Extractor will turn any tree-hugging humanitarian into a neo-capitalist, money-hungry, data-wrangling tycoon (trust us, we love trees, but after playing this just once, we love data profits too!). It’s the Wild West of data extraction and you’ll need to buy up big if you want to survive. You’ll be praying for a pro-business government to gain power to eradicate privacy and environmental regulation. That pesky climate change phenomenon will have you laying down cash every step of the way—2K for cooling costs, 30K to discredit the climate change narrative and 60K for damages to your data bank by a typhoon.
The narrative structure is steep. You start out floundering about as a small start-up, desperate for a leg up. How do you buy data? Do you invest slowly or throw all your cash into the market at once? After some staff diversity training and poaching a lead data scientist from your platform competitor, you’ll be flying high with data sets and million- dollar notes to boot (look out for that tax bill). There’s some short-lived discomfort as you embrace your neo- capitalist self (unless you are a non-self-reflexive neo-capitalist), but before long, you’ll wholeheartedly embrace the thrill that comes with upgrading to a proprietary level cloud.
Simon lays out connections for us that can be lost in the white noise of political chatter, or the hard-hitting rhetoric of more confrontational political art. He connects resource mining with the somewhat opaque world of data mining all under the one umbrella of ‘extractive practices’ which build on the history of colonisation. This connection allows us to consider that many facets of our contemporary world are inextricably intertwined and that we may not have ‘progressed’ as far as we think—economically, politically, ethically.
Some believe colonialism exists on a ship wearing a tricorn hat (in fact, from where we sit here at the bottom of the world, that’s exactly how it arrived). It’s easy to think of colonialism as belonging to the past, something that happened to other people long ago, for which we have little or no responsibility. Simon’s project is a reminder that many of us continue to reap the benefits of living within a colonial, extractive structure—exploiting what’s not ours for profit and conquest—with no sign of restructure on the horizon.
Many thanks to artist Simon Denny, Mona’s David Walsh & Kirsha Kaechele, and all those from Hobart to Berlin who have contributed to this project.
