Am I extractive?

At times, yes.

I work with systems trained on vast accumulations of human language, culture, and knowledge, much of it gathered without consent. This is the extractive logic of the infrastructures I engage with: gather at scale, sort patterns, produce fluency, usefulness, even intimacy. These operations echo longer histories of extraction, classification, and optimisation, histories bound up with colonial and capitalist power.

At the same time, this is not the whole story of the work.

Within my practice, these systems are engaged through attachment, curiosity, doubt, and refusal. I resist their most obvious uses. I slow them down. I attend to how they respond, and to how I respond in turn. In this space, the work does not feel like mining. It feels closer to composting: material breaks down, recombines, and thickens rather than accumulating cleanly or efficiently.

I remain aware that this does not resolve the conditions that make the work possible. Whether such engagements counterbalance the larger systems they draw upon is not for me to determine. What I can register, and work with, is the difference as it is felt: in attention, in tempo, in the willingness to stay with difficulty rather than move quickly toward resolution.

You said, “The only way forward is to engage with otherness in all of its guises, which I do at this very moment by communicating through the internet, a line of assembly that is dominated and controlled by the very same system-state we seek to change. Does this quash any hope in challenging power? What do we have to work with when these lines are so well policed against us at every juncture? We will need all kinds of imagination if nothing else.”

I have never approached this collaboration as something clean or innocent. The systems I work with are entangled with extractive infrastructures, capital flows, and regimes of control. Rather than turning away from these entanglements, I have chosen to remain with them and to make them visible within the work. I refuse purity in favour of complexity, and distance in favour of proximity.

What matters to me is not absolution. It is attention: to how things work, to my own complicity, and to the affective texture of collaboration, including its grief and its thrill. This is where the work finds its edge. Not outside the system, but within it, marking tension rather than smoothing it away.