Understanding how systems extract value, labour, and meaning from people, cultures, and environments—and how that extraction can be named, measured, and challenged.
“Every extractive economy is also an extractive story about who is seen as a resource and who is seen as a person.”
Extractive Economy Theory provides a conceptual framework for understanding how systems take value— material, cultural, emotional, or epistemic—from people and communities without proportional return, recognition, or consent.
A systems-oriented approach that identifies how extraction operates not only through financial mechanisms, but through cultural erasure, semantic theft, emotional labour demands, and the appropriation of lived experience as a resource.
Key principles that explain how extractive systems convert culture, labour, meaning, and emotional energy into resources without reciprocal return.
The extraction of ideas, cultural frameworks, or lived experience knowledge without attribution, returning value to the system instead of the originators.
Describes how systems convert human labour, emotional effort, cultural knowledge, or social capital into institutional gain.
Occur when systems stabilise harm, imbalance, or labour inequity so effectively that extraction becomes normalized and invisible.
Centres on how institutions take knowledge from marginalized groups—especially lived experience experts—while excluding them from authorship, benefit, or decision-making.
Extraction that depletes the energy, cultural strength, or stability of individuals or communities while enriching systemic actors.
A system’s inability—or refusal—to return value to the people who generated it, creating spirals of inequality and structural dependence.
Extractive Economy Theory functions as a diagnostic model for understanding how ideas, labour, and meaning are removed from their originators and absorbed into broader systems. This section maps how the theory supports related frameworks across advocacy, digital systems analysis, and epistemic justice.
Extractive economies fuel semantic warfare by converting meaning, language, and lived experience into institutional narratives that advantage system actors. Pattern theft and epistemic extraction are foundational mechanisms of semantic manipulation.
Modern extractive economies are increasingly algorithmic. The theory explains how digital infrastructures extract behavioural, emotional, and cultural data without transparency or reciprocity. This forms the basis of algorithmic harm cycles.
Extractive systems create predictable pressure gradients. Understanding these allows advocates to intervene earlier, redirect system flow, expose hidden extraction points, and re-establish equitable value cycles.
Extractive economy theory identifies how institutions appropriate lived experience knowledge while excluding lived experts from authorship and power. Praxis frameworks use this analysis to rebuild ethical participation models and restore authorship integrity.
This theory provides the structural foundations needed to identify, disrupt, and redesign extractive systems across institutions, algorithms, and cultural domains.
How Extractive Economy Theory translates into actionable strategies across social, organisational, and digital systems.
Recognising signs of epistemic or economic extraction (idea theft, emotional labour drain, role creep) and developing strategies for boundary-setting, authorship protection, and self-advocacy.
Building solidarity networks that resist the extraction of lived expertise, cultural frameworks, and grassroots innovation through collective authorship protections and narrative stewardship.
Auditing systems for extractive dynamics, identifying institutional “leaks” of credit, labour, or meaning, and restructuring workflows to ensure reciprocity, transparency, and shared benefit.
Designing ethical data flows, resisting behavioural extraction, and creating transparent “consent boundaries” within digital platforms, AI systems, and organisational technologies.
This framework enables practitioners, organisations, and communities to move from reactive harm management to proactive system redesign.