Some Commoning (art) Projects that Combat Digital Neo-Extractivism:
Everest Pipkin’s Image Scrubber (tool to remove faces from any online photo, shown above)
micha cárdenas‘s “autonets” (wearable mesh networks that radiate private communication servers so that people can join ad-hoc communities/avoid tracking)
Abram Stern‘s “Oversight Machines” (alternative visualizations of government surveillance footage)
Dorothy R. Stern, “Refresh”(collaborative & politically engaged platform for art & tech)
Disco Co-Op (projects in distributed cooperativism)
American Artist, 1956/2056 (critique of predictive policing that imagines a future where blackness isn’t criminalized)
Feral File (non-blockchain platform for sharing NFTs with minimal enviro impact)
#Neoextractivism as a response to #disastercapitalism? An Inquiry.
In the article by Dr. Christoper A. Loperena (CUNY Graduate Center) entitled “Honduras is open for business: extractivist tourism as sustainable development in the wake of disaster?” Loperena complicates the relationship between (neo) extractivism and neoliberalism. The work asks us to complicate the mechanisms of “sustainable development” as a ricochet of what historical materialists like David Harvey consider to be the ‘state/finance’ nexus. When the state has to respond to natural disasters and protect multinational economic investment, Loperena demonstrates how contested land can be assumed as empty by the state after a disaster and used toward development.
Loperena reminds us that at the heart of extractivism or “neo”- extractivism, there is “state-orchestrated natural resource expropriation, enclosure and dispossession.” In the case of the Garifuna, a Afro-Indigenous group that center their politics around autonomy and decolonial plurivision political reality, the extractivism elements of state supported tourism actively disrupts the claims of autonomy and resistance to exploitation by the Garifuna. After Hurricane Mitch (1998), the state hurried to salvage investment by expanding (rapidly) “special” legislation meant to reform and encourage international investment areas like mining, energy, and tourism. He centered his analysis by ethnography and highlighting what could be seen as anti-extractivist protest by community leaders against a resort being developed in Tela Bay, Honduras.
Christopher A. Loperena (2017) Honduras is open for business: extractivist tourism as sustainable development in the wake of disaster?, Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 25:5, 618-633, DOI: 10.1080/09669582.2016.1231808
Hurricane Maria is another example of #disastercapitalism that amplifies how #neoextractivism works from the United States. As the United States treats Puerto Rico as an extended colony, economic accumulation from the island to the U.S. is obfuscated because the United States asserts itself as a settler colony. Nevertheless, the policy response and lack of government response display that Puerto Rico is and has been a site of knowledge extractivism. Federal agencies (FEMA) and the academy have modeled their study around #disastercapitalism and #resilience by actively abandoning the island’s immediate needs when there is an emergency. In the article, “Puerto Rico: The Future in Question”, Dr. Adriana Garriga-López highlights this conflict as she does fieldwork after Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. By focusing on autonomous organizing, especially around food sovereignty, Dr. Garriga-López effectively shows how the United States produces scarcity after a natural disaster by allowing the state to accumulate and reconfigure what can be salvaged as economic means without island consensus. Moreover, this construction is part of colonial exploitation that reproduces itself within the neoliberal era. Similar to the anti-extractivist protests in Tela Bay, the autonomous organizing in Puerto Rico included a rise in agroecological awareness- a specific and political orientation around food sovereignty.
Garriga-López, A., 2019. Puerto Rico: The future in question. Shima, 13(2), pp.174-192.
presentation on Agroecology in Puerto Rico found on Wikipedia Commons
Dispossession as #disastercapitalism, #stateviolence against Land Defenders
This piece explains the long arduous struggle land defenders in Honduras have engaged with against the state. Consequently, in the struggle of overcoming contradictions among the peasant class, autonomous afro-indigenous class, and those who are laborers, projects that go against the state push those activities closer to a premature death. In particular, land defenders as environmental activists, conservationists, and practitioners of development from below, are vulnerable to being ‘disappeared’ either by the state or by corporations. OFRANEH (Organización Fraternal Negra Hondureña) is a grassroots organization dedicated to Black autonomy and pluralvision politics in Honduras. Members and allies, including well-known #BertaCaceres have been abducted, tortured, incarcerated, and at times murdered by the state. Below is a documentary that explains the work of OFRANEH.
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)
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