant and subordinate groups.”17 For instance, even when copyright law’s formal racial restrictions ended, the nation’s racist attitudes persisted. Jim Crow, which violently pushed back against the rights afforded by the Fourteenth Amendment, was only one manifestation of such tiered personhood and the systematic racial subordination that supported it.

Formal citizenship requirements for copyright registration eventually ended with the International Copyright Act of 1891, a statute that, in theory, extended copyright protection to all individuals in the United States.18 However, the International Copyright Act of 1891 neither ended the nation’s desire to associate American citizenship with whiteness nor prevented the de facto racial discrimination that followed from legal articulations of copyrightability. Lauren Berlant describes sentimental approaches to citizenship, which posit the citizen not as political subject but rather as “someone with attachments and intentions and pain capacities—for example, as a subject of feelings—who longs for what everybody is said to long for, a world that allows access to vague belonging, a sense of unanxious general social membership that ought to be protected by the institutions that bind power to ordinary life.”19

Intellectual property law shapes and is shaped by citizenship. Citizenship, as a category, is prefigured by racial scripts in ways that normalize some people as citizens and others as non-citizens, which, in turn, circumscribes the outcome in intellectual property cases. Racial scripts describe “how racialization processes extend across time and space and affect racial groups even when they do not cross paths.”31 Understanding racist rhetorics in this way highlights the simultaneous durability and flexibility of language and sentiment about race, in a manner that is consistent with theorizations of racial formation. The play in the joints of racial scripts protects white supremacy, often by racializing people of color using one or more sets of racist stereotypes in ways that provoke strong racial feelings. Historical uses of racial scripts prime audiences for accepting them again, in different contexts.

According to Vincent Pham, racial scripts are “anchored in history”32 and “reoccur, interact, and work concomitantly to constitute our ideas about some racial groups in relation to other racial groups.”33 These racial scripts also often “reinforce a cultural logic of race as the basis of national belonging [and] legitimate citizenship.”34 As critical race studies scholars have consistently demonstrated, though formal equality may be a reality in contemporary American law, including intellectual property law, informal racism seeps into legal doctrine and the practice of law. Pinpointing the language that intellectual property law uses to invoke conceptions of citizenship and related racial scripts, particularly as they code for who has the capacity to create/infringe, reveals an underlying racial episteme, calcified in precedentially trenchant judicial decisions.

Because claims to citizenship are always already, by virtue of managing questions of belonging, couched in terms of proving that those who are Other are not Other, they often involve drawing distinctions that reinforce existing exclusions instead of embracing humanness as a space of profound difference. Citizenship requires norms that are “brutally enforced against non-normative bodies, practices, behaviors, and forms of affiliation through oppositional, divide-and-conquer logics that set up nonnormative subjects to compete against each other in order to gain the privileged access to citizenship.”24

In the context of intellectual property, these divide-and-conquer logics are evident even in seemingly productive calls for inclusion. Prince’s appeals to protect Black creatorship—as well as popular cultural texts such as Empire and The Get Down that echo them—do so at the expense of “pirates,” even when those pirates exist in states of tremendous precarity. Indian and Indian American claims to have a cultural property interests in yoga feed virulent Hindu nationalism that justifies violence against Muslims.25 Lynch’s claims to own the labor of his Black body reinscribe the racial capitalism of both the NFL and the celebrity industrial complex that makes the cult of personality around his undoubtedly appealing Beast Mode persona profitable. Unless they confront and undo the underlying logics of copyright, patent, and trademark law, performative engagements with creatorship and citizenship can fall prey to the anti-affiliative and anti-intersectional labor sentiments that Brandzel critiques as problematic. Combating such problems requires addressing the humanness of people of color, their knowledge, and their rights to liveable and sustainable economic realities.

No easy trans-systemic transferability or compatibility exists between Aboriginal peoples' rights and Canadian intellectual property rights. The perceived incommensurability arises in the intersection of Euro-Canadian and Indigenous knowledge systems. Euro-Canadian assumptions, categories, and justifications are not commensurable with Indigenous peoples' knowledge systems. European Enlightenment created these assumptions to classify humanity's stages, racism, and colonial identification of non-Europeans. The purpose of Canadian intellectual property laws is to secure economic returns for an individual creative, productive, and innovative process that is not always compatible with most Indigenous peoples' objectives. When the Canadian intellectual property laws and its categories extended to Indigenous peoples' knowledge, it often regenerated cultural appropriation issues.

A pretense of benign translation has mediated the contemporary concern of Indigenous peoples' knowledge with Canadian knowledge. Eurocentric disciplinary knowledges have attempted to translate Indigenous knowledge into their frameworks. Such adaptations or incorporations are often not compatible, as the translation requires foundational transformations in how knowledge is understood and how it is shared. The superiority of Eurocentric knowledge is presumed in most translations. That questionable presumption sheers off the complexity, interconnection, and intelligibility of Indigenous peoples' knowledge systems to render them legible. The Canadian knowledge systems' historical construction has generated many negative stereotypes. Thus, Indigenous peoples have rejected these past translations and transformations.

