Affective Infrastructure for Extractive Futures: An Ethnographic Analog of Artificial Intelligence

This project investigates the affective infrastructure through which extractive futures are assembled, mobilized, and performed, using Artificial Intelligence as an ethnographic analog for recognizing its underlying architecture.

The reference to Artificial Intelligence invokes a conceptually significant comparison to the nineteenth-century retrospective vision of work. With the discovery of the first law of thermodynamics, previously unrelated instances of energy conversion – human muscles, steam engines, horses, waterfalls – became intelligible under a universal principle of quantified labor power. Thermodynamics did not invent labor. It reorganized previously disparate observations into a single explanatory object. 

Artificial Intelligence did not create the organizational practices examined in this project. Forecasting, valuation, visualization, intermediary expertise, executive coordination, advisory work, and intelligence firms long predate computational intelligence. 

What Artificial Intelligence has done is retrospectively reveal an underlying architecture. Practices previously studied as separate domains become recognizable as constituent operations of a single recursive reality-harvesting system. Artificial Intelligence is therefore not the empirical object of this project. It provides the conceptual point from which anthropology can recognize affective infrastructure as a coherent object of inquiry.