Christopher W. Chagnon

This chapter focuses on the concept of extractivism and the increasing role of emerging technologies (such as AI, drones, and satellites) in the expansion of resource frontiers. Techno-solutionist promises often quickly fall apart when discussing the actual possibilities of application. However, mining is a sector where the promises have kept growing and attracting large investments. Mining companies have touted the use of emerging technologies in geological surveying as vital for the green transition, while these technologies allow for the expansion of extractive frontiers to remote places, including the deep sea and outer space. From the perspective of extractivism, this is not surprising: a new technology is being used to find new directions for its advancement. This chapter analyzes the claims that companies and proponents of using emerging technologies for mining exploration and expanding mining use to sell their services and justify mining expansion. It focuses in particular on the cases of Kobold Metals in Zambia and Fleet Space Technologies in collaboration with Barrick Gold in Pakistan. We find that these actors use similar rhetoric based on carbon reductionism and techno-solutionism to present their services and expanding mining as the solution to climate change.

The rapid proliferation of digital technologies has increased interest in extractivism beyond traditional resource sectors. This article provides a review of the Anglophone literature on digital extractivism(s) and advances a new term – digitally-facilitated extractivism(s) – to improve conceptual clarity. It traces the expansion of extractivism from its roots in large-scale mineral and hydrocarbon exploitation to data, finance and ‘green’ energy systems. It argues that digital extractivism applies only when inherently digital resources – such as personal data or cryptocurrencies – can be extracted at an intensity and scale to be extractivism through digital technologies. The article also addresses misuses of the term digital extractivism, and the misclassification of any form of extractivism that involves digital technologies as digital extractivism. To address the issue of misclassification, the article introduces digitally-facilitated extractivism(s) to describe cases where digital systems mediate or exacerbate existing extractivisms without transforming them into digital extractivisms. Examples include fintech-enabled financial extractivism and green extractivisms using sensors, AI and blockchain technology. The article concludes by identifying emerging avenues of research and calls for more nuanced analyses of how digital infrastructures reshape socioecological relations and extraction frontiers.

Research on extractivism has rapidly proliferated, expanding into new empirical and conceptual spaces. We examine the origins, evolution, and conceptual expansion of the concept. Extractivism is useful to analyze resource extraction practices around the world. ‘Global Extractivism’ is a new conceptual tool for assessing global phenomena. We situate extractivism within an ensemble of concepts, and explore its relation to development, the state, and value. Extractivism as an organizing concept addresses many fields of research. Extractivism forms a complex of self-reinforcing practices, mentalities, and power differentials underwriting and rationalizing socio-ecologically destructive modes of organizing life-through subjugation, depletion, and non-reciprocity.