This entanglement means that many of the conceptual and analytical tools that were developed through European modernity, and that we still use today to access and understand reality, have colonial foundations and implications. An uncritical use of the central categories and concepts of modernity is thus often bound to a reproduction of coloniality. If we are to question and undo coloniality, we need to interrogate how we understand the world we live in, how we perceive it, through which analytical constructs, and what impact these have on our realities. Thought constructs are never left entirely to theory. They have practical foundations and consequences. How we articulate and deploy them may enable and/or prevent certain interventions in the world. The organisation of our socio-political subjectivities and lives is influenced by the concepts and underlying knowledge we use. As Bonaventura de Sousa Santos pointed out: “There is no knowledge that is not known by someone for some purpose. All forms of knowledge uphold practices and constitute subjects” (2014: 201). As such, the overarching question behind a possible decolonial rearticulation of political concepts, be it from academia or from movements politics, is what kind of practices and subjects do we want to create and foster through our use of language?

This is precisely why language has received significant attention in decolonial thinking. Indeed, recognising the entanglement of modernity and coloniality unavoidably poses the question of possible tensions and even contradictions between the task of decolonisation and the use of certain political categories in their inherited modern forms. Using the language of the coloniser – the language of European modernity – to express and understand the experience of the colonised and to articulate the decolonial seems problematic. As a consequence, Gloria Anzaldúa (2009) called women of colour to “speak in tongues”, in a language of the subaltern different from the predominant white male language that would properly encapsulate their own experiences, culture, and thinking. In the same vein, Kwasi Wiredu (1995, 1996) advanced a recentring of African (and especially Akan) political philosophy as a theoretical repertoire better equipped to articulate practical resolutions to some of the continent’s pressing challenges. Indeed, the language we use defines the contours of reality and possibility and thus circumscribes political imagination and praxis in potentially limiting ways. Audre Lorde’s (2007) famous assertion that “the Master’s tools will never dismantle the Master’s house” comes to mind. Even when Western political thought and its categories are not necessarily the language of expression used by colonised peoples, the latter have often been historically forced to use them in order to be heard and/or understood.

Intellectual property citizenship is more than a description of the ties between intellectual property and citizenship discourse: it is a grid of intelligibility that reveals how the American racial episteme operates by and through the ideals of citizenship around which copyright, patent, and trademark law are imagined. For Foucault, a grid of intelligibility is a schema that helps to make sense of social orders.23 In this context, intellectual property citizenship is a grid of intelligibility that aids in understanding how intellectual property and citizenship discourse coalesce to protect whiteness in copyright, patent, and trademark spaces. Thinking about citizenship as an ordering discursive formation through which intellectual property law is constructed reveals that race continues to be not just a superficial issue that determines the outcome of legal cases but an a priori racial ordering of the structures of knowledge production.

I argue that the outcome of individual legal cases involving creators of color is less important than how doctrinal standards were forged through epistemically raced conceptions of citizenship. The coalescence of intellectual property and citizenship produced doctrinal language that continues to systematically privilege whiteness even today. More specifically, America’s racial episteme is “the strategic apparatus which permits separating out from among the statements which are possible those that will be acceptable within.”24 Understanding citizenship as a “strategic rhetoric of whiteness,”25 in the words of Thomas Nakayama and Robert Krizek, transforms the object of study from the racial outcome in individual cases to the racial logics of doctrine itself. Though the race of the plaintiffs and defendants in intellectual property cases is helpful in locating moments of racial crisis, it is not dispositive in thinking about how race works in those moments.

We undertake to administer a thousand cuts to corporatized systems of knowledge production. We will ‘decolonize attribution’ by rewriting our relationships to knowledge to embrace interconnectedness, rather than individual authorship (Anderson and Christen Citation2019). We will, wherever we can, withdraw from the commodity sphere all that we hold as intellectual property and release it into non-commercial open access domains within the global South – royalty-free and non-revocable, in entirety and for perpetuity.

We acknowledge this as a strike against the hierarchies of knowledge production: first, by undermining their foundational assumptions of attribution and ownership; second, by attacking the separation between the commodity and social reproduction spheres which is fundamental to their survival and third practising self-dispossession as an act of radical solidarity by which to undermine the gender, ethnic and class divisions that are etched into the capitalist enterprise.

