05 ISSUE X
FEBRUARY 2026
FEBRUARY 2026
the afterlives of extraction
Extraction challenges temporal and bodily assumptions of ontology: labor can persist long after the body is no longer present, raising questions about attribution, agency, and recognition.
By Maria Alejandra Acosta Ramos
Extraction, both material and ontological, structures Western knowledge and the formation of the Human. In Latin America, extraction has historically operated through gold, petroleum, lithium, and coerced labor, making some wealthy while violently dispossessing others. Ontology in the Western philosophical tradition is inseparable from the invention of the category of the Human. Yet that invention depends on the extraction of an ‘other’ and the establishment of difference.
Henrietta and her husband David, image via Blood cancer UK, courtesy of the Lacks family.
Sylvia Wynter begins her essay “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation — An Argument” by pointing out that the struggle of our millennium consists of deflating our Western bourgeois conception of “Man.” Wynter’s Man1 and Man2 describe successive constructions of the Human—first as the European-Christian moral and spiritual figure, then as the modern scientific-rational-economical figure—both narrow genres of being presented as universal, and both sustained through processes of exclusion and extraction.
Wynter further argues that the transition from Man1 to Man2 redefined which peoples would occupy the place of otherness. In the first instance, it was the individuals and groups who diverged from the subject of the church (pagans/idolators/enemies-of-Christ), and in the second, it was those who diverged from Western subjects of the political state (uncivilized, irrational, sub-human). In both instances, the conflation between “Man” and “Human” is performed through exclusion. Extraction is central to this process as it produces universality for some while simultaneously extracting Black, Indigenous, and colonized life from being. Extraction, in this sense, is both epistemic and ontological, determining whose life counts and whose labor is recognized.
Emptiness as a space of generativity is the logical follow-up to a society of post-extraction. When we extract, presumably, a space is left behind. The shift in temporality, identity, and bodily autonomy brought on by new forms of tracking and surveillance has turned what would otherwise be nothingness into a new site of extraction. The afterlife of data, for example, transforms the body into a carrier of productivity long after the moment of initial dispossession.
The case of Henrietta Lacks exemplifies this dynamic. Lacks, an African-American woman, is the source of the HeLa cell line: the first immortalized human cell line, and one of the most important in medical research. Neither Lacks nor her family had given her physicians permission to harvest her cells. At that time, permission was neither required nor customarily sought. In the 1980s, family medical records were published without family consent. A similar issue was raised in the 1990 Supreme Court of California case Moore v. Regents of the University of California. The court ruled that a person's discarded tissue and cells are not their property and can be commercialized. It wasn’t until 2013 that the Lacks family gained partial say over the HeLa cell line’s genome, but only after it had been published by the NIH without the family’s consent. Lacks’ cells proliferate endlessly in laboratories, producing knowledge, capital, and medical innovation. Her case illustrates how extraction challenges temporal and bodily assumptions of ontology: labor can persist long after the body is no longer present, raising questions about attribution, agency, and recognition.
Digital and mediated labor continue this historical pattern. AI labor similarly extracts human capacity while erasing origin and context. The bodies producing surplus are excluded from the definition of the Human. The veneer of neutrality and hyper-modernity AI offers allows for the erasure of the human lives required to sustain it. The safety system used by OpenAI to filter out violent or otherwise inappropriate content from its database is trained by workers outsourced from countries across the Global South. One of these outsource partners, a San Francisco-based company named Sama, employs workers in Kenya, Uganda and India to label data for Silicon Valley clients like Google, Meta, and Microsoft. The data labelers employed by Sama on behalf of OpenAI were paid a take-home wage of between around $1.32 and $2 per hour, depending on seniority and performance.
Specifically, labelers observe, classify, and label what OpenAI refers to as “harmful images,” consisting of anything from pornography and images of physical violence to child and animal abuse. These labeled images are then fed into the system, which learns to recognize and filter that content for the end user. Through the psychological effects of violent exposure, both the images and the labor of the individuals who build AI endures long after the job is done, and continues to replicate itself. Extraction, even in digital form, reproduces colonial logics while generating forces that exceed containment. It produces value, stabilizes hierarchies, and simultaneously creates irreducible excess. Data centers, cryptocurrency mining, and global AI training infrastructures displace the site of labor from the source of value. Here, extraction is horizontal, diffuse, and often invisible, yet it generates knowledge, power, and capital.
Central to Wynter is the recognition that extraction is not neutral; it is racialized, gendered, and historically embedded. Extraction enacts ontological erasure, separating certain lives from the category of the Human, while producing value that exceeds the bodies and labor extracted. Lacks’ HeLa cells,, and the global infrastructures of AI illustrate how extraction spans material, biological, and digital domains. In each case, the surplus produced cannot be contained within Western ontological categories, yet it continues to generate knowledge, labor, and economic value.
maria alejandra acosta ramos is completing a BFA in Fine Arts at Parsons School of Design.