Though the term neo-extractivism was coined in relation to particular left-leaning Latin American governments who relied heavily on extractivist activities as means of financing social reforms, this partial list of sources posits that we might also apply the term to certain practices and patterns of governance Western “democracies” have co-opted from big tech in recent years under the guise of egalitarian progress. This list explores examples that can largely be grouped under Shoshana Zuboff’s moniker “surveillance capitalism,” or the entanglement of invasive tech policies which are “not an overthrow of the state but rather an overthrow of the people’s sovereignty and a prominent force in the perilous drift toward democratic deconsolidation that now threatens Western liberal democracies” (Zuboff, 2019). Such policies include algorithm-based policing, state-run data accumulation, state tracking under the facade of “national security,” lack of big tech regulation, and other means by which big-tech-born data mining and surveillance have become a state-sanctioned logic of accumulation and commerce. 

Some Grounding Texts on Digital Neo-extracitivism:

Barris-Gomez, Macarena The Extractive Zone, Duke University Press, 2017.

Buolamwini, Joy. Coded Bias, Netflix, 2021.

Broussard, Meredith. Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World. MIT Press, 2018.

Couldry, Nick The Costs of Connection: How Data is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating it For Capitalism. Stanford University Press, 2019.

Heaven, William Douglas “Predictive Policing is Racist, No Matter What Data You Use” MIT Technology Review, 2021.

O’Neil, Cathy. Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. Crown Books, 2016.

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

(image source: Vice)