Acknowledging the urgency of “thinking big” in the context of the imminent ecological catastrophe, I nevertheless remain unconvinced about the long-term productivity of such a (universalizing) move within memory studies. What troubles me is the conceptual (im)possibility of including the discreet, nuanced, and situated manifestations of these multiscalar entanglements within this ever-expanding paradigm. It is true that the hitherto evolution of the field (from familial, national, transnational, global, to planetary), as well as its focus on a shared nature of remembering, generates a situation in which attention is predominantly being paid to what is thought of as spectacular developments of massive violence, mammoth destruction, outstanding atrocities, and remarkable deaths.2 It seems that the “collective” (rather than “collected”; cf. Olick, 1999) dimension of memory deliberated upon by memory studies scholars enables only a limited subsuming of differentiated, localized, and individualized histories of oppression, bereavement, and misery, even if they remain contingent on more overarching (colonial) practices and (humanist) patterns of thinking. The current emphasis on the planetary scale of memory appears to further aggravate this tendency; as Groes (2016: 141) argues, in such a context, memory must be rethought, since “much more central now are climatological and geological memory, and perhaps cosmological memory that dwarfs the individual, embodied memory that is a part of anthropogenic thinking.”

Such upscaling does not come without certain risks. In that sense, I align with Bond et al.’s (2017: 859) warning, that in doing so, we may “lose sight of particular instances of suffering, eliding the inequitable distribution of human and environmental violence, and occluding a valuable opportunity to map the intersections of global upheaval and personal trauma” plotted across the troubling history of subjugation and extraction. Meanwhile, paying attention to (only seemingly) unspectacular manifestations of violence allows such stories to “retain some specificity” (Clark, 2015: 131; see also Bond et al., 2017: 859), whether they refer primarily to human or nonhuman beings. A more thoughtful analysis of (genealogies of) localized violence displays its embeddedness in the humanist—highly extractive and deeply discriminatory—logic of thinking, unveiling its multiscale entanglements and varied manifestations. Attending to such (minor) stories of (planetary) harm clearly uncovers, to reference Braidotti (2020: 265), that although “we are in this together, we are not one and the same” (original emphasis; see also Braidotti, 2019), and that we are not (and have never been) in this in the same ways. It is thus necessary to expose the racial and classist blindness, as well as still to a large extent anthropocentric construction, of the Anthropocene rhetoric.3 As Yusoff (2018: 2) notes, “As the Anthropocene proclaims the language of species life—anthropos—through universalist geologic commons, it neatly erases histories of racism that were incubated through the regulatory structure of geologic relations.” It is therefore crucial to remember—contra Chakrabarty’s (2014: 11) earlier-mentioned views—that “The human and its subcategory, the inhuman, are historically relational to a discourse of settler-colonial rights and the material practices of extraction” (Yusoff, 2018: 2). As such, the language of colonialism, which has been increasingly invoked in discussions associated with the unequal global distribution of climate change’s effects, cannot be approached merely as a metaphor (cf. Bhambra and Newell, 2022; see also Bhambra, 2021). Processes of colonialization of land/people and climate change share a natal moment (Yusoff, 2018), which calls for new forms of remembrance capable of embracing, as Braidotti (2020: 266) evinces, “different ways of caring,” as well as of responding to a great diversity of racially, socially, religiously, and economically stratified—albeit often covert or discreet—violences and desolations.

The rampant overprotection of intellectual property empowered by the forces of information capitalism is resulting in the growing privatization and enclosure of the public domain, and the marginalization and devaluation (or susceptibility to ‘theft’) of the knowledge produced and held in disempowered communities. The public domain, for our purposes, consists of the types and uses of information and aspects of culture that remain publicly accessible: free to use without permission or payment.

Legal scholar Deborah Halbert argues (Citation2006) that the public domain is inherently ‘feminine’ because it rejects dualities: it does not privilege a single way of knowing and doing over another.

Extractivism and infrastructure are the two sides of the socio-ecological coin. The extraction of human and non-human life to ‘develop’ states, grow economies and modernise infrastructures, while responsible for creating living possibilities and enchantments (Alexander, 2008; Harvey and Knox, 2012), is undeniably the modality of development that is responsible for socioecological and climate catastrophe (Kallianos, Dunlap and Dalakoglou, 2022). ‘The invention of the boat’, as Paul Virilio ((2008 [1983]), 46) reminds us, ‘was the invention of shipwrecks. The invention of the steam engine and the locomotive was the invention of derailments. The invention of the highway was the invention of three hundred cars colliding in five minutes’. Ward Churchill (2003) and Winona LaDuke and Sean Aaron Cruz (2012), taking this further, remind us that colonial genocide–ecocide process on Turtle Island are foundational to nuclear weapon production. Colonial conquest and the ‘Indian Wars’ established the means to exterminate Hiroshima and Nagasaki via atomic bombs dropped on Japan.1 With the wider public recognition of climate change, we can now say that the invention of capitalist industrialisation (as we know it) has consolidated the pathways towards ecological and climate catastrophe.

