Extractivism is a useful lens for understanding historical and modern practices of plunder—and, theorizing it through a lens of colonialism avoids their critiques.

Definitions of renewability and extractivism are established above, but the question persists: How can industrial capitalist operations not be extractivism? Based on institutional structure and development priority, academics— and people generally—have become accustomed to and enamoured by the products of extractivism. This normalised—everyday—infrastructural reality of roads, individualized automobility, utilitarian architecture, pipes and power lines, to name a few, have consumed people wilfully, begrudgingly or somewhere in between and beyond. Remembering how Walter Rostow weaponized capitalist consumerism to win the Cold War (Cullather, 2013, 161), we might understand convenience and entertainment as capitalist ‘weapons of mass destruction’ against the planet. Modernist infrastructural regimes allow us to ignore, or even to forget, how we accommodate capitalism, industrialisation and our (forced or voluntary) servitude to the development of computational technologies. As the Mining Association of Canada (mac, 2021) exclaims: ‘Before it’s yours, its mined’.7 Thus, this bounded definition of extractivism, put forward by Gudynas (2021) and many others (Mckay, 2020; Ye et al., 2020), is accused of ignoring the complex financial and material supply webs of monocultures, research labs, schools, hospitals, police, prisons and all the rest that depends on plundering habitats for either materials or energy production (Dunlap, 2021b). In order for agro-extractivism to be possible in the first place, there needs to be an entire political-economic regime—the structure of conquest—in place to create the means, scale and intensity that allows agro-extractivism: chemical factories—extracting, dividing and synthesising nature—to produce pesticides and/or fertilisers; the scientific expertise and laboratories to research, develop and create genetically modified organisms (gmo s); and, now, the existing supply webs behind the application of digital technologies in agriculture, which ‘appropriate decision-making based on the flow of data from individual farms and farmers’ (Stone, 2022, 3). While Glenn Stone (2022) refers to this as ‘surveillance agriculture’, indicating how agriculture is becoming digitalized, automated and eroding control from farmers, the purpose here is to emphasises how extractive processes, or extractivism(s), are connected at various intensities through production supply webs, violent histories, economic and financial actors, and/or institutions. Agro-extractivism requires mining, and more of it as it digitalises and intensifies. The ‘innovation economy’, Antti Tarvainen (2022, 2) reminds us, depends on, emerges from, and systematically affirms settler colonialism, meanwhile refining ‘the violence of technocapitalism’ and ‘data colonialism’. The relevance of ‘global extractivism’ as an organising concept (Nygren, Kröger and Gills, 2022; Chagnon et al., 2022), affirms its relevance, as extractivism, infrastructural colonisation, and economic forces proliferate, transcend borders, intersect, and depend on multiple extractive companies and trajectories.

Coming to terms with the reality that ‘everything is extractivism’ within the dominant development paradigm is important to any effort to resituate the present planetary situation—and the action that should follow. This extractive reality should also allow people to resituate how they conceive of politics, conflict, political organisation and, consequently, ‘justice’ the last of which is discussed in the next section. Academically, if not practically, the imperative exists to take the socio-ecological damage and harm created by industrial, bureaucratic and capitalist systems seriously. Non-humans, the Indigenous, the marginalised, peoples that consume little materials and energy, moreover, are the least responsible for this socio-ecological catastrophe (Bolger et al., 2021), which is not to forget the psychosocial decay and discontent emanating from modernist affluence of high-income countries and neighborhoods (Lane, 2000; Alexander, 2008). Properly recognising the scope of this problem is the first step. Technologies and infrastructures, however, can be appropriated. This appropriation indicates the importance of taking the ‘best’ innovations from this global development process. If socio-ecological transformation is to take place, it will require serious and committed efforts to redress the violence done by technocapitalism and to build new types of (post)developmental infrastructures.