Technological progress, its speed, convenience and possibilities, offered existential purpose and enamoured people (Harvey and Knox, 2012; Anand, Gupta and Appel, 2018), meanwhile masking, ignoring and externalising the underside and ‘costs’ of this wonder—‘[t] he negative side of technology and speed was censored’, as Virilio ((2008 [1983]), 46) contends. This underside is not only accidents and disasters as Virilio indicates, but an entire self-reinforcing and administering institutional network of extractivism and infrastructure powered by capitalism(s). This, of course, refers specifically to materialintensive, or ‘hard’, infrastructures, such as roads, pipes, power lines, data centres, power stations and more (Anand, Gupta and Appel, 2018; Tarvainen, 2022), which function as the skeleton of capitalism, the shape of modernity, the driving force of extractivism. Patrick Wolfe’s (2006, 388) contention that colonial ‘invasion is a structure not an event’, indicates—past and present—how the modernist process seeks to literally ‘steamroller’ and absorb Indigenous peoples and ecologies, revealing how political economy maintains this socio-ecological apparatus of conquest. Wolfe’s ‘structure’ refers to settler colonialism and colonial societies, their political economy and forms of political organisation— the state (Dunlap, 2018; 2020). Viewing statist2 infrastructures as conquest reminds us of the extent to which intense socio-ecological destruction is tolerated and normalised within the current institutions and economies. This is to say that colonial/statist3 invasion is also infrastructural (Dunlap and Arce, 2022, 461; Tornel, 2020), which implies the necessity of rethinking and changing ‘resource’ extraction practices and modern infrastructural construction (Kallianos, Dunlap and Dalakoglou, 2022), which extends to bureaucratic, judicial and mental infrastructures. Mental infrastructures are formed by systematically bombarding people with efforts at subjectivity persuasion (e.g. ‘brain washing’) by private industries and governments in order to cultivate particular forms of public conduct and consumer practices (Bernays, [1928]2005; Herman and Chomsky, [1989]2010; Verweijen and Dunlap, 2021). If people want to mitigate ecological crisis, they must become responsive and challenge the persistence of ecologically destructive infrastructures and begin (re)transforming their habitation practices to support their environments. This chapter seeks to address an anthropocentric extractive and infrastructural bias that predominates within extractive and environmental justice (ej) literatures. This bias relates to how people chart (multi-scalar) extractive supply webs, the state and ‘justice’ phraseology. Critical approaches, the chapter argues, still suffer from ‘infrastructural coloniality’ (Dunlap, 2021a, 6), which underestimates the accumulation and interdependence of extractivism(s) and enables them through processual and egalitarian concerns that maintain the supremacy of modernist infrastructures over ecosystems. Infrastructural coloniality frequently results in ‘selling out’ ecosystems/habitats, thereby subordinating nonhuman life (e.g. animals, rivers, mountains, trees and habitats) to the desires of various human populations under the influence of colonial mentalities and, later, industrial-‘technocapitalist’ desires. Civilisation, Empire, Monarchy and Colonialism, guided by various statist forms and economic logics, have progressed alongside technological developments, which reinforce each other to continue industrial capitalist trajectories into cybernetic and computational capitalism(s) that remain normal features of (statist) market societies.

Although the global intellectual property regime 1 is often positioned as being the only intellectual property regime across the globe, there are currently many different regimes regulating the production of, and access to, a range of intangible resources. These alternative intellectual property regimes—such as customary systems, informal contracts, trade secrets and other informal normative systems—are often highly relational and deeply embedded in the social, cultural and political matrix of the group they regulate. Today many of these systems operate in pockets where the global intellectual property system has not as yet spread, but these areas are quickly diminishing as the global system continues to colonise both new geographical regions and also new types of subject matter.

This paper argues that local knowledge and innovation systems are often rendered invisible by the dominance of the global intellectual property system. This is largely due to the state-centric, positivistic paradigm within which the global system, and the institutions that manage it, operate. This in turn means that when new types of intangible resources or innovation start to be recognised as valuable by the global North, such as traditional knowledge, there is a tendency to fail to see the existing regulatory structures that surround them as these structures rarely operate at the level of the state. This type of myopia has been referred to as the ‘blank slate fallacy’ (Twining 2009:285–86) by legal pluralists who reveal a repeated pattern of marginalisation of non-state regulatory orders by state-based legal systems (see, for example, Griffiths 1986; von Benda-Beckmann 1985:187). As a result, the global intellectual property system often colonises these ‘new’ regulatory spaces through imposing transplanted regulatory regimes. The existing systems are often changed in fundamental ways as a result of the new rules, ideologies and categories of winners and losers, introduced by the